| Late Spring | |
|---|---|
Original Japanese movie poster |
|
| Directed by | Yasujirō Ozu |
| Produced by | Shochiku Films Ltd. |
| Written by | Kazuo Hirotsu Kôgo Noda Yasujiro Ozu |
| Starring | Chishu Ryu Setsuko Hara Haruko Sugimura |
| Music by | Senji Itô |
| Cinematography | Yuuharu Atsuta |
| Distributed by | Shochiku Films Ltd. New Yorker Films |
| Release date(s) | September 13, 1949 (Japanese release)[1] July 21, 1972 (U.S. release) |
| Running time | 108 min. |
| Country | Japan |
| Language | Japanese |
Late Spring (晩春 Banshun) is a critically acclaimed black-and-white Japanese film drama, directed by Yasujirō Ozu (1903–1963), first released in Japan in September 1949.[1] Based on the short novel Father and Daughter (Chichi to musume) by Kazuo Hirotsu, the story concerns a young woman who lives happily in Kamakura with her kindly professor father, a widower. He decides that she must find a husband and, despite initial resistance, she accepts the inevitability of their separation and marries, leaving the father alone. The film was written and shot during the Allied Powers' Occupation of Japan and was subject to the Occupation's official censorship requirements.[2]
The work belongs to the type of Japanese film known as shomingeki, a genre that deals with the ordinary daily lives of working class and middle class people of modern times. The film stars Chishu Ryu, a performer featured in most of the director’s movies, and Setsuko Hara, making her first of six appearances in Ozu’s cinema.[3] It is the first installment of Ozu’s so-called “Noriko trilogy” — the others are Early Summer (Bakushu, 1951) and Tokyo Story (Tokyo Monogatari, 1953) — in each of which Hara portrays a young woman named Noriko, though the three Norikos are completely distinct and unrelated characters, linked primarily by their status as single women in postwar Japan.[3][4][note 1]
Late Spring is frequently regarded as the initial film of the director’s final creative period, which is characterized by, among other traits, the use of extremely simple plots, an exclusive focus on stories about families during Japan's immediate postwar era, and a generally static camera.[5] Late Spring is also sometimes seen as either a forerunner, or one of the first major examples, of Japanese cinema's so-called “Golden Age,” a period of exceptional cinematic quality, widely regarded as having begun at the turn of the 1950s, about the time this movie was first shown.[6]
The film was very well received on its initial release, and its reputation has not diminished over the years. In 1950, it was awarded the prestigious Kinema Jumpo critics' award as the best Japanese production released in 1949.[7][8] Late Spring has sometimes been referred to as the director's "most perfect" work,[9] and has been called "one of the most perfect, most complete, and most successful studies of character ever achieved in Japanese cinema."[10] Both as an individual work and as a representative work of the final creative period of Ozu's oeuvre, an enormous amount of literature has appeared about the film and even about a single, disputed scene,[11] including much critical praise, commentary and controversy.
The website They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They?, in the latest (January 2011) edition of its annual “1000 Greatest Films” compilation, places Late Spring in the 195th position among all movies ever made, which makes it, on that list, the eighth highest-ranking Japanese-language film of all time.[12]
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Professor Shukichi Somiya (Chishu Ryu), a widower, has only one child, a twenty-seven-year-old unmarried daughter, Noriko (Setsuko Hara), who takes care of the household and the everyday needs of her father. On a shopping trip to Tokyo, Noriko encounters a friend of her father's, Professor Jo Onodera (Masao Mishima), who lives in Kyoto, and they go to a restaurant together. Noriko knows that Onodera, also a widower, has remarried, and she tells him that she finds the very idea of his remarriage distasteful, even filthy. Onodera, and later her father, tease her for having such thoughts.
Shukichi's sister, Aunt Masa (Haruko Sugimura), convinces him that it is high time his daughter got married. Noriko is friendly with her father’s assistant, Hattori (Jun Usami), and Aunt Masa suggests to her brother that he ask Noriko if she might be interested in Hattori. When he does bring up the subject, however, Noriko laughs: Hattori already has been engaged to another girl for quite some time.
Undaunted, Masa tries to serve as her niece’s matchmaker. She pressures Noriko to meet with a marriageable young man, a Tokyo University graduate named Satake who, Masa believes, bears a strong resemblance to Gary Cooper. Noriko declines, explaining that she doesn’t wish to marry anyone, because to do so would leave her father alone and helpless. Masa surprises Noriko by claiming that she is also trying to arrange a match between Shukichi and Mrs. Miwa (Kuniko Miyake), an attractive young widow known to Noriko. If Masa succeeds, it would mean Shukichi would have someone other than Noriko to care for him.
At a Noh performance attended by Noriko and her father, the latter nods to Mrs. Miwa, which triggers Noriko's jealousy. When her father later tries to talk her into going to meet Satake, he tells her that he intends to marry Mrs. Miwa. Devastated, Noriko reluctantly decides to meet the young man and, to her surprise, gains a very favorable impression of him. Shaken by thoughts of her father taking a second wife, Noriko gives in and consents to the arranged marriage with Satake.
The Somiyas go on one last trip before the wedding to Kyoto, where they meet Prof. Onodera and his family. Noriko changes her opinion of Onodera's remarriage when she discovers that his new wife is a nice person. While packing their luggage for the trip home, Noriko asks her father why they can't simply stay as they are now, even if he does remarry – she is very happy living with him and marriage certainly wouldn’t make her any happier. Shukichi admonishes her, saying that she must embrace the new life she will build with Satake, one in which he, Shukichi, will have no part, because "that’s the order of human life and history." Noriko asks her father’s forgiveness for her "selfishness" and agrees to go ahead with the marriage.
Noriko’s wedding day arrives. At home just before the ceremony, both Shukichi and Masa admire Noriko, who is dressed in a traditional wedding costume. Noriko thanks her father for the care he has taken of her throughout her life and then leaves in the car for the wedding. Afterwards, Aya (Yumeji Tsukioka), a divorced friend of Noriko’s, goes with Shukichi to a bar, where he confesses to her that his claim that he was going to marry Mrs. Miwa was a ruse all along; he had said so only to help persuade Noriko to get married herself. Aya, touched by his sacrifice, promises to visit him often. Shukichi returns home and faces the quiet night all alone.
