So this is the middle of Ozu’s Noriko trilogy (three unrelated films that all have a young woman named Noriko in them, but she’s not the same person in each film); the other two, Tokyo Story and Late Spring, were on that S&S list, so I guess by default this is considered the weakest of the three. Which probably isn’t wrong, but like… it’s still pretty great?

So this is about a multi-generational family living together in Tokyo; the daughter, Noriko, is 28 and they’re worried she hasn’t married yet. And her boss is like, hey, I know a guy who needs a wife, why don’t you get married? And he tells her brother about it, and everyone’s all excited, and they’ve basically got her married off already, despite her never having met the guy. And then they find out that he’s 40 and they’re like “well, idk, let’s see if she’s okay with that.”

Meanwhile, she’s talking to an older woman who’s a neighbor, whose son is a widower with a child, and the older lady is like, “Man, I wish my son could find someone. It’d be great if you married him!” and Noriko is all “cool, let’s do it,” and bam, now they’re engaged, even though the dude doesn’t know about it and they’ve barely ever even spoken.

Noriko’s family is upset by her impulsive decision (this guy is much poorer than the older man, and also he’s a widower, so it’s not exactly the match they were hoping for), but she’s adamant that she wants to marry this guy, and so they kind of grudgingly go along with it.

And so what’s interesting about this is, a) we never even see the older guy; there’s a scene where Noriko and a friend of hers are going to peek in on him, but the scene cuts away before they see him; b) we never once see her together with her new fiancé once they’re engaged and while they do get married before the end of the movie, we likewise never see them together even once (the marriage is offscreen). It’s like 100% about the family’s reaction to the marriage, not the individual people’s.

But so also of course, while that’s the main story, there are a lot of other things going on. There’s a whole subplot about Noriko and her friends, and how they divide into the single ones and the married ones and are drifting apart as they get older; there’s a thing about how the family’s eldest son is still missing (from WW2; this is made in 1951) and they’ve given up hope of finding him; there are the family’s grandkids who really really want more model train track and throw a tantrum and quasi-run-away when they don’t get it.

Maybe the weirdest scene is with Noriko’s boss and her single friend. When he’s asking why Noriko doesn’t want to marry the 40-year-old guy he recommended, he’s all like, “does she like men?” and then later, “oh, is she into women?” which seemed kind of shocking, because the movie has been so sexless and now this guy’s just going there. He goes on to invite the friend out for sushi, proposing “open clam” and “a long rice roll,” and from her affronted reaction, I don’t think I’m imagining the innuendo there.

But so anyway, yeah, Ozu’s revisiting a lot of territory here that’s familiar from his other films, but the particulars of the characters and their situations matter to the story and keep it from being plainly repetitive. Good stuff.