Of all the classics directed by Yasujirō Ozu, 1949’s Late Spring is not only the one that kickstarted his most fruitful creative period that would last until his death in 1963, but it is perhaps the easiest to reduce to a few now-iconic signifying objects. The three most famous are a sign for Coca-Cola, a vase, and a peeled fruit. The first is the easiest to summarize as an oblique reference to the American military presence of Japan’s postwar period, but even that slips out of the easy interpretation of opposition to American censorship when you contemplate the troubling undercurrents that the use of the other two objects pose. The film’s attitude toward the Japanese tradition of arranged marriage in a period where the country was going through intense Westernization has never been easy to summarize or pin down, and while Tokyo Story has reigned supreme as the Ozu of choice for decades, it is Late Spring with the most irreconcilable conflicts of the human heart at its center in the form of the father-daughter relationship between Chishū Ryū’s Shukichi and Setsuko Hara’s Noriko.
Ozu’s style of a typically static camera set at tatami-level, conversations that break the 180-degree rule, elliptical allusions to off-screen events, and those famous pillow shots make all his films, already similar in themes and frequently involving remakes of his own past work, into variations and evolutions on each other. (He’d later loosely remake Late Spring as Late Autumn in 1960, with a more overtly comedic touch — Hara taking on something similar to the Ryū role — and color. Curiously, the films are both adaptations, but of entirely different novels.) The first of the so-called Noriko trilogy, followed by Early Summer and Tokyo Story, Late Spring introduced Hara to Ozu and was the first of the three young and unmarried women named Noriko she’d play for his chronicles of postwar Japan. (Ryū and Ozu were already inseparable and would remain so for the remainder of Ozu’s career.) This approach frequently risks coming across as indifferent or identical, right down to the common use of seasonally-themed titles, but Ozu and his co-screenwriter Kogo Noda had an uncanny knack for finding new methods to keep the films differentiated. Late Spring is perhaps the most intimate Ozu — his subsequent films would frequently be closer to ensemble efforts, while this keeps its focus on its two leads and a few others in their orbit.
What it means for it to be a time of late spring has its connotations when applied to a 27-year-old daughter who doesn’t really want to get married and leave her father’s home, but a potentially sad future is foreshadowed by her widowed father. Ozu’s own likely homosexuality and refusal to leave his mother’s house to get married loom heavily in the background of any autobiographical readings of Late Spring, and as is so often the case in Ozu, Haruko Sugimura represents the nosey side of Japanese society that casts plenty of moral judgement on anyone who doesn’t follow the mores. While Ozu himself avoided this traditional path, the women in his movies usually do not, and the ultimate attitude is one of observant ambivalence. Hara is ultimately the one who is granted the agency to make her own choice, even if what shapes it is a very limited and misleading sort of greater agency for Japanese women in the postwar period.
The attitudes and ambivalences of the narrative arc are best summed up by the famous vase, a reverse Kuleshov effect where the object remains unchanging but the face goes from happiness to sorrow. It’s the ultimate enigma in the Ozu filmography, and when he famously compared his films to tofu in an interview, the mystery of the vase and Hara’s opaque shift in performance perhaps became recontextualized as the spongy baseline that led Japanese New Wave master Yoshishige Yoshida to call his films “anti-cinema.” The human face is turned into something like an object: its meanings shift in new contexts, but its essence is unknowable when it cannot speak to us. For a more literal explication of what constitutes anti-cinema, one should consider the matter of Hara’s potential husband: he is compared to Gary Cooper in appearance, but the movie star lookalike never actually shows up in the film despite his increasingly critical role. He serves as his own form of commentary on American censorship, but the commentary is merely an allusion, and the baseline is once again something to project oneself onto. It’s an approach that could be compared with an element of the scene that might be the most difficult for Westerners to fully comprehend, in the extended showcase of a Noh performance and its many masks. They serve as a backdrop for Hara’s gradually shifting attitudes towards a potential marriage, and a clue for the cultural traditions that shaped virtually every Japanese filmmaker of the studio era.
Ozu made many comedies with despairing undercurrents, best summed up here when Sugimura’s character finds a purse with money and never gets around to turning it in. Late Spring isn’t generally seen as a comedy of (re)marriage in the vein of Stanley Cavell, but the methods and misunderstandings that result in one marriage and one lack thereof have a bit of a screwball tinge to their mechanics. The characters, however, are too everyday and stuck in a postwar rut: they’re not entirely capable of seeing the funny side of these misunderstandings or of Sugimura being such a busybody. It all comes down to the sight of Ryū after the wedding, knowing that he’ll be alone now forever, peeling an apple. When Paul Schrader described Ozu’s movies as transcendental, he primarily referred to their final releases of tension: an apple peel slips out of Ryū’s grasp and falls to the ground, and then the waves of time come to carry us away. It’s a final sacrifice for someone else’s potential happiness, and everything that’s left after that is just running out life’s clock as the season finally comes to an end.
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