The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice

Ozu's marriage film, whose script has a longer history than the film itself. After returning from military service in 1939, Ozu wrote a screenplay with Tadao Ikeda: an idle bourgeois wife and a husband who smokes cheap cigarettes, rides second class and pours soup over his rice. The wartime censors rejected it, on the grounds that a soldier's send-off meal was an ordinary ochazuke, rice with green tea poured over it, rather than a celebratory spread. They called the script unserious. Ozu rewrote it with Kogo Noda in 1952. The war came out; the marriage stayed. Taeko finds her husband coarse and without taste, and lies in order to slip away to a spa with her friends. Satake is a calm man who does not know how to fight. The scene the film is named for comes late at night in the kitchen: the maid is gone, the two of them rummage through the cupboards together and eat rice with tea poured over it at the same table. Ozu defines marriage not as a settlement but as the ability to share the same plain meal. Who it is for: viewers who know Ozu and like quiet films about marriage. Who it is not for: anyone expecting something on the scale of Tokyo Story. Ozu himself was not satisfied with it, and the middle section noticeably drags.