Paul: Floating Weeds
It has happened before and it will happen again: Molly has taken the initiative to show me a piece of art that I surely would not have experienced on my own.
This time it was Yasuhiro Ozu's 1959 film Floating Weeds.
It's hard not to sound like a Film Guy when talking about this movie. I want to avoid soliloquizing bullshit about cinematography, a subject I know very little about. What I can say is that: It turns out a director widely acclaimed for his singular visual sensibility is in fact very good at putting beautiful images on the screen.
The majority of these images are interior shots of the small rooms where the characters of Floating Weeds enact their lives. They evoke a ramshackle tidiness that in turn subtly articulates a culture of care and hard work under conditions of material scarcity.
The film concerns an itinerant acting troupe visiting a small seaside town to perform for a few days or weeks. The troupe's leader, Komajuro, is a particularly dangerous kind of late middle-age guy; rascally, melancholy, charming. My man clearly fucks.
The troupe's performance is not a financial success, but Komajuro has a secret reason for visiting this particular town: His former mistress, Oyoshi, lives here with their teen son, Kiyoshi, who has been raised believing Komajuro is his uncle.
Kiyoshi is a bright boy and on the verge of graduating high school and going to college. In 1950s Japan, doing so and entering Japan's postwar white-collar workforce would have afforded him access to a standard of living that would be nearly inconceivable to his parents, both of whom definitionally lived through the madness, privation, and tragedy of Japan's 1930s and 40s. Komajuro in particular is desperate for his son to have the good life that he senses is possible.
But Komajuro is also selfish, and he selfishly wants to know his son, hence the "uncle" lie he and Oyoshi have agreed to perform. My own personal son just called me "papa" for the first time yesterday, so I can relate to Komajuro's overweening desire, but in Komajuro's case, his desire overrides his sense of duty, and we soon learn that this is a pattern on his part.
Molly once gave me a quote from a novel she was reading, which I then misremembered. I have internalized the misremembered version, and here it is: "Take what you want, and pay the price."
Komajuro has spent his life taking what he wants and then haggling down the price, occasionally skipping the check entirely. Floating Weeds tells the story of the whole bill coming due, with Kiyoshi's future as the collateral: Komajuro’s current mistress, Sumiko, is out of her mind with jealousy and suspicion, and to get back at Komajuro she dares/pays the troupe’s ingenue, Kayo, to seduce Kiyoshi.
Kayo is roughly of an age with Kiyoshi, but in contrast to his serious, hardworking innocence, she’s clever, flirtatious, worldly, and beautiful. What I’m trying to say here is that speaking as someone who has been a boy in his late teens myself: Kiyoshi never had a chance. I found myself nodding seriously along with Komajuro’s words when he discovers what’s happened: “She’s going to ruin his life!”
One by one, the consequences of Komajuro’s disingenuousness and dishonesty arrive. That the story doesn’t end in utter disaster is a miracle of grace. Komajuro, however, does pay the price: His relationship with his son is largely destroyed, and in any case will no longer take place on his terms.
Some of the consequences for dishonesty and selfishness are built into the acts themselves. When Komajuro lies—when I lie, when you lie—we become the people who told that lie, and we live at the remove it places us from every good thing. Even if we are fortunate enough to be shown grace and welcomed back inside, we know there was a better self we chose not to be.