Shortly after the Great Kanto earthquake in 1923, Shiro Kido, barely thirty years old, became manager of Shochiku Company’s Kamata film studios. He transformed the Japanese film industry by developing what was later to be called the shomingeki genre (also known as the “home drama”) of movies about contemporary life. According to film scholar David Bordwell, “Mixing laughter and tears, the ‘Kamata-flavor’ film was aimed at an urban female audience. Kido wanted films that, in his words, ‘looked at the reality of human nature through the everyday activities of society.’ The films might be socially critical, but their criticism was based on the hope that human nature was basically good. People struggle to better their lot, Kido believed, and this aspiration should be treated in ‘a positive, warm-hearted, approving way.’”[13] The pioneer Shochiku director Yasujiro Shimazu made the early film Sunday (Nichiyobi, 1924), which helped establish the typical “Kamata flavor” movie[14] and he personally trained other notable directors, including Heinosuke Gosho, Shiro Toyoda and Keisuke Kinoshita, who all helped make the shomingeki type of film into Shochiku’s “house style.”[15]
Yasujiro Ozu, after growing up in Tokyo and in Mie Prefecture and engaging in a very brief career as a teacher, was hired by Shochiku, through family connections, as an assistant cameraman in 1923. He became an assistant director in 1926 and a full director in 1927.[16][17] (He would remain with the company for the rest of his life.)[18] His breakthrough film in the shomingeki genre was the 1931 silent film[note 2] Tokyo Chorus (Tokyo no Gassho) about a young office worker with a family and a house in the suburbs who stands up for an unjustly fired office colleague and promptly gets fired himself.[19][20] As the Great Depression had hit Japan severely by this time, the hero’s predicament is no minor problem (one intertitle reads "Tokyo: Town of Unemployment").[21] In its movement from broad office comedy to the grim drama of (temporary) poverty, Ozu achieved in this depiction of the lives of ordinary people the synthesis of humor and pathos that Kido was urging his directors to strive for. (It has been said that the influence of the screenwriter Kogo Noda, ten years Ozu’s senior, was instrumental in this change towards a tone darker than the director’s more lighthearted early works.)[22]
This film became only the second by the director to win a place (third prize) in the most prestigious of Japanese film awards: the “Best Ten” critics’ prizes offered by Kinema Junpo magazine[20][note 3] However, in the following three years, Ozu accomplished the (in the opinion of one scholar) “astonishing” feat of winning the “Best Film” award in the Kinema Junpo poll three times in a row, for I Was Born, But... (Umarete wa Mita Keredo, 1932), Passing Fancy (Dekigokoro, 1933) and A Story of Floating Weeds (Ukigusa Monogatari, 1934), respectively.[16] Other films Ozu directed during the 1930s also won awards: Until the Day We Meet Again, now considered lost (Mata Au Hi Made, 1932, #7 in the Kinema Junpo poll); An Inn in Tokyo (Tokyo no Yado, 1935, #9); his first talkie, The Only Son (Hitori Musuko, 1936, #4); and What Did the Lady Forget? (Shukujo wa Nani o Wasuretaka, 1937, #8).[23] One critic, Hideo Tsumura, wrote in 1938 that Japan had produced thus far only two great filmmakers: Ozu and Sadao Yamanaka, a director of jidaigeki films[note 4] who was Ozu’s close friend, despite the fact that such notable figures as Kenji Mizoguchi, Heinosuke Gosho and Mikio Naruse were all active during this period.[24]
As critically esteemed as they were, Ozu’s many pictures of the 1930s were not conspicuously successful at the box office.[25] During the first phase of the Sino-Japanese War (1937–1941) and then the Pacific War (1941–1945), owing partly to several long stints serving in the Japanese military[note 5] and partly due to the fact that a number of scripts he worked on during this time were never filmed, Ozu directed only two movies. Nevertheless, these two works — Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family (Toda-ke no Kyodai, 1941) and There Was a Father (Chichi Ariki, 1942) — became his most popular up to that time.[26] It has been surmised that the public embraced them because the family themes Ozu had always favored suddenly were in full accord with official government ideology.[25] In his book about the Japanese film industry during wartime, Peter B. High writes that though There Was a Father was "made in strict accordance to the ideological requirements of the Pacific War era, [the movie] is one of the few such films to be recognized as an artistic masterwork today."[27]
For virtually all Japanese film professionals, but particularly for the older generation, to which Ozu belonged, the first years after the end of the Pacific War were a difficult and disorienting period. Not only did they have to cope, like other Japanese, with the humiliation of defeat and the widespread physical and economic devastation of their homeland, but they were forced to confront a new kind of film censorship from the victorious Americans,[note 6] one that seemed with its alien values, in the words of Audie Bock, "to be trying to change the very fabric of Japanese daily life, from which they drew their subject matter."[28] Perhaps the greatest challenge was comprehending the brand-new concept of democracy. As Bock notes, the director Shohei Imamura, in a film made several decades later, would poke fun at all the fuss over democracy by equating it with group sex, "but in the late 1940s it was very serious, if confusing business."[29]
During this period, Ozu directed two movies, widely regarded as among his least typical: Record of a Tenement Gentleman (Nagaya no Shinshiroku, 1947) which portrays the plight of homeless children, and A Hen in the Wind (Kaze no Naka no Mendori, 1948) which deals with the problems of repatriated soldiers. The two works are thought to display a "civic" character remote both from his previous films — even the socially conscious ones — and his subsequent pictures. For example, Record of a Tenement Gentleman ends with the heroine giving a didactic speech against society’s selfishness and resolving to adopt an orphan, a scene that one critic claims "almost ruins" the film[30] and which several have called "un-Japanese."[30][31] Critics have described A Hen in the Wind as "awkwardly sordid"[32] and "uncharacteristically bleak and violent."[33] These two works received, in Japan, much less popular and critical acceptance than his two wartime films.[26]
Many critics have tried to account for the apparent major change in Ozu's approach to filmmaking from 1949 on. Bordwell provides one explanation when he writes: "According to [critic Tadao] Sato, Ozu [after finishing A Hen in the Wind] was thereafter told by friends that he had reached the limits of his formal powers. He set out to find a stable subject through which he could refine his technique, and the life of the middle-class family was his choice."[34]
The central event of Late Spring is the marriage of the heroine to a man she has met only once through a single arranged meeting. This immediately presented a problem for the censors of the American Occupation. According to film scholar Kyoko Hirano, these officials "considered feudalistic the Japanese custom of arranged meetings for prospective marriage partners, miai, because the custom seemed to them to downgrade the importance of the individual." Hirano notes that, had this policy against showing "arranged" marriages onscreen been rigidly enforced, Late Spring could never have been made.[35] In the original synopsis, Noriko’s decision to marry was presented as a collective family decision, not an individual choice, and the censors apparently rejected this.[36]
The synopsis explained that the trip to Kyoto by father and daughter, just prior to Noriko’s marriage, occurs so she can visit her dead mother’s grave. This motivation is absent from the finished film, possibly because the censors would have interpreted such a visit as “ancestor worship,” a practice they frowned upon.[37]
Any reference in the script to the devastation caused by the Allied bombings was removed. In the script, Shukichi remarks to Onodera’s wife in Kyoto that her city is a very nice place, unlike Tokyo, with all its ruins. The censors deleted the reference to ruins (as an implied critique of the Allies) and, in the finished film, the word “hokorippoi” (“dusty”) was substituted as a description of Tokyo.[38]
The censors at first automatically deleted a reference in the script to the movie star Gary Cooper, but then reinstated it when they realized that the comparison was to Noriko’s suitor Satake, who is described as attractive, and was thus flattering to the actor.[39][40]
Sometimes, the censors’ demands seemed irrational. A line about Noriko’s health having been negatively affected by "her work after being conscripted by the [Japanese] Navy during the war" was changed to "the forced work during the war," as if even the very mention of the Japanese Navy was somehow suspect.[41]
At the script phase of the censorship process, the censors demanded that the character of Aunt Masa, who at one point finds a lost change purse on the ground and keeps it as a kind of good-luck charm, should instead hand over the purse to the police. Ozu responded by turning the situation, in the finished film, into a kind of running gag in which Shukichi repeatedly (and futilely) urges his sister to turn the purse in to the police. This change has been called "a mocking kind of partial compliance with the censorship."[42]
One scholar, Lars-Martin Sorensen, has alleged that Ozu's partial aim in making the film was to present an ideal of Japan at odds with that which the Occupation wanted to promote, and that he successfully subverted the censorship in order to accomplish this. "The controversial and subversive politico-historical 'message' of the film is… that the beauty of tradition, and of subjugation of individual whims to tradition and history, by far outshines the imported and imposed western trends of occupied Japan."[43]
Sorensen uses as an example the scene early in the film in which Noriko and her father's assistant Hattori are bicycling towards the beach. They pass a diamond-shaped Coca-Cola sign and another sign, in English, warning that the weight capacity of a bridge over which they are riding is 30 tons: quite irrelevant information for this young couple, but perfectly appropriate for American military vehicles that might pass along that road. (Neither the Coke sign nor the road warning are referred to in the script approved by the censors.)[44] Sorensen argues that these objects are "obvious reference(s) to the presence of the occupying army."[45]
On the other hand, Late Spring, more than any other film Ozu ever made, is suffused with the symbols of Japanese tradition: the tea ceremony that opens the film, the temples at Kamakura, the Noh performance that Noriko and Shukichi witness, and the landscape and Zen gardens of Kyoto.[46] Sorensen argues that these images of historical landmarks "were intended to inspire awe and respect for the treasures of ancient Japan in contrast to the impurity of the present."[39] Sorensen also claims that, to Ozu’s audience, "the exaltation of Japanese tradition and cultural and religious heritage must have brought remembrances of the good old days when Japan was still winning her battles abroad and nationalism reached its peak."[47] To scholars such as Bordwell who assert that Ozu was promoting with this film an ideology that could be called liberal,[46] Sorensen argues that contemporary reviews of the film "show that Ozu (the director and his personal convictions) was considered inseparable from his films, and that he was considered a conservative purist."[48]
Sorensen concludes that such censorship may not necessarily be a bad thing. "One of the positive side effects of being prohibited from airing one's views openly and directly is that it forces artists to be creative and subtle in their ways of expression."[49]
On Late Spring, Ozu worked with a number of old colleagues from his prewar days, such as actor Chishu Ryu and cinematographer Yuharu Atsuta. However, a long-deferred reunion with one artist and the beginning of a long collaboration with another — the screenwriter Kogo Noda and the actress Setsuko Hara, respectively — were to prove critical artistically, both to this movie and to the direction of Ozu's subsequent work.
