Director Yoji Yamada, quite similar to Kurosawa in this respect, is an expert in portraying the common folks. His style, however, is always lovingly gentle. He does employ absurdity-flavoured humour, as in this Tora-san series, but that is always poking fun in a good-natured manner.
If you think "Rocky" has gone far enough, "Tora-san" boasts of 49 movies which you can call "episodes", but not to be confused with episodes in a TV series. "Tora-san" episodes are full-lengths movies shot for the cinema. "The Intellectual" is episode 16.
The protagonist Torajiro Kuruma is an endearing buffoon and the episodes all follow a fixed formula, on his failed romances. He is a travelling salesman who is usually on the road where the romances occur, always with an attractive love object, showing promises and invariably ending up in failure. One can get mildly philosophical about these things.
When he comes home, he stays with his uncle and aunt who run a small but popular eatery famous particularly for their fish balls. Not living there but always present is his sister Sakura, a personification of kindness and common sense, who works with the uncle and aunt on this family business. Sakura has a model family of a good husband and a lively boy, both of whom we see a lot. Just as for TV series, the audiences will soon grow to be very familiar with the characters, and watching an episode gives one the feeling of spending time with family and friends.
This episode, entitled appropriately "The intellectual", is slightly different in that it happens at home during one of his sojourning. The love objects here is a university lecturer (archelogy) who happens to be renting the family's second floor room. There are two other characters particularly for this episode. There is a teenage girl who have just lost her mother, coming to seek his unknown father believed to be our protagonist but in fact is not. There is also his love object's professor who, aside from of being erudite in his field of archelogy and his gruffy appearance, is like a teenager. Smitten with his student all these years, he never has courage to express his feelings to her.
I am going to finish with a confession. This is the very first Tora-san movie I have watched, although I am a big fan of some of director Yamada's other work, particularly "Twilight Samurai" which is among the best Japanese movies in my book. I'll definitely try more of the Tora-san movies.
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