"The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice" - a Yasujiro Ozu movie from 1952 - is a beautiful, intimate and winning movie. It is about a married couple growing apart because of their differences - and their efforts to overcome the distance. If you think they invented marital dramas in the 1970s when they seemed to absolutely love them - well, personally I prefer the Ozo take. His films are the best of keenly observed humanity and no one had to have a dramatic Method-acting, '70s-style breakdown.
"Green Tea Over Rice" lets its eye wander through the city and the home. The shot composition is wonderful. The boxed-in lines of the house the couple lives in become claustrophobic and close and they each feel suffocated by each other's flaws, isolating when they're lonely, cozy for their rapprochement. He's not afraid to linger on still tableaus of empty halls and tables. He's not afraid of silence, whether the contrite silence of the wife contemplating her behavior or the companionable one of the couple sharing a late-night meal. Ozo is always one of my favorites and I feel like his movies are very easy to love and enjoy. They have a magical complexity on the director's part, the kind that makes them seem simple to the viewer.
Ozo lets the actors work in subtle ways.
The camera's eye observes in a very human way.
"The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice" uses a lot of well composed shots to enhance the story.
Federico Fellini's masterpiece "La Strada" is so well known I almost didn't mention it here. But I watched it right after "Green Tea," and it was a fascinating pairing. Like the Ozo movie, "La Strada" is one of those movies that is deceptively simple - significant work on the director's part to make it feel that way. Perhaps that is even more the case in "La Strada," because unlike the realist story of "Green Tea," "La Strada" is more allegorical. A simple woman is sold, basically, by her impoverished family to work for a strongman and travel around on the road with him, assisting in his act. She is innocent and optimistic; he's a savage brute. And then there's The Fool, a clown act who makes the woman, Gelsomina, think about herself a bit differently. None of the people feel like complete characters; in my interpretation, they are all aspects of one person, which makes their interplay interesting. Gelsomina has no agency and doesn't seem to want to make any decisions for herself, just drifting along the road with the strongman. It's a bit existentialist, maybe a bit Freudian, there's a lot going on to think about - but you could also, easily, just watch it as a simple tale of the difficult life of circus performers. Giulietta Masina as Gelsomina is incandescent, Anthony Quinn quite effective as the strongman and Richard Basehart, The Fool - fantastic, and I realized I don't know enough about him. He was on the Love Boat at one point (I guess everyone was - well, not his co-stars).
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