RADIO DAYS (Woody Allen, 1987)

Generations of a family live together, seaside, in Rockaway, New York, and listen to the radio. Radio Days begins in the late 1930s. In 1942, Joe (Seth Green), writer-director Woody Allen’s surrogate, is 13 and enamored of the Masked Avenger, while other family members are either interested in other radio personalities or not (“He’s a ventriloquist on the radio. How do you know he’s not moving his lips?”). The film ends with two celebrations, worlds apart, on New Year’s Eve 1944: the family’s; celebrities, including radio personalities, at a posh nightclub. Allen narrates, mining memories and proffering asides. The result, modeled on Fellini’s Amarcord (1973), is funny and poignant—and nostalgic for radio, whose popularity television would supplant.
     The film proceeds by vignettes, one of which hilariously suits images to an absurdly sentimentalized report of a legendary baseball player who loses leg, arm and sight in three separate hunting accidents, and through it all continues playing, evidencing “heart.” This recollection spins out as a metaphor for Joe’s Aunt Bea (Dianne Wiest), who is continually unlucky at romance, and for wartime America in general, which hopes for war’s end. The family, indeed the nation, tightens its bond when it hears that a missing child has been found dead.
     Poor Aunt Bea! One boyfriend turns out to be married; another, gay. In a fog that Allen has lifted from Antonioni’s Identification of a Woman (1982), Bea’s date proves a coward when a facsimile of Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds seemingly announces a Martian invasion on the car radio.
     Sally White (Mia Farrow) is a cigarette girl who studies hard to lose her accent—not British here—and becomes a show-biz gossip reporter: an hilarious send-up of Sheilah Graham.
     The closing rooftop images sweep out the heart.

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FLOATING WEEDS (Yasujiro Ozu, 1959)

Inferior to his 1934 version, which is shorter, silent and in black and white, Yasujiro Ozu’s Ukigusa is nevertheless a spirited, lovely film. I am doomed for the rest of my life to see it rarely because my normal preference will always be to revisit the original. However, Ozu’s greatest decade, the 1950s, included the greatest film ever made, Early Summer (1951), and another of the twenty-five greatest films, Tokyo Story (1953); but sound and color add nothing of great value to Ozu’s remake of Ukigusa monogatari. I see only commercial motivation behind all this. I will say nothing here about its story, which essentially remains unchanged.
     Seaside; the first shot, inaugurating a brief Ozuvian cluster of establishing shots, is formal and imposing: upon a strip of land in the foreground stands a black bottle, beyond which, with the sea in between, is a strip of land, three-quarters of the way across right to left, upon which stands a white lighthouse. Thus the two upright things are parallel, as are, in a more oblique way, the deep blue sea and the light blue sky, which occupies four-fifths of the frame. The image, which is correlative to the traveling theatrical troupe/family drama about to unfold, is therefore one of balance—but of imperfect balance. (A later shot, with a shift in distance and perspective, parallels the lighthouse with an electric pole.) A young man, after all, does not know that his “uncle,” who is part of the visiting troupe, is really his biological father. This is the big difference between the two versions; with its assault on patriarchy, the outcome of World War II for Japan has left the issue of paternity in the later film, for the boy, of smaller consequence. Life goes on—ironically.