Cinephile and archivist Quentin Turnour offers an additional personal thought.
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| Tokyo Story |
I was never much for her
skills as a an actress, or her essence (Tanaka Kinuyo does it for me in skills
and range, the mysterious Mizukubo Sumiko for essence). But how she came to be
the emblem of Japanese post-war women remains essential in making sense of
that time in Japanese culture and its movies - and their balance-finding
between public ambition and domestic duty, their moments of insistance and
withdraw (... and I still see it just a bit in many Japanese women I know
who work successfully in their film industry now). That's the mystique that
animator Kon Satoshi was trying to explore in his partially biographical
Millennium Actress (Japan, 2001).
And speaking of mystique, of course she
made up a part of what Ozu meant for western fans, beyond the director's
technical skills.
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