Writer Kogo Noda, already an accomplished screenwriter,[50] had collaborated with Ozu on the script of his debut film of 1927, Sword of Penitence (Zange no Yaiba), the director's first and only movie in the jidaigeki genre.[50][51] Noda had subsequently worked with Ozu (while also writing scripts for other directors) on many of his best silent pictures, including the groundbreaking Tokyo Chorus, as noted above.[50] Yet by 1949, the director hadn't worked with his old friend for fourteen years. However, their reunion on Late Spring was so harmonious and successful that Ozu wrote exclusively with Noda for the rest of his career.[50]
Ozu once said of Noda: "When a director works with a scriptwriter they must have some characteristics and habits in common; otherwise, they won't get along. My daily life — what time I get up, how much sake I drink and so on — is in almost complete agreement with that of [Noda]. When I work with Noda, we collaborate even on short bits of dialogue. Although we never discuss the details of the sets or costumes, his mental image of these things is always in accord with mine; our ideas never criss cross or go awry. We even agree on whether a dialogue should end with wa or yo."[52][note 7] From Late Spring on, partly due to Noda's influence, all Ozu’s characters would be safely middle class and, unlike the characters in, for example, Record of a Tenement Gentleman or A Hen in the Wind, beyond immediate physical want and necessity.[53]
Setsuko Hara was born Masae Aida in Yokohama, Kanagawa prefecture on June 17, 1920. Barely in her teens, she was signed in 1935, under her new stage name, to an acting contract with Nikkatsu, Japan's oldest major film studio. It is said that her brother-in-law, the director Hisatora Kumagai, was instrumental in this decision.[54] Decades later, she would claim that she had had no personal ambition to appear in films and, in fact, did not enjoy acting; she had worked, she said, only to help support her large family.[55] Her tall frame and strong facial features — including very large eyes and a prominent nose — were unusual among Japanese actresses at the time; it has been rumored, but not verified, that she had a German grandparent.[56]
Two years after her debut, she was cast as the female lead in the first German-Japanese co-production, The New Earth (Atarashiki tsuchi, 1937), which was shown in the West as Die Tochter des Samurai (Daughter of the Samurai). The film broke box office records in several Japanese theatres, despite very poor reviews.[57] She maintained her popularity throughout the war years, when she appeared in many films made primarily for propaganda purposes by the military government, becoming "the perfect war-movie heroine."[58] After the defeat of Japan, she was more popular than ever, so that by the time Ozu worked with her for the first time on Late Spring, she had already become "one of Japan's best-loved actresses."[59]
Ozu had a very high regard for Hara's work. He once said, "Every Japanese actor can play the role of a soldier and every Japanese actress can play the role of a prostitute to some extent. However, it is rare to find an actress who can play the role of a daughter from a good family."[58] Speaking of her performance in Early Summer, he was quoted as saying, "Setsuko Hara is a really good actress. I wish I had four or five more like her."[52]
In addition to the three "Noriko" films, Ozu directed her in three other roles: as an unhappily married wife in Tokyo Twilight (Tokyo Boshoku 1957),[60][61] as the mother of a marriageable daughter in Late Autumn (Akibiyori, 1960, which is sometimes said to be a "remake" of Late Spring, with Hara's character substituting for Chishu Ryu's father figure from the earlier film),[62][63] and the daughter-in-law of a sake plant owner in the director's penultimate film, The End of Summer (Kohayagawa-ke no Aki, 1961).[64][65] Bordwell summed up the critical consensus of Hara's significance to the late work of Ozu when he wrote, "After 1948, Setsuko Hara becomes the archetypal Ozu woman, either the bride-to-be or the widow of middle years."[50]
The movies of Yasujiro Ozu are well known for their unusual — some would say highly eccentric — approach to film narrative. Scenes that most filmmakers would consider obligatory (e.g., the wedding of Noriko) are often not shown at all by the director,[66] while apparently extraneous incidents (e.g., the concert attended by Hattori but not Noriko) are given seemingly inordinate prominence.[67] Sometimes important narrative information is withheld not only from a major character, but from the viewer (e.g., Hattori’s engagement to another girl, about which neither Noriko’s father nor the audience has any knowledge until Noriko, laughing, informs him).[67] And at times, the filmmaker proceeds, within a scene, to jump from one time frame to another without transition, as when two establishing shots of some travelers waiting for a train on a platform lead to a third shot of the same train already on its way to Tokyo.[68]
Bordwell refers to Ozu’s approach to narrative as "parametric narration." By this term, Bordwell means that Ozu’s "overunified" visual approach, characterized by its “stylistic rigor,” often provides the basis for "playful deviation," including narrative playfulness.[69] As Bordwell puts it somewhat more plainly, Ozu "back[s] away from his own machinery in order to achieve humor and surprise."[70] He claims that "in narrative poetry, rhythm and rhyme need not completely subordinate themselves to the demand of telling the story; in art song or opera, 'autonomous' musical structures may require that the story grind to a halt while particular harmonic or melodic patterns work themselves out. Similarly, in some films, temporal or spatial qualities can lure us with a patterning that is not wholly dependent on representing fabula [i.e., story] information."[71]
He points out that the opening scene of Late Spring "begins at the railroad station, where the characters aren’t. A later scene will do exactly the same thing, showing the train station before showing [the characters] already hurtling towards Tokyo… In Tokyo, [Professor] Onodera and Noriko discuss going to an art exhibit; cut to a sign for the exhibit, then to the steps of the art gallery; cut to the two in a bar, after they’ve gone to the exhibit."[67]
However, to Kathe Geist, Ozu’s narrative methods reflect the artist's economy of means, not "playfulness." "His frequent use of repetition and [narrative] ellipsis do not 'impose their will' on Ozu’s plots; they are his plots. By paying attention to what has been left out and to what is repeated, one arrives at Ozu’s essential story."[72]
As an example, Geist cites the scene in which Noriko and Hattori bicycle together to the beach and have a conversation there, an incident that appears to imply a budding romantic relationship between them. When Noriko slightly later reveals to her father that Hattori, before that bicycle trip, had already been engaged to another woman, "we wonder," writes Geist, "why Ozu has wasted so much time on the 'wrong man' [for Noriko]."[73] However, the key to the beach scene’s importance to the plot, according to Geist, is the dialogue between Hattori and Noriko, in which the latter tells him that she is "the jealous type." This seemingly unlikely claim, given her affable nature, is later confirmed when she becomes bitterly jealous at her father’s apparent plan to remarry. "Her jealousy goads her into her own marriage and is thus the pivot on which the plot turns."[73]
Geist sums up her analysis of several major Ozu films of the postwar period by asserting that "the narratives unfold with an astounding precision in which no shot and certainly no scene is wasted and all is overlayered with an intricate web of interlocking meaning."[74]
The following represents what some critics regard as important themes in this film. This summary is not intended to be comprehensive.
