Floating Weeds

Twenty-five years after the release of his 1934 silent film A Story of Floating Weeds, the now-middle-aged Yasujirō Ozu set about remaking the earlier backstage drama, an endeavor that would yield his only collaboration with Daiei Film Co., and one of just six color films that the master auteur would direct in his lifetime. Like its predecessor, Floating Weeds takes as its subject a traveling theater troupe that arrives in a sleepy village on Japan’s Inland Sea to mount a series of traditional kabuki-style performances. During their stay, troupe leader Komajuro (portrayed by the acclaimed real-life kabuki actor Nakamura Ganjirō) reconnects with a former lover (Ozu regular Haruko Sugimura) whose son Kiyoshi (Hiroshi Kawaguchi) doesn’t know that the itinerant performer is his father. When Komajuro’s current mistress and fellow troupe member (Machiko Kyō) becomes suspicious of his attachments, romantic and existential complications ensue, all of which are provocatively juxtaposed against the highly stylized expressive intensity of the art form they practice.