Ozu, Mcewan: masters

The Guardian has a nice little piece on Ian Mcewan. I have just borrowed his latest book, 'Saturday', from my brother T, much to his chagrin. My interest in him could be described as shallow considering I have not read any of his works to date, to my shame. And, of course, seeing him in the flesh was always going to be a spur to checking him out. In the article, though, William Sutcliffe reveals his growing up to be woefully absent of books, much like mine. He goes on to say,

It has been said that a lecture is a means by which ideas can pass from the
notes of a lecturer to the notes of a student without passing through the minds
of either. The same could be said of the novel, in which subtle, taboo or
impossible-to-paraphrase ideas can pass from the subconscious of the author to
the subconscious of the reader without taking root in the conscious mind of
either...The (first) chapter closes with one of the most memorable lines in contemporary literature. Jack's father, who dies face-down in wet concrete, has now been taken away, and Jack returns to the spot where the heart attack took place: "I did not have a thought in my head as I picked up the plank and smoothed away his impression in the soft, fresh concrete."...A sliding scale of "ambition" is these days often applied to novels, as if breadth of canvas is a useful measure of a novel's quality. By this spurious standard, The Cement Garden is an insignificant work. Yet for its concision, vivid emotional intensity and sheer moral daring, I would stand by it as one of the great novels of the last 30 years.

Yasujiro Ozu is also discussed in the Guardian in a similarly thoughtful article.

Every time his movies are shown on television or at film festivals, more people
find themselves enraptured by his delicate watercolour emotions, his mastery of
simplicity and reticence, in which you glimpse explicit pain and joy.Tomi takes
her tiny grandson for a walk and asks him if he wants to be a doctor when he
grows up, like his father. "I wonder if I'll still be here when you are," she
adds with a flash of anxiety, shocking us with the revelation that, so far from
being a wise grandmother calmly accepting her own mortality, she is as
frightened and unprepared as anyone. When mortality does intervene, it is for
Toriko to tell us that children gradually drift away from their parents. "Isn't
life disappointing?" replies her sister quietly, one of the most devastating
lines in cinema.

Simon Hattenstone also writes here that,

His films were so still that at times they seemed little more than a series of
photographs. Ozu realised that the great dramas of life lay in its minutiae -
despair may be expressed in the tiniest grunt or silence, the essence of honesty
may be distilled down to the interpretation of a bought piece of cake. In Tokyo
Story, the elderly couple's son-in-law buys them a fancy cake and they tell each
other that this shows how much their daughter loves them. But we have just seen
the daughter chide her husband for wasting so much money when a rice cake would
have done.

Although I can't honestly recommend Mcewan without my integrity dissolving away, I can safely say that Ozu is well worth checking out if you haven't seen his films.
books, film, movies, Ozu, Ian Mcewan