A MATTER OF TASTE
To Western ears, it’s surely one of the most evocatively Japanese of film titles. Ozu Yasujiro’s 1952 drama The Flavour of Green Tea over Rice conjures up images of beautiful ceramics, pearly white grains, possibly even a tatami-floored room in which to savour the verdant liquor poured, steaming, into the bowl. In the film itself though, the reality is rather more prosaic. Green tea and rice make up a late night whatever’s-left-in-the-kitchen snack for a married couple attempting to soothe their ongoing hostilities. It’s the ochazuke part of the original title Ochazuke no aji, and it’s a comforting everyday combo which barely counts as cuisine. The Japanese audience might reckon it’s something so ordinary it’s hardly worth inflating into a film title, so if you tried to render the actual sense of it into English, you might come up with Tea and Toast. Far from exotic, but that’s actually the point.
In Japan, the film was released the year before what would become Ozu’s signature title for many Western film lovers: . That emotive tale of an old couple visiting their offspring in the capital and getting a warmer reception from Hara Setsuko, widow of their late son, than the is a very effective slow-burn in its own right, both as an insightful act of portraiture, and a slightly tangential take on Ozu’s central theme of marriage as a crucible of human experience – where family ties are tested or strengthened, modernity meets tradition and independence strafes against convention. In this instance, class tensions and a certain marital lassitude seem to be eating away at an older couple’s long-term relationship, perhaps offering a cautionary example for two seemingly well-matched younger folk – whose families possibly have other ideas about marrying them off.