The main theme of Late Spring is, of course, marriage; specifically, the persistent attempts by several characters in the film to get Noriko married. The marriage theme had resonance for Japanese of the late 1940s. On January 1, 1948, a new law had been issued in Japan which allowed young people over twenty to marry consensually without parental permission for the first time.[75] Commentator Richard Peña has pointed out that one reason why Noriko is still unmarried at the relatively late age of 27 is that many of the young men of her generation had been killed in the Second World War, leaving far fewer eligible potential partners.[53]
An interesting aspect of the film involves the absence of any preoccupation in it with the traditional Japanese family system, or ie. As Sumiko Iwao, a psychology professor based in Tokyo, describes it, during the Meiji era (and for a considerable time before that), "the basic unit of society was the ie, or household. The head of the household, who was as a rule male, exercised unchallengeable authority over the lives of all family members. Women (wives) were seen primarily in terms of their role as bearers of male offspring who would carry on the family line and assume the responsibilities of family head. Women exercised no authority over marriage, divorce, or inheritance. The ie as part of the legal system was abolished in 1947."[76] Although by 1949, the legal concept of the ie had, thanks to the American occupation, disappeared, the system remained informally in place in numerous Japanese households (and still exists today in parts of Japan).[77] But in Late Spring, Noriko's father never orders her to marry; even when he pleads with her to agree to the miai to meet Satake, he "assures her that she is free to decline [marriage with him]."[78] And when he tries to persuade her to accept Satake after she meets him, he never uses as a rationale that she must bear offspring, though his direct line would die out if she remained childless. He "emphasizes marrying for love and happiness not for perpetuation of the ie. (There is no emphasis on having children to maintain the family)."[46] Peña claims that, for Ozu, marriage is not about procreation, but about one’s place in society.[53]
Marriage in this film, as well as many of Ozu’s late films, is strongly associated with death. Prof. Onodera's daughter, for example, refers to marriage as “life’s graveyard.”[79] Says Geist: "Ozu connects marriage and death in obvious and subtle ways in most of his late films… The comparison between weddings and funerals is not merely a clever device on Ozu’s part, but is so fundamental a concept in Japanese culture that these ceremonies as well as those surrounding births have built-in similarities… The elegiac melancholy Ozu evokes at the end of Late Spring, Late Autumn, and An Autumn Afternoon arises only partly because the parents have been left alone… The sadness arises because the marriage of the younger generation inevitably reflects on the mortality of the older generation."[80] Robin Wood stresses the marriage-death connection in commenting on the scene that takes place in the Somiya home just before the wedding ceremony. "After everyone has left the room… [Ozu] ends the sequence with a shot of the empty mirror. Noriko is no longer even a reflection, she has disappeared from the narrative, she is no longer ‘Noriko’ but ‘wife.’ The effect is that of a death."[81]
The tension between tradition and modern pressures in relation to marriage — and, by extension, within Japanese culture as a whole — is one of the major conflicts Ozu portrays in the film. The characters in the work are, as several critics have pointed out, largely defined in terms of their relation to tradition. Sorensen indicates by several examples that what foods a character eats or even how he or she sits down (e.g., on tatami mats or Western-style chairs) reveals the relationship of that character to tradition.[82] According to Peña, Noriko "is the quintessential moga — modan gaaru, 'modern girl' — that populates Japanese fiction, and really the Japanese imagination, beginning in the 1920s onward."[53] Throughout most of the film, Noriko wears Western clothing rather than a kimono, and outwardly behaves in up-to-date ways. However, Bordwell asserts that "Noriko is more old-fashioned than her father, insisting that he could not get along without her and resenting the idea that a widower might remarry… she clings to an outmoded notion of propriety."[78]
The other two important female characters in the film are also defined in terms of their relation to tradition. Noriko’s Aunt Masa appears in scenes in which she is associated with traditional Japan, such as the tea ceremony in one of the ancient temples of Kamakura.[83] Noriko’s friend Aya, on the other hand, seems to reject tradition entirely. Under the new constitution of the prior year (1948), Japanese women had just been granted the right to divorce their husbands. Thus, Aya is presented as a new, Westernized phenomenon: the divorcee.[53][83] She "takes English tea with milk from teacups with handles, [and] also bakes shortcake (shaato keeki)," a very un-Japanese type of food.[84]
Prof. Somiya’s assistant, Hattori, Noriko’s friend, is also associated with symbols of modernity: the previously mentioned Coca-Cola sign, the "Balboa" coffee shop (the shop’s sign is in English) where he and Noriko briefly meet and the concert of Western classical music that Hattori, but not Noriko, attends.[83]
Like Noriko, her father has an ambiguous relation with modernity. Shukichi is first seen in the film checking the correct spelling of the name of the German-American economist Friedrich List – an important figure during Japan’s Meiji era, as List’s theories helped the economic modernization of the country.[78] Prof. Somiya treats Aya, the divorcee, with unfailing courtesy and respect – though one critic suspects that such a person in the real-life Japan of that period might have been considerably less tolerant.[53]
On the other hand, he, like Aunt Masa, is also associated with the traditions of old Japan, such as the city of Kyoto with its ancient temples and Zen rock gardens, and the Noh play that he so clearly enjoys.[78][83] Most importantly, he pressures Noriko to go through with the miai meeting with Satake, though, as noted above, he makes clear to her that she can reject her suitor without negative consequences.
