Good Morning

#84

Yasujiro Ozu's Ohayo (Good Morning) is a comedy about a pair of boys who bring much trouble to their family and community by refusing to do very basic activities. The boys desire a television, but their father refuses. They are so insistent that the father eventually commands them to be quiet. They take him quite literally and refuse to speak at all, not even a typical polite morning greeting. Their impoliteness begins to weigh down both the family and the town as it goes against the ordered social structure of Japanese culture. The film is a remake of Ozu's earlier 1932 silent film I Was Born, But...

Review

A lighthearted take on director Yasujiro Ozu’s perennial theme of the challenges of intergenerational relationships, Good Morning (Ohayo) tells the story of two young boys who stop speaking as an act of resistance after their parents refuse to buy a television set. Ozu weaves a wealth of subtle gags through a family portrait as rich as those of his dramatic films, mocking the foibles of the adult world through the eyes of his childish protagonists. Shot in stunning Technicolor and set in a suburb of Tokyo where housewives gossip about the neighbors’ new washing machine and unemployed men look for work as door-to-door salesmen, this charming comedy reworks Ozu’s own silent classic I Was Born, But . . . to gently satirize consumerism in postwar Japan.

BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
- New 4K digital restoration from Shochiku Co., with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
- I Was Born, But . . ., Yasujiro Ozu’s 1932 silent comedy masterpiece, with a score composed by Donald Sosin in 2008
- Surviving excerpt from A Straightforward Boy, a 1929 silent film by Ozu
- New video essay on Ozu’s use of humor by critic David Cairns
- New interview with film scholar David Bordwell
- New English subtitle translation
- PLUS: An essay by critic Jonathan Rosenbaum