112. Late Spring

Yasujiro Ozu isn't really very good at naming his films. There's Late Spring, Early Summer, Late Summer, The End of Summer, An Autumn Afternoon and Spring Comes from the Ladies. To make things worse, The End of Summer is also known as Early Autumn and is listed here under that name. It all gets very confusing. Still, I did manage to not only notice that Late Spring was on one November weekday morning and associate it with the listed film I needed to see, but also to set my recorder to tape it. And I'm glad I did, because it's bloody marvellous.

The film is as simple as it comes and is very low on any sort of action. A young woman lives with her father in postwar Japan (I guess it would have been American occupied then, but you don't see any Americans) and looks after him contentedly. There's a hint that she's slightly damaged from the war but nothing much is revealed there. She's not married so her father and aunt encourage her to find a husband, despite her reluctance. And that's basically it plotwise. There are some scenes at a bar and there's a long, almost hypnotic, sequence at a Noh performance, but mostly it's just dialogue, touchingly and honestly performed by the leads.

The actors are all magnificent. Setsuko Hara as Noriko, the daughter, is beautiful and her smile lights up the screen when her character is not having a strop. Chishu Ryu as the father is the star of the show: stately, wise but with a cheeky twinkle in his eye. The relationship between the two features no melodrama, no fireworks or loud destructive arguments — it's just real, sensitively and quietly observed to reflect true human behaviour. The supporting cast are good too but it's the central performances that carry it.

Ozu's direction is understated in the extreme and consists almost entirely of low static shots, as if he'd hired garden gnomes to be the cameramen. This is of course his trademark (this one film and Wikipedia has made me an authority on the subject) and it fits the material perfectly. It's really just a stage play with a few cuts to scenes of late spring, and certainly a case of less-is-more. Modern directors could learn something. The elisions are interesting too, and emphasise the importance of how and why events occur, not caring too much about the events themselves.

I suppose the best compliment I could make about this film is that I learned a lot from it. I'm fairly ignorant about postwar Japanese life and the emerging role of its women — I clearly didn't pay enough attention at school — and it opened a window into that previously unseen world. Late Spring is the first part of a trilogy — one of theme rather than narrative. Part two, Early Summer is not on this list but Tokyo Story, the final and most celebrated part, is. I'm going to have to watch them both, though.