THE LADY AND THE BEARD (Yasujiro Ozu, 1931)

“All great men have beards!” Kiichi Okajima declares, citing Charles Darwin and Karl Marx; but bearded, traditionally garbed Kiichi was born in the twentieth century, while Darwin and Marx lived and died in the preceding century—and elsewhere than in Japan. Yasujiro Ozu’s comedy Shukujo to hige charts the gradual entrance of this old-fashioned young man […]