Best of Ozu and an Almodovar

The Little Tokyo Cinema’s Yasujiro Ozu series continues today with “Tokyo Story” (1953), long regarded as one of the finest films of all time, and “Equinox Flower” (1958).

“Tokyo Story” tells of an elderly couple’s visit to their married children, who neither have as much time for them as they had hoped nor are as successful as they had imagined. It is a masterpiece of subtlety and simplicity in which Ozu and his perennial collaborator Kogo Noda not only probe with compassion the generation gap, long before the term was coined, but also protest the deteriorating quality of over-populated urban life--and this was more than 35 years ago.

Above all, “Tokyo Story” evokes the fleeting quality of life. Chishu Ryu, who appeared in all but two of Ozu’s films, is the elderly father and the late Chieko Higashiyama, who was a famous stage actress celebrated for her roles in Chekhov plays, is the mother.

The lesser-known “Equinox Flower” (1958) finds Ozu, who never married, dealing with one of his favorite relationships: the one between a father and a grown daughter.

At the opening of this exquisite film, Ozu’s first in color, the father (Shin Saburi), carried away by the moment, gives a speech at the wedding of a friend’s daughter, saluting love matches and denouncing arranged marriages. The entire film turns upon the father’s difficulty in practicing what he has preached in regard to his own daughter (Ineko Arima), whose fiance (Keiji Sada), heretofore unknown to her parents, arrives at Saburi’s office to go through the formality of asking him for his daughter’s hand in marriage. Saburi’s father is a forceful, successful Tokyo executive, traditional to the core, and Ozu is at pains to show him struggling to adjust to the inevitable without losing his dignity. Ozu is of course a traditionalist himself, but what gives his films such poignancy and tension is that he understood and accepted that change and loss cannot be avoided any more than death itself.

In contrast to last week’s “Early Spring,” Ozu uses his austere style to express warmth, occasional humor and and a spirit of reconciliation; as usual, his repeated shots of people crossing a corridor suggest the passage through life. The always-commanding Saburi is very much the star of the film, and Kinuyo Tanaka--one of the greatest actresses ever to face a camera--has been cast as his wife. Tanaka is famous for her martyred Lillian Gish-like heroines, but here she is completely the cheerful, dutiful, traditional Japanese wife. Even so, she’s able to let us know, entirely through her expressions, that her allegiance is with her daughter. Information: (213) 687-7077.

“The Films of Pedro Almodovar,” a Saturday and Sunday 10:30 a.m. series at the Monica 4-Plex, commences Saturday with one of the iconoclastic Spanish director’s best pictures, “What Have I Done to Deserve This?”

A pitch-dark yet hilarious satire, the 1984 film is an all-out assault on propriety, a declaration that it is a luxury rarely affordable for the lower classes. Almodovar’s perennial star, the remarkable Carmen Maura, plays the most put-upon housewife you could ever imagine. The often funny yet uneven “Dark Habits” (Jan. 27-28), which was made in 1983 and is one of Almodovar’s earliest features, is mainly of interest for what it portends. It’s a send-up of life in a convent, in which the nuns sin out of religious conviction.

Like “What Have I Done to Deserve This?,” “Matador” (Feb. 3-4) skewers machismo , but it also sends up all the extremes of the Spanish sexual psyche.

Perhaps Almodovar’s finest film to date, the 1987 “Law of Desire” (Feb. 10-12), sets off its unbridled outrageousness with a genuine tenderness. The central figures are a famous gay director (Eusebio Poncela) and his gaudy sister (Maura) who is not what she so flamboyantly seems. The series concludes with the 1988 “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” (Feb. 17-19).

Information: (213) 394-9741.