TOKYO STORY, DIRECTOR: YASUJRIO OZU

It says a lot that the best film of the week is 51 years old, but then Tokyo Story is a special film, a life-changing experience that has stood the test of time for over haf a century.

In the renowned film magazine Sight and Sound, Tokyo Story ranked as number five on the 2002 critics' poll, adding testament to a well-deserved legacy.

Tokyo Story is a universal tale of estrangement between parents and their adult children, a story that never seems to date and has emotional resonance for any mother, father and offspring.

It's a very simple film, in the sense that it builds its emotional power from nuances, in terms of camera placement and characters' expressions and from a story that reflects reality, showing how people deal with a range of situations.

The story is of an aging married couple who travel from a provincial town to visit their various grown-up children.

But the children have moved on, leading busy lives as professionals, seemingly only taking them out to see the city because they feel obliged to.

But the don't seem to have time to show them around properly, eat a meal or just chat, hamstrug as they are by their jobs and their seperate, hectic lives.

The parents come to terms with this turn of events and turn their attention to their widowed daughter-in-law, someone who seems to have time for the couple and shows human kindness.

However, on their trip, the mother dies and the scene is set for a funeral at the ancestral home, where the siblings face up to their priorities and try to absolve some of their guilt.

Recriminations are kept to a minimum, as is the apportioning of blame. The widowed daughter-in-law comes off as showing the most compassion, which the father remembers even if she is nothing less than modest about what she has done.

The greatest sorrow is reserved for the widowed husband. His resignation to loneliness is heartbreaking and there is little he can do but face his fate without the woman that he loved.

This simplicity is also the brilliance of a director like Yasujrio Ozu. He is able to make big emotional strides by expression real human emotion and this is why the film exudes a power that is rarely seen in cinema.

Ozu's sublime trademark style of little camera movement, setting up the scene and playing lt long after the narrative necessitates is cinematic poetry.

Ozu knows more than most directors about exploring off-screen space and enhancing it for emotional heft. However, this is the least conventional or emotionally manipulative film that you are ever likely to see.

Characters are framed with utmost relevance to their surroundings, making a relationship between person and environment. The idea of loneliness being conveyed in terms of film space is something that Ozu understands.

He also expresses beautifully the images of a character in the middle of a frame surrounded by huge gulfs of space as a metaphor for helplessness and isolation in scene after scene.

It's the unobtrusive camera placement, usually only a foot or so higher than the floor, which puts you at the heart of the drama and the heart of the characters. It's as if you are an invisible member of the family, absorbing the humanity surrounding you.

Ozu was one of the greatest directors of the 20th century and most of his film are inbued with the kind of humanism that makes him a great film-maker.

The film manages, simply and in an unfussy manner, to explain more about the complexities of life than many so-called epics.

Tokyo Story is epic, not in terms of its canvas, but in terms of its ambition, its depth and its perception of human values and feelings.

If there were only seven wonders of the cinematic world, Tokyo Story would surely be one of them.

This is absolutely unmissable cinema that will stand the test of time for the next 50 years and way beyond that.