Lost in Criterion

Spine 526: There Was a Father


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The second of our pair of Ozu films finds the director between World War II deployments bringing to screen a script he'd been working on for nearly a decade about loyalty to one's father, and by extension -- perhaps at least to the Japanese censor board that celebrated the film -- loyalty to one's emperor. This is the closest thing to a propaganda film we've seen from Ozu, but we're not convinced that was Ozu's intention.

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Lost in CriterionBy Lost in Criterion