Cinema: Homespun Tatami

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Ohayo is Japanese for "good morning." With that greeting, day begins for the teeming inhabitants of a crowded modern housing development near Tokyo. And the lives of nearly all of them are woven into the texture of this delicate, homespun comedy by the late Yasujiro Ozu. Virtually unknown in the West, Ozu died in 1963 as Japan's most honored film maker, a man whose gentle art was eclipsed outside his homeland by the blazing, exportable genius of Kurosawa.

Typically plotless, Ohayo derives theme, story and soul from the easy rhythm of middle-class existence. If it has heroes, they are two ebullient rebel schoolboys (Koji Shidara, Masahiko Shimazu), whose chief concerns are watching TV at the home of disreputable neighbors ("who loll around the house in Western-style nightgowns," a mother complains), resisting parental authority in any form, or eating pumice stone because they believe it helps them to break wind voluntarily, an achievement esteemed by their peers. The boys' innocent vulgarity is rooted in a world of gossipy housewives, aged parents clinging to tradition, working fathers uneasily eying their retirement years, young lovers so full of Oriental reticence that they pour all their tenderness into discussing the shapes of clouds while waiting for a commuters' train.

Nothing really happens to Ozu's characters except that they come and go, and leave unmistakable traces of humanity behind. Somehow, his austere style transforms the commonplace into a small, satisfying miracle of nature, the way a pebble makes ripples in a pond. And for earnest moviegoers, Ozu's refined camera technique is a revelation in itself, for he avoids the customary fades and dissolves, shoots every scene from a few feet above the floor, the approximate viewpoint of a neighbor kneeling on a tatami mat. It is an amiable posture, altogether appropriate for one of the world's most contemplative film poets.