Yasujiro Ozu
Tokyo monogatari [東京物語]

A humble gaze, one that knows how to wait for life's sedimentation.

A still gaze, living within silences: in the imperceptible creak of beech planks, in the bubbling of the tin kettle on the stove.

A quiet gaze, at floor level. As if to signify that it is not indifferent to what it observes.

The story is simple and modest, as in every Ozu film. Precisely for this reason, perhaps, it becomes truly universal.

Seemingly muffled, it is instead bitter, like life.

Bitter yet gentle, full of candor.

That bitter candor that the patina of time and the apparent otherness of the context cannot, despite everything, make us indifferent to.

Ozu's is an (aesth)etic of telling a story on tiptoe, without pulling the viewer; letting the story itself speak.

And the story, as always, speaks only of life's unpredictability, of our humble (and often vain) reaction to it, and of the void that death leaves behind.

Of nothing else but this.