“Listen, darling, you’re imagining too much.”—Oyoshi (Sugimura Haruko) in Floating Weeds (1959) My second opportunity to experience the work of French filmmaker Jean-Claude Rousseau—whose patient, curious, and altogether cleansing sensibility is as radiant, pure, and necessary as that of any active filmmaker I can think of—came at the 2017 Locarno Festival, where he unveiled two new medium-length pieces, Arrière-saison and Si loin, si proche. This pairing, the first of what now amounts to three completed works that he shot in Japan, marked the most significant evolution in his otherwise remarkably consistent aesthetic tendencies. Namely, they were shot in HD video, and therefore in the comparatively wide 16:9 frame—an ironic gesture given that these films saw Rousseau explicitly announcing his debt to Ozu, who so famously pooh-poohed CinemaScope by likening it…