The Cinematheque

“One of the most charming, eccentric, and fleet-footed of all Ozu’s works.”

Lloyd Hughes, The Rough Guide to Film

Ozu’s 50th film, and his second in colour, is a masterful comedy of manners about small talk and social niceties, set against 1950s suburbia and featuring flatulence as a major motif! Back in 1932, Ozu made a silent comedy, I Was Born, But…, in which two young boys stage a hunger strike in protest against adult phoniness. The delightful Good Morning reworks that premise with its tale of two pint-sized rebels who take a vow of silence after their father (Ryu Chishu) refuses to buy them a television. (TV, dad asserts, ​“will produce 100 million idiots.”) The boys’ refusal to engage in even the customary morning greeting—“ohayo”—soon sparks a neighbourhood quarrel. The fart gags, Ozu claimed, were to show that he hadn’t gotten all serious after recently winning two of Japan’s highest distinctions. The linear geometry of the director’s compositions have rarely been pushed to such hyperbolic extremes.

In Japanese with English subtitles

“Enchanting … A richly devious portrait of humanity being human.”

Tom Milne, Time Out

“[Ozu’s] sense of generational conflict is here at its sharpest and most anarchic.”

Richard Brody, The New Yorker