Sorensen has summed up the ambiguous position of both father and daughter in relation to tradition as follows: "Noriko and [Professor] Somiya interpolate between the two extremes, between shortcake and Nara-pickles, between ritually prepared green tea and tea with milk, between love marriage/divorce and arranged marriage, between Tokyo and Nara. And this interpolation is what makes them complex characters, wonderfully human in all their internal inconsistencies, very Ozu-like and likable indeed."[43]
Late Spring has been seen by some commentators as a transitional work in terms of the home as a recurring theme in Japanese cinema. Tadao Sato points out that Shochiku’s directors of the 1920s and 1930s — including Shimazu, Gosho, Naruse and Ozu himself — in their best pre-World War II films, "presented the family in a tense confrontation with society."[85] In A Brother and His Young Sister (Ani to sono imoto, 1939) by Shimazu, for example, "the home is sanctified as a place of warmth and generosity, feelings that were rapidly vanishing in society."[86] By the early 1940s, however, in such films as Ozu’s There Was a Father, "the family [was] completely subordinate to the [wartime] state" and "society is now above criticism."[87] But when the military state collapsed as a result of Japan’s defeat in the war, the idea of the home collapsed with it: "Neither the nation nor the household could dictate morality any more."[88]
Sato considers Late Spring "the next major development in the home drama genre," because it "initiated a series of Ozu films with the theme: there is no society, only the home. While family members had their own places of activity — office, school, family business — there was no tension between the outside world and the home. As a consequence, the home itself lost its source of moral strength."[88] Yet despite the fact that these home dramas by Ozu "tend to lack social relevance," they "came to occupy the mainstream of the genre and can be considered perfect expressions of 'my home-ism,' whereby one’s family is cherished to the exclusion of everything else."[88]
Late Spring is the first of several extant Ozu films with a "seasonal" title.[53][note 8] (Later films with seasonal titles are Early Summer, Early Spring (Soshun, 1956), Late Autumn and The End of Summer (literally, "Autumn for the Kohayagawa Family")).[note 9] The "late spring" of the title refers on the most obvious level to Noriko who, at 27, is in the "late spring" of her life, and approaching the age at which she would no longer be considered marriageable.[45][89]
However, there may be another meaning to Ozu's title derived from ancient Japanese culture. When Noriko and Shukichi attend the Noh play, the work performed is called Kakitsubata or "The Water Iris." (The water iris in Japan is a plant which blooms, usually in marshland, in late spring/early summer.)[90] In this play, a traveling monk arrives at a place called Yatsuhashi, famous for its water irises, when a woman appears. She alludes to a famous poem by the waka poet of the Heian period, Ariwara no Narihira, in which each of the five lines begins with one syllable that, spoken together, spell out the word for "water iris" ("ka-ki-tsu-ba-ta"). The monk stays the night at the humble hut of the woman, who then appears in an elaborate kimono and headdress and reveals herself to be the spirit of the water iris. She praises Narihira, dances, and at dawn receives enlightenment from the Buddha and disappears.[91][note 10]
As Norman Holland explains in an essay on the film, "the iris is associated with late spring, the movie’s title" and the play contains a great deal of sexual and religious symbolism. The iris' leaves and flower are traditionally seen as representing the male and female genitalia, respectively. The play itself is traditionally seen, according to Holland, as "a tribute to the union of man and woman leading to enlightenment." Noriko calmly accepts this sexual content when couched in the "archaic" form of Noh drama, but when she sees her father nod politely to the attractive widow, Mrs. Miwa, who is also in the audience, "that strikes Noriko as outrageous and outraging. Had this woman and her father arranged to meet at this play about sexuality? Is this remarriage 'filthy' like [Onodera's] remarriage? She feels both angry and despairing. She is so mad at her father that, quite uncharacteristically, she angrily walks away from him after they leave the theater." Holland thus sees one of the movie's main themes as "the pushing of traditional and inhibited Noriko into marriage."[92]
Late Spring has been particularly praised for its focus on character, having being cited as "one of the most perfect, most complete, and most successful studies of character ever achieved in Japanese cinema."[10] Ozu’s complex approach to character can best be examined through the two protagonists of the film: Noriko Somiya and her father, Shukichi.
Noriko, at 27, is an unmarried, unemployed young woman, completely dependent financially upon her father and living (at the film’s beginning) quite contently with him. Her two most important traits, which are interrelated, are her unusually close and affectionate relationship with her father and her extreme reluctance to marry and leave home. Of the first trait, the relationship between father and daughter has been described as a "transgenerational friendship,"[93] in which there is nevertheless no hint of anything incestuous or even inappropriate.[94] However, it has been conceded that this may primarily be due to cultural differences between Japan and the West and that, were the story remade in the West, such a possible interpretation couldn’t be evaded.[93] The second trait, her strong aversion to the idea of marriage, has been seen, by some commentators, in terms of the Japanese concept of amae, which in this context signifies the strong emotional dependence of a child on its parent, which can persist into adulthood. Thus, the rupturing of the father-adult daughter relationship in Late Spring has been interpreted as Ozu’s view of the inevitability — and necessity — of the termination of the amae relationship, although Ozu never glosses over the pain of such a rupture.[79][95]
There has been considerable difference of opinion amongst commentators regarding the complicated personality of Noriko. She has been variously described as like a wife to her father,[53] or as like a mother to him;[92][85] as resembling a petulant child;[53] or as being an enigma,[96] particularly as to the issue of whether or not she freely chooses to marry.[53] Even the common belief of film scholars that she is an upholder of conservative values (expressed primarily by her opposition to her father’s (feigned) remarriage plans)[53][78][92] has been challenged. Robin Wood, writing about the three Norikos as one collective character, stated that "Noriko" "has managed to retain and develop the finest humane values which the modern capitalist world… tramples underfoot — consideration, emotional generosity, the ability to care and empathize, and above all, awareness."[97]
Noriko’s father, Shukichi, works as a college professor and is the sole breadwinner of the Somiya family. It has been claimed that the character represents a transition from the traditional image of the Japanese father to a very different one.[53] Sato points out that the national prewar ideal of the father was that of the stern patriarch, who ruled his family lovingly, but with an iron hand.[98] Ozu himself, however, in several prewar films, such as I Was Born, But… and Passing Fancy, had undercut (according to Sato) this image of the archetypal strong father by depicting parents who were downtrodden "salarymen" (or sarariman, to use the Japanese term), or poor working-class laborers, who sometimes lost the respect of their rebellious children.[99] Bordwell has noted that "what is remarkable about Ozu's work of the 1920s and 1930s is how seldom the patriarchal norm is reestablished at the close [of each film]."[34]
The character of Prof. Somiya represents, according to this interpretation, a further evolution of the “non-patriarchal” patriarch. Although Shukichi wields considerable moral influence over his daughter through their close relationship, that relationship is "strikingly nonoppressive."[93] One commentator calls Shukichi and his friend, Professor Onodera, men who are "very much at peace, very much aware of themselves and their place in the world," and are markedly different from stereotypes of fierce Japanese males promulgated by American films during and after the World War.[53]
It has been claimed that, after Noriko accepts Satake’s marriage proposal, the film ceases to be about her, and that Prof. Somiya at that point becomes the main protagonist, with the focus of the film shifting to his increasing loneliness and grief.[53] In this regard, a plot change that the filmmakers made from the original source material is significant. In the novel by Kazuo Hirotsu, the father’s announcement to his daughter that he wishes to marry a widow is only initially a ruse; eventually, he actually does get married again. Ozu and his co-screenwriter, Kogo Noda, deliberately rejected this "witty" ending, in order to show Prof. Somiya as alone and inconsolable at the end.[100]
Ozu's unique[101][102][103][104] style has been widely noted by critics and scholars. Some have considered it an anti-Hollywood style, as he eventually rejected many conventions of Hollywood filmmaking.[92][105][106] Some aspects of the style of Late Spring — which also apply to Ozu's style in general, as the film is typical in almost all respects[note 11] — include Ozu's use of the camera, his use of actors, his idiosyncratic editing and his frequent employment of a distinctive type of shot that some commentators have called a "pillow" shot.
