Late Spring - WikiHQ

is a 1949 Japanese drama film directed by Yasujirō Ozu and written by Ozu and Kogo Noda, based on the short novel Father and Daughter (Chichi to musume) by the 20th-century novelist and critic Kazuo Hirotsu. The film was written and shot during the Allied Powers' Occupation of Japan and was subject to the Occupation's official censorship requirements. Starring Chishū Ryū, who was featured in almost all of the director's films, and Setsuko Hara, marking her first of six appearances in Ozu's work, it is the first installment of Ozu's so-called "Noriko trilogy", succeeded by 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 distinct, unrelated characters, linked primarily by their status as single women in postwar Japan.

Late Spring belongs to the type of Japanese cinema known as shomin-geki, a genre that deals with the ordinary daily lives of working class and middle class people of modern times. The film is frequently regarded as the first in the director's final creative period, "the major prototype of the [director's] 1950s and 1960s work". These films are characterized by, among other traits, an exclusive focus on stories about families during Japan's immediate postwar era, a tendency towards very simple plots and the use of a generally static camera.

Late Spring was released on September 19, 1949, to critical acclaim in the Japanese press. In the following year, it was awarded the prestigious Kinema Junpo critics' award as the best Japanese production released in 1949. In 1972, the film was commercially released in the United States, again to very positive reviews. Late Spring has been referred to as the director's "most perfect" work, as "the definitive film of Ozu's master filmmaking approach and language" and has been called "one of the most perfect, most complete, and most successful studies of character ever achieved in Japanese cinema". Hirano notes that, had this policy against showing arranged marriages onscreen been rigidly enforced, Late Spring could never have been made.

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.

Any reference in the script to the devastation caused by the American 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.

The censors at first automatically deleted a reference in the script to the Hollywood star Gary Cooper, but then reinstated it when they realized that the comparison was to Noriko's (unseen) suitor Satake, who is described by the female characters as attractive, and was thus flattering to the American actor.

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.

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 totem of good fortune for the wedding succeeding, should be shown handing 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."

Ozu's alleged "subversion" of censorship

One scholar, Lars-Martin Sorensen, has claimed 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."

thumb|Hattori (Jun Usami) and Noriko bicycling towards the beach (with the Coca-Cola sign in the foreground)|alt=A young Japanese man and woman, both in casual clothes, are riding bicycles over a paved road in the near background of the image; mountains are visible in the far distance. In the foreground of the image, at the edge of the road, is a diamond-shaped Coca-Cola sign, below which is an arrow upon which is written the name (in English) of a beach.

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.) Sorensen argues that these objects are "obvious reference(s) to the presence of the occupying army."

On the other hand, Late Spring, more than any other film Ozu 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 attend, and the landscape and Zen gardens of Kyoto. 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." To scholars such as Bordwell who assert that Ozu was promoting with this film an ideology that could be called liberal,

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."

Ozu's collaborators

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 work and to the direction of Ozu's subsequent career.

Kogo Noda

thumb|left|Ozu's frequent screenwriting partner [[Kogo Noda|Kōgo Noda: from Late Spring on, Noda would collaborate on all Ozu's films until the latter's death in 1963|alt=A middle-aged Japanese man, wearing a kimono and glasses, in a kneeling position, is reading a book he holds in his left hand, his elbow resting on a table, while his right hand rests upon a tea kettle]]

Kogo Noda, already an accomplished screenwriter, had collaborated with Ozu on the script of his debut film of 1927, Sword of Penitence. From Late Spring on, partly due to Noda's influence, all Ozu's characters would be comfortably middle class and thus, unlike the characters in, for example, Record of a Tenement Gentleman or A Hen in the Wind, beyond immediate physical want and necessity.

Setsuko Hara

thumb|Yasujirō Ozu directing Setsuko Hara in the final film of the "Noriko Trilogy," [[Tokyo Story (1953); Ozu is standing in the foreground of the picture, at far right|alt=A crowd of people gathered at a film location shoot: in the background, slightly out of focus are many adults and children, some standing, some sitting on stone steps; in the left foreground is a young Japanese woman, Hara, in a white blouse and dark dress, with camera crew behind her; a middle-aged Japanese man, Ozu, in dark pants, white shirt and floppy hat stands at far right foreground.]]

Setsuko Hara (born Masae Aida in Yokohama, Kanagawa prefecture, on June 17, 1920) had appeared in films since the mid-1930s, when she was in her teens. 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. She maintained her popularity throughout the war years, when she appeared in many films made for propaganda purposes by the military government, becoming "the perfect war-movie heroine." 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."

Ozu had a very high regard for Hara's work. He 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 [like Hara] who can play the role of a daughter from a good family." as the mother of a marriageable daughter in Late Autumn (Akibiyori, 1960) 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). 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." Sometimes important narrative information is withheld not only from a major character, but from the viewer, such as the news of Hattori's engagement, about which neither Noriko's father nor the audience has any knowledge until Noriko, laughing, informs him.

"Parametric" narrative theory

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. As Bordwell puts it somewhat more plainly, Ozu "back[s] away from his own machinery in order to achieