38 seconds – Lozuaway McComsey

   38 Seconds 
    – Lozuaway McComsey

    His son tells him his wife is going to die this night. 
    They gather with the rest of the family. 
    Sad music starts to play; it sounds tinny and old-fashioned.
    The camera cuts to his fallen face. The smile which had been permanently affixed until now is gone. We see him swallow. We watch him, lost, staring into the abyss. He has the rest of his life before him and all of it without the wife he didn't treat as well as he wished he had. Pain. 
    Cut to 38 seconds of heartbreak.


    Notice: there is no one in these 38 seconds save perhaps an indistinct man on his boat in the second shot. Ozu wants us to feel Shukichi's emptiness. Things that were normal, back when his wife had an indefinitely long life ahead of her, had life to them. The kids walked to school on the exact street Ozu shows us. The train carrying Noriko back to Tokyo will be shown on those tracks. The boats we have seen on the water rest at their docks. 
    The life has gone out of the old man and the life is gone from the world around him. So much is the same, but the life, the very life, that filled those scenes is gone. 
    A continuously tragic song plays over empty places. 
    We feel as Shukichi does. We know how he felt not because we were told, but because we are shown, not only the images above, but by the man himself. 
    Here he is, realizing he will never share another conversation, another trip, another kiss, another laugh, another fight, another moment with his living wife:        

    And those 38 seconds of empty life might as well be a guided tour of the feelings in this man's heart.

Comments

  1. Krishnan VenkateshNovember 7, 2021 at 8:13 PM

    Fantastic, and moving. Followng up on our post-seminar conversation, I think the main thing that leaves directors in awe of this film is the perfection -- not only of every single image, but also of the editing rhythm, where no shot is too long or two short, and which gives the film as a whole its pulse. And every shot is emotionally expressive, for a sensitive viewer.

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