Probably the most frequently noted aspect of Ozu's camera technique is his consistent use of an extremely low camera position to shoot his subjects, a practice that Bordwell traces as far back as his films of the 1931-1932 period.[107] An example of the low camera in Late Spring would be the scene in which Noriko visits her friend Aya in her room. Noriko is seated and Aya is in a standing position, so Aya is looking down towards her friend. However, "the camera angle on both is low. Noriko sits looking up at the standing Aya, but the camera [in the reverse shot] looks up on Noriko's face, rejecting Aya's point of view. We are thus prevented from identifying with Aya and are forced into an inhuman point of view on Noriko."[108]
Ozu's decision to use the camera this way puzzled not only critics, but his filmmaking colleagues as well, and he was always evasive as to why he did so.[107] (One story goes that one night, at the home of director Daisuke Ito, Ozu set a sake bottle on a rock in Ito's garden; crouching down to observe the rock and the bottle, Ozu declared himself pleased: "That stone - that is my position, Ito, and you know it!")[107] Bordwell suggests that his motive for using it was primarily visual, to create distinctive compositions within the frame and "make every image sharp, stable and striking."[109] The film historian and critic Donald Richie believed that one of the reasons he used this technique was as a way of "exploiting the theatrical aspect of the Japanese dwelling."[110] However, other critics believe that the ultimate effect of the low camera position was to elevate and "ennoble" the ordinary people in his films, such as Noriko and her father.[108]
Ozu was widely noted for a style characterized by a frequent avoidance of the kinds of camera movements — such as panning shots, tracking shots or crane shots — employed by most film directors.[111][112][113] (As he himself would sometimes remark, "I'm not a dynamic director like Akira Kurosawa.")[114] Bordwell notes that, of all the common technical practices that Ozu refused to emulate, he was "most absolute" in refusing to reframe (for example, by panning slightly) the moving human figure in order to keep it in view; this critic claims that there is not a single reframing in all of Ozu's films from 1930 on.[115] In the late films (that is, those from Late Spring on), the director "will use walls, screens, or doors to block off the sides of the frame so that people walk into a central depth," thus maintaining focus on the human figure without any motion of the camera.[115]
The filmmaker would paradoxically retain his static compositions even when a character is walking or riding by moving the camera with a dolly at the precise speed at which the actor or actors move. He would drive his devoted cameraman, Yuharu Atsuta, to tears by insisting that actors and technicians count their steps precisely during a tracking shot so that the movements of actors and camera could be synchronized.[115] Speaking of the bicycle ride to the beach early in the movie, Peña notes: "One of the things that’s distinctive about Ozu’s use of camera movement is that so often he moves the camera at the same speed in which characters within the frame are moving… It’s almost as if Noriko [on her bicycle] doesn’t seem to be moving, or Hattori’s not moving because his place within the frame remains constant… These are the sort of visual idiosyncrasies that make Ozu’s style so interesting and so unique in a way, to give us movement and at the same time to undercut movement."[53][116]
Ozu typically takes an approach to scenes involving dialogue between two characters that differs from the usual method of Western and even most Japanese directors. The conventional way of filming dialogue, as described by Tadao Sato, is to "shoot one party from the front at a left oblique angle and the other at a right oblique angle, linking the shots by alternating the position of the camera so that the camera eye intersects a hypothetical cross."[117] (This is most commonly known as the 180 degree rule). But frequently, in an Ozu film, "when a character delivers a line, Ozu brings the camera around so he or she faces it almost head on... In a conversation between two people facing each other, Ozu changes his camera position each time the speaker changes,"[118] a technique referred to by the Japanese as donden (sudden reversal).[117] Sato suggests that the director's motive for doing this is to de-emphasize confrontation.[118][note 12]
Bordwell points out that such shots are not true POV (point-of-view) shots because they tend to create a "flagrantly 'impossible' view," since in the establishing shot of the two characters, they are seen as closer together spatially than they are when each is viewed separately in the donden shots.[119] Sato and Bordwell agree that the actors do not actually look directly into the camera when delivering their lines in these false POV shots. But the two scholars slightly differ as to the actual direction of the actors' gaze, Sato claiming that they look "just to the side of the lens,"[118] and Bordwell asserting that, while "the eyelines will fall at least slightly to the right or left of the lens axis,"[120] "the low camera height assures that the glance passes over the top of the camera."[121][note 13]
Virtually all actors who worked with Ozu — particularly Chishu Ryu, who collaborated with the director on countless films — agree that he was an extremely demanding taskmaster.[122] He would direct very simple actions by the performer "to the centimeter."[111] As opposed to those of both Mizoguchi and Kurosawa, Ozu's characters, according to Sato, are "usually calm... they not only move at the same pace but also speak at the same measured rate,"[123] suggesting that Ozu was concerned with the actor's presence both as an element in the compositional design and as part of the overall tempo of the film. He insisted that his actors express emotions through action, even rote action, rather than by directly expressing their innermost feelings. Once, when the distinguished character actress Haruko Sugimura asked the filmmaker what her character was supposed to be feeling at a given moment, Ozu responded, “You are not supposed to feel, you are supposed to do.”[124]
Sugimura, who played Aunt Masa in Late Spring, vividly depicted Ozu’s approach to directing actors in her description of the scene in which Noriko is about to leave her father’s house for her wedding:
Ozu told me to come [back] in the room [after she, Hara and Ryu had exited] and circle around. So I did as I was told, but of course it wasn’t good enough. After the third take, Ozu approved it… The reason [Aunt Masa] circles around the room once is that she’s nostalgic for all the memories there and she also wants to make sure she’s left nothing behind. He didn’t show each of these things explicitly, but through my smoothly circling the room — through how I moved, through the pacing and the blocking — I think that’s what he was trying to express. At the time, I didn’t understand. I remember I did it rhythmically: I didn’t walk and I didn’t run; I just moved lightly and rhythmically. As I continued doing it, that’s what it turned into, and Ozu okayed it. Come to think of it, it was that way of walking rhythmically that I think was good. I did it naturally, not deliberately. And of course it was Ozu who helped me do it.[125]
According to Richie, the editing of an Ozu film was subordinate to the script: that is, the rhythm of each scene was decided at the screenwriting stage, and the final editing of the film reflected this.[126] This overriding tempo even determined how the sets are constructed. Sato quotes Tomo Shimogawara, who designed the sets for The End of Summer (though the description also clearly applies to the approach used in Late Spring): "The size of the rooms was dictated by the time lapses between the actor's movements... Ozu would give me instructions on the exact length of the corridor. He explained that it was part and parcel of the tempo of his film, and this flow of tempo Ozu envisioned at the time the script was being written... Since Ozu never used wipes or dissolves, and for the sake of dramatic tempo as well, he would measure the number of seconds it took someone to walk upstairs and so the set had to be constructed accordingly."[123] Sato says about this tempo that "it is a creation in which time is beautifully apprehended in conformity with the physiology of daily occurrences."[123]
A striking fact about Ozu's late films (of which Late Spring is the first instance) is that transitions not only within scenes but between scenes are accomplished exclusively through simple cuts.[127] According to various commentators, the lost Life of an Office Worker apparently contained a dissolve,[128] and several Ozu films of the 1930s (e.g., Tokyo Chorus and The Only Son) contained some fades.[129] But by the time of Late Spring, these were completely eliminated, with only music cues to signal scene changes.[130] (Ozu once spoke of the use of the dissolve as "a form of cheating."[131]) Somewhat ironically, this self-restraint by the filmmaker is now seen as very modern, because although fades, dissolves and even wipes were all part of common cinematic grammar worldwide at the time of Late Spring (and long afterwards), such devices are often considered somewhat "old fashioned" today.[128]
