I can really identify with the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu.  Perhaps not when it comes to the fact of living with your mum until you are 57, but the luckless with the ladies, hard drinking bachelor lifestyle he enjoyed is one that rings a few bells.  Legend has it that Ozu and his long time co-writer Kogo Noda crafted their immensely detailed screenplays during all night benders, measuring their progress in terms of the amount of empty Sake bottles scattered about the place.

The wondrous thing about Ozu is that despite never marrying or having any children himself he made a career out of often deceptively simple depictions of the domestic life of the Japanese middle class.  He offers more insight into cross generational relationships, romance, and both the drudgery and joy of day to day living in the twentieth century than any other filmmaker I can think of.

Watching an Ozu film you get a sense that he knows firsthand the loneliness of the human condition, and how this loneliness can be mitigated or transcended, even if only briefly, by contact with another.  When these moments happen in a bar or restaurant, with Sake acting as the great social catalyst between reunited comrades in arms or even complete strangers discovering shared humanity in hard liquor, it is clear that Ozu is the bard of the bottle and that getting on the piss at the pub with your mates was as much fun in the Japan of the 1950s as it is down town in H-town sixty years later.

Ozu was not above fart jokes.  Flatulence is an essential part of the humour in "Ohayo", one of three of his works released on DVD last week.  More openly comedic than some of Ozu's better known films, "Ohayo" has to do with two young boys deciding to stop talking after their parents refuse to buy a television set.  It also says a lot about gossip, unemployment, the ongoing impact - materialist and otherwise - of the American occupation on Japanese culture, fear of ageing, the difficulty of achieving and sustaining romantic love, and the complexity of language.

Stylistically Ozu was a law unto himself.  So insistent on close to the ground camera angles was he that he literally wore one cinematographer out, causing the man such stomach complaints that he had to go to hospital and then into retirement.  Ozu seldom moved the camera from its low, eastern vantage point, rarely zooming, panning or tracking, preferring instead to create a tableau in which actors performed without recourse to close or mid shots.  Both the physical environment and the full frame interaction between characters are vital to his art.  Unlike Kurosawa's, the cinema of Ozu is not one of montage.

Aside from "Ohayo", Auteur House stocks five other Ozu films, including his 1953 masterpiece, "Toyko Story".