Italian Premiere | Special Screenings | Out Of Competition
Japan, 2025, 103’, Japanese
Directed by: Yamada Yoji
Screenplay: Asahara Yuzo, Yamada Yoji
Cinematography (color): Chikamori Masashi
Editing: Sugimoto Hiroshi
Music: Iwasaki Taisei
Producer: Fusa Shunsuke
Production Company: Shochiku
Cast: Baisho Chieko, Kimura Takuya
Date of First Release in Territory: November 21st, 2025
The 94-year-old Yamada Yoji’s 91st film,
Tokyo Taxi, which premiered at the Tokyo International Film Festival, could be his swan song, though Yamada has not announced his retirement.
And why should he when the film, a remake of 2022 French-Belgian drama
Driving Madeleine, is one of the best he’s done in years? Co-scripted by Yamada, it may have a borrowed storyline – an elderly woman asks a taxi driver to take her to memorable spots in her life before she moves into a retirement home – but the veteran director put his own inimitable stamp on it.
That stamp will be familiar to fans of Yamada’s 48 episode Tora-san series, which followed the misadventures of a wandering tramp played by Kiyoshi Atsumi with a mix of broad comedy and heartwarming drama – Charlie Chaplin’s classic “a laugh and a tear” formula.
But in
Tokyo Taxi, Yamada’s strong social conscience, seen in his neglected 1970 masterpiece
Spring Comes Late and other films about ordinary people struggling to get by, is also evident.
And Yamada, who penned his first screenplay in 1958, gives a master class in script construction, making his points with brisk efficiency, while setting up an ending that seems obvious early on, but delivers third-act twists that would draw tears from a stone.
Yamada’s propensity to tug at audience heartstrings has been derided, but is one big reason he still had a career long after many of his directing contemporaries passed into silence – or television.
His protagonist, 85-year-old Takano Sumire (Baisho Chieko ), calls a cab from her house in Shibamata – Tora-san’s
shitamachi (old Tokyo downtown) stomping ground. Her driver, Usami Koji (Kimura Takuya ), is not in a good mood, since he is substituting for a fellow cabby as a last-minute favor, after pulling a night shift. Also, he has just had an argument with his wife about family finances, including tuition for his teenage daughter’s pricey music high school.
Nonetheless, he readily agrees to Sumire’s request to make her ride to the retirement home in Yokohama a trip down memory lane.
The film, however, is not a long soak in a warm bath of nostalgia. A survivor of the March 1945 firebombing of Tokyo, in which her father died on a bridge over the Sumida River – their first stop – Sumire has had an eventful life. With the taciturn, if sympathetic, Koji serving as a willing ear, she wants to remember as much as she can, the good, the bad and the ugly.
Along the way, and with Sumire’s encouragement, Koji begins to open up about his own past life and present-day troubles. By the time the retirement home draws near, the two strangers have bonded – but their brief encounter is not the end of their story.
Both Baisho and Kimura have worked with Yamada before – the former as a regular in the Tora-san series, as well as other collaborations, the latter as the star of the 2006 samurai drama
Love and Honor – and both are fully in tune with his style and rhythms.
But it is Baisho who is the film’s revelation, playing Sumire with a salty frankness and lingering darkness that contrasts with the bright-eyed, pure-hearted characters that first made her famous. With her in the back seat,
Tokyo Taxi is a ride worth taking.
Yamada Yoji
Yamada Yoji (b. 1931) entered the Shochiku studio in 1954. He directed his first feature in 1961 but rose to fame with the Tora-san series, starring Atsumi Kiyoshi as a wandering peddler who is forever falling in love but never gets the girl. Following Atsumi’s death in 1996, he put the series on hiatus and made his first-ever samurai period dramas: The Twilight Samurai (2002), The Hidden Blade (2004) and Love and Honor (2006), with Twilight Samurai being nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar.
SELECTED FILMOGRAPHY
1961 – Nikai no Tanin
1969 – It’s Tough Being a Man
1970 – Where Spring Comes Late
1977 – The Yellow Handkerchief
1993 – Gakko
2002 – The Twilight Samurai
2004 – The Hidden Blade
2006 – Love and Honor
2008 – Kabei: Our Mother
2013 – Tokyo Family
2023 – Mom, Is That You?!
2025 – Tokyo Taxi