The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice

The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice

Directed by Yasujiro Ozu • 1952 • Japan
Starring Shin Saburi, Michiyo Kogure, Keiko Tsushima

One of the ineffably lovely domestic sagas made by Yasujiro Ozu at the height of his mastery, THE FLAVOR OF GREEN TEA OVER RICE is a sublimely piercing portrait of a marriage coming quietly undone. Secrets and deceptions strain the already tenuous relationship of a childless, middle-aged couple, as the wife’s city-bred sophistication bumps up against the husband’s small-town simplicity, and a generational sea change—in the form of her headstrong, modern niece—sweeps over their household. The director’s abiding concern with family dynamics receives one of its most spirited treatments, with a wry, tender humor and buoyant expansiveness that moves the action from the home into the baseball stadiums, pachinko parlors, and ramen shops of postwar Tokyo.

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The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice
  • The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice

    Directed by Yasujiro Ozu • 1952 • Japan
    Starring Shin Saburi, Michiyo Kogure, Keiko Tsushima

    One of the ineffably lovely domestic sagas made by Yasujiro Ozu at the height of his mastery, THE FLAVOR OF GREEN TEA OVER RICE is a sublimely piercing portrait of a marriage coming quietly undone. Secre...

Extras

  • Ozu & Noda

    Director Yasujiro Ozu collaborated with screenwriter Kogo Noda on twenty-seven films, including THE FLAVOR OF GREEN TEA OVER RICE, with the pair often working out of a small house in the mountains of Tateshina, Japan. The following program, created by filmmaker Daniel Raim in 2019, explores their...

  • David Bordwell on THE FLAVOR OF GREEN TEA OVER RICE

    The following interview with David Bordwell, author of “Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema,” was shot in May 2019.