An Inn in Tokyo

Yasujiro Ozu's deeply moving study of poverty and fatherhood — among the most quietly devastating films of his pre-war period. An unemployed man wanders the desolate industrial flatlands of Tokyo's outskirts with his two young sons, searching for work while barely able to feed them. When he encounters a woman in similar straits with her own sick child, the two form a fragile bond born of shared desperation. Ozu strips his filmmaking to its barest essentials: long static shots of empty lots, smokestacks, laundry lines, and the vast indifferent sky above the urban wasteland. The result is neo-realism avant la lettre — a decade before De Sica's Bicycle Thieves, Ozu was already finding in the daily struggle of ordinary people a beauty and tragedy that needs no embellishment. The final sequence is heartbreaking in its simplicity.