Many critics and scholars have noted and commented upon the fact that frequently Ozu, instead of transitioning directly from scene to scene, interposes, as a transitional device, as few as one and as many as six or more shots — often but not always devoid of human figures — between the end of a scene (or of the opening credits) and the beginning of the next (or first) scene.[132] These units of film have been variously called "curtain" shots,[128] "intermediate spaces,"[132][133] "empty" shots[134] or, most frequently, "pillow" shots (by analogy with the "pillow words" of classic Japanese verse.[135] The nature and function of these shots is disputed. Sato (citing the critic Keinosuke Nanbu) compares the shots to the use of the curtain in the Western theatre, that "both present the environment of the next sequence and stimulate the viewer's anticipation."[128] Richie claims that they are a means of presenting only what the characters themselves perceive or think about, to enable us to "experience only what the characters are experiencing."[136] Bordwell sees it as an expansion of the traditional transitional devices of the "placing shot" and the "cutaway", using these to convey "a loose notion of contiguity."[137]
Some examples of pillow shots in Late Spring — as illustrated on the ozu-san.com website[100] — are: the three shots, immediately after the opening credits, of the Kita-Kamakura railway station, followed by a shot of Kenchoji temple, "one of the five main [Zen] temples in Kamakura," in which the tea ceremony (the first scene) will take place;[67] the shot immediately after the tea ceremony scene, showing a hillside with several nearly bare trees, which introduces a "tree-motif" associated with Noriko;[67] the shot of anonymous passengers waiting at Kamakura station for the train to Tokyo, followed by a shot of that same train already on its way;[67] a shot of a single leafy tree, appearing immediately after the Noh play scene and before the scene depicting Noriko and her father walking home together;[138] and a shot of one of the pagodas of Kyoto during the father and daughter's visit to that city late in the film.[138]
The most discussed instance of a "pillow shot" in any Ozu film — indeed, the most famous crux in all of the director's work[11] — is the scene that takes place between Noriko and Shukichi at an inn in Kyoto, in which a vase figures prominently. The scene occurs during the father and daughter's last trip together, after a day sightseeing and visiting with Professor Onodera and his wife and daughter. After discussing what they did that day and what Noriko plans to do tomorrow, they decide to turn in for the night. Noriko turns out the ceiling light and they lie down on their separate futons on the floor of the inn. Noriko talks about what a nice person Onodera's new wife is, and how embarrassed and even ashamed she feels for having called Onodera's remarriage "filthy." Shukichi assures her that she should not worry about it, because Onodera never took her words seriously. After Noriko confesses to her father that she found the thought of his own remarriage "distasteful," she looks over to discover that he is already asleep, or seems to be. She looks up towards the ceiling and appears to smile. There follows a six-second medium shot, in the semidarkness, of a vase on the floor in the same room, in front of a shōji screen through which the shadows of leafy branches can be seen. There is a cut back to Noriko, now looking sad and pensive, almost in tears. Then there is a ten-second shot of the vase again, as the music on the soundtrack swells, cuing the next scene (at the Ryōan-ji rock garden in Kyoto, the following day).[139][140]
According to an online commentator, an essay by Abé Mark Nornes about the vase scene, entitled "The Riddle of the Vase: Ozu Yasujirō's Late Spring (1949)," includes so many disparate interpretations of this particular scene that it traces "the history of Ozu scholarship in the English speaking world."[141] Nornes himself observes: "Nothing in all of Ozu's films has sparked such conflicting explanations; everyone seems compelled to weigh in on this scene, invoking it as a key example in their arguments."[11] The reason for this, Nornes speculates, is the scene's "emotional power and its unusual construction. The vase is clearly essential to the scene. The director not only shows it twice, but he lets both shots run for what would be an inordinate amount of time by the measure of most filmmakers."[142] To one commentator, the vase represents "stasis," and is thus "an expression of something unified, permanent, transcendent."[143] Another commentator describes the vase and other Ozu "still lifes" as "containers for our emotions."[144] Yet another specifically refutes this interpretation, identifying the vase as "a non-narrative element wedged into the action."[145] A fourth scholar sees it as an instance of the filmmaker's deliberate use of "false POV" (point-of-view), since Noriko is never shown actually looking at the vase the audience sees.[146] And yet another suggests several alternative interpretations, including the vase as "a symbol of traditional Japanese culture," and Noriko's "sense that inevitably [her] relationship with her father has been changed."[53]
The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, in his book L'image-temps. Cinéma 2 (Cinema 2: The Time-Image, 1985), which is the sequel to his earlier book, L'image-mouvement. Cinéma 1 (Cinema 1: The Movement Image, 1983), cited this particular scene as an example of what he referred to as the "time image." Simply put, Deleuze sees the vase as an image of unchanging time, although objects within time (e.g., Noriko) do change (e.g., from joy to sadness). "The vase in Late Spring is interposed between [Noriko’s] half smile and the beginning of her tears. There is becoming, change, passage. But the form of what changes does not itself change, does not pass on. This is time, time itself, ‘a little bit of time in its pure state’: a direct time-image, which gives what changes the unchanging form in which the change is produced… The still life is time, for everything that changes is in time, but time does not itself change… Ozu’s still lifes endure, have a duration, over ten seconds of the vase: this duration of the vase is precisely the representation of that which endures, through the succession of changing states."[147]
Like many celebrated works of cinema, Late Spring has inspired varied and often contradictory critical and scholarly interpretations. The two most common interpretations of Late Spring are: a) the view that the film represents one of a series of Ozu works that depict part of a universal "life cycle," and is thus either duplicated or complemented by other Ozu works in the series; b) the view that the film, while similar in theme and even plot to other Ozu films, calls for a critical approach entirely distinct from those other works.
Ozu’s films, both individually and collectively, are often seen as representing either a universal human life cycle or a portion of such a cycle. Ozu himself at least once spoke in such terms. “I wanted in this picture [Early Summer] to show a life cycle. I wanted to depict mutability (rinne). I was not interested in action for its own sake. And I’ve never worked so hard in my life.”[148]
Those who hold this interpretation argue that this aspect of Ozu's work gives it its universality, and helps it transcend the specifically Japanese cultural context in which the films were created. Bock writes: "The subject matter of the Ozu film is what faces all of us born of man and woman and going on to produce offspring of our own: the family… [The terms "shomingeki" or "home drama"] may be applied to Ozu’s works and create an illusion of peculiar Japaneseness, but in fact behind the words are the problems we all face in a life cycle. They are the struggles of self-definition, of individual freedom, of disappointed expectations, of the impossibility of communication, of separation and loss brought about by the inevitable passages of marriage and death."[149] Bock suggests that Ozu’s wish to portray the life cycle affected his decisions on technical matters, such as the construction and use of the sets of his films. "In employing the set like a curtainless stage Ozu allows for implication of transitoriness in the human condition. Allied with the other aspects of ritual in Ozu's techniques, it reinforces the feeling that we are watching a representative life cycle."[108]
According to Geist, Ozu wished to convey the concept of sabi, which she defines as “an awareness of the ephemeral”: "Much of what is ephemeral is also cyclical; thus, sabi includes an awareness of the cyclical, which is evinced both formally and thematically in Ozu’s films. Often, they revolve around passages in the human life cycle, usually the marriage of a child or the death of a parent." She points out scenes that are carefully duplicated in Late Spring, evoking this cyclical theme: "Noriko and her father’s friend [Onodera] sit in a bar and talk about [Onodera’s] remarriage, which Noriko condemns. In the film’s penultimate sequence, the father and Noriko’s friend Aya sit in a bar after Noriko’s wedding. The scene is shot from exactly the same angles as was the first bar scene, and again the subject is remarriage."[150]
The "life cycle" interpretation, for some critics, implies a certain interchangeability of characters and situations within the Noriko trilogy and the late-period works in general. (Perhaps the most extreme expression of this perceived sameness in Ozu's work was written by film historian David Shipman: "It is not too much to say that virtually the only difference between Late Spring and Early Summer (1951) is that the latter is thirty minutes longer and Mr. Ryu plays Setsuko Hara’s brother instead of her father.")[151] For example, Geist implies that Ozu's conception of the life cycle ensured that the three Norikos in the trilogy are all approximately the same age. "In Ozu's cosmology, Noriko [in Tokyo Story] is a candidate for remarriage only because she is still young and childless. Her niche in the life cycle is akin to that of the unmarried but slightly 'old' (late twenties) daughters in Late Spring and Bakushu (Early Summer). Ozu did not permit those who had passed this rung of the ladder to remarry with grace."[152]
A school of thought opposing the "life cycle" theory emphasizes the differences in tone and intent between Ozu films that deal with very similar themes, situations and characters. As critic Roger Ebert explains, "Late Spring began a cycle of Ozu films about families... Did he make the same film again and again? Not at all. Late Spring and Early Summer are startlingly different. In the second, Noriko takes advantage of a conversational opening [about marriage] to overturn the entire plot... she accepts a man [as husband] she has known for a long time — a widower with a child." In contrast, "what happens [in Late Spring] at deeper levels is angry, passionate and — wrong, we feel, because the father and the daughter are forced to do something neither one of them wants to do, and the result will be resentment and unhappiness." Ebert goes on, "It is universally believed, just as in a Jane Austen novel, that a woman of a certain age is in want of a husband. Late Spring is a film about two people who desperately do not believe this, and about how they are undone by their tact, their concern for each other, and their need to make others comfortable by seeming to agree with them." The film "tells a story that becomes sadder the more you think about it."[153]
The degree to which Ozu accepted marriage as a universal or inevitable part of the life cycle has also been questioned. Michael Grost, in his essay about the film, claiming that Ozu "seems to [have been] a gay man, although nobody wants to say so,"[note 14] asserts that, although "no one in the film speaks out against marriage as an institution... the film never makes any transcendental moral argument in favor of marriage. It shows that it is socially demanded, but it never shows it benefiting anyone, or hurting anyone by its absence... It is merely unthinkingly accepted by everyone as the natural order of things, a universal obligation of nature. Ozu's films are not ambiguous on this point: they do not make the slightest case for marriage as a moral obligation... I have been unable to find any claim in Ozu's films that the experiences of his characters, in particular their problems with marriage, represent a 'universal' experience of all human beings."[154]
Wood's interpretation contains similarities to those of both Ebert and Grost. Late Spring, in Wood's view, "is about the sacrifice of Noriko’s happiness in the interest of maintaining and continuing 'tradition,' [which sacrifice] takes the form of her marriage, and everyone in the film — including the father and finally the defeated Noriko herself — is complicit in it."[93] He asserts that, in contradiction to the view of many critics, the film "is not about a young woman trying nobly to sacrifice herself and her own happiness in order dutifully to serve her widowed father in his lonely old age," because her life as a single young woman is one she clearly prefers: "With her father, Noriko has a freedom that she will never again regain."[155] He points out that there is an unusual (for Ozu) degree of camera movement in the first half of the film, as opposed to the "stasis" of the second half, and that this corresponds to Noriko’s freedom in the first half and the "trap" of her impending marriage in the second.[156] He also claims that Ozu was able to empathize with Noriko's plight in part due to the fact that he "was able to remain in touch with his innate bisexuality."[157] Rather than perceiving the Noriko films as a cycle, Wood asserts that the trilogy is "unified by its underlying progressive movement, a progression from the unqualified tragedy of Late Spring through the ambiguous 'happy ending' of Early Summer to the authentic and fully earned note of bleak and tentative hope at the end of Tokyo Story."[158]
Late Spring was released by Shochiku in Japan on September 13, 1949.[1] Basing his research upon files kept on the film by the Allied censorship, Sorensen notes: "Generally speaking, [the movie] was hailed with enthusiasm by Japanese critics when it opened at theaters."[159] The publication Shin Yukan, in its review of September 20, emphasized the scenes that take place in Kyoto, describing them as embodying "the calm Japanese atmosphere" of the entire work.[160] Both Shin Yukan and another publication, Tokyo Shinbun (in its review of September 26), considered the film beautiful and the former called it a "masterpiece."[160] There were, however, some cavils: the critic of Asahi Shinbun (September 23) complained that "the tempo is not the feeling of the present period" and the reviewer from Hochi Shinbun (September 21) warned that Ozu should choose more progressive themes, or else he would "coagulate."[160]
In 1950, the movie became the fifth Ozu film overall, and the first of the postwar period, to top the Kinema Junpo poll as the critics' best film of 1949.[7][161] (Akira Kurosawa's early detective movie, Stray Dog (Nora Inu), now considered a classic,[162] was awarded third prize in the same poll.)[163] Sato has written of the film's socio-historical significance, remarking that at the time of its release, the work "[made] audiences feel for the first time that peace [had] finally come to Japan."[164]
In a recent (2009) poll by Kinema Junpo magazine of the best Japanese movies of all time, a total of nine Ozu films appeared. Late Spring was the second highest-ranking film by the director on that list, tying for 36th place. (The highest-ranking of his films was Tokyo Story at number one.)[165]
Ozu's younger contemporary, Akira Kurosawa, in 1999 published a conversation with his daughter Kazuko in which he provided his unranked personal listing, in chronological order, of the top 100 films, both Japanese and non-Japanese, of all time. One of the works he selected was Late Spring, with the following comment: "[Ozu's] characteristic camera work was imitated by many directors abroads [sic] as well, i.e., many people saw and see Mr. Ozu’s movies, right? That’s good. Indeed, one can learn pretty much from his movies. Young prospective movie makers in Japan should, I hope, see more of Ozu’s work. Ah, it was really good times when Mr. Ozu, Mr. Naruse and/or Mr. Mizoguchi were all making movies!"[166]
The film was released in the United States by New Yorker Films[167] on July 21, 1972,[168] about four months after the successful first U.S. release of Tokyo Story.[169] A newspaper clipping, dated August 6, 1972, indicates that, of the New York-based critics of the time, six (Stuart Byron of The Village Voice, Charles Michener of Newsweek, Vincent Canby of The New York Times, Archer Winsten of The New York Post, Judith Crist of The Today Show and Stanley Kauffmann of The New Republic) gave the work a favorable review and one critic (John Simon of New York magazine) gave it a "mixed" review.[170]
Vincent Canby in his review observed that "the difficulty with Ozu is not in appreciating his films... [but] in describing an Ozu work in a way that doesn't diminish it, that doesn't reduce it to an inventory of his austere techniques, and that accurately reflects the unsentimental humanism of his discipline." He called the characters played by Ryu and Hara "immensely affecting — gentle, loving, amused, thinking and feeling beings," and praised the filmmaker for his "profound respect for [the characters'] privacy, for the mystery of their emotions. Because of this — not in spite of this — his films, of which Late Spring is one of the finest, are so moving."[171]
Stuart Byron called the movie "Ozu’s greatest achievement and, thus, one of the ten best films of all time."[172][173]
In Variety, reviewer Robert B. Frederick (under the pseudonym "Robe") also had high praise for the work. "Although made in 1949," he wrote, "this infrequently-seen example of the cinematic mastery of the late Yasujiro Ozu... compares more than favorably with any major Japanese film... A heartwarming and very worthy cinematic effort." However, he cautioned that the story "may be too static for today's action-trained filmgoers."[174]
More recent commentators have been equally positive. On the Rotten Tomatoes review website, the film has received a score of 100 percent, with 17 positive and no negative reviews.[175] Kurosawa biographer Stuart Galbraith IV, reviewing the Criterion Collection DVD, called the work "archetypal postwar Ozu" and "a masterful distillation of themes its director would return to again and again... There are better Ozu films, but Late Spring impressively boils the director's concerns down to their most basic elements."[176] Dennis Schwartz calls it "a beautiful drama," in which "there's nothing artificial, manipulative or sentimental."[177]
The website They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? (TSPDT), which describes itself as "primarily a film list resource,"[178] annually compiles a "1,000 Greatest Films" list "as voted by... critics, filmmakers, reviewers, scholars and other likely film types."[179] The list is compiled almost entirely from preexisting "best of" lists and other data indicating critical preference, in an attempt to determine the current reputation of a given film (and film director). In the 2011 list, Late Spring placed 195th among all films from all countries since the invention of cinema. Only seven Japanese-language productions scored higher in the poll.[note 15] Among the filmmakers and critics whose opinion of the work contributed to its high ranking were Claire Denis, Barbet Schroeder, Carl Franklin, Phil Solomon, David Thomson and Jonathan Rosenbaum.[180]
In 2006, The Criterion Collection released a two-disc set with a restored high-definition digital transfer and new subtitle translations. It also includes Tokyo-Ga, Wim Wenders' Ozu tribute, audio commentary by Richard Peña, and essays by Michael Atkinson and Donald Richie.[181]
In June 2010, the BFI released the film on Region B-locked Blu-ray. The release includes a 24-page illustrated booklet as well as Ozu's earlier film The Only Son, also in HD, and a DVD copy of both films.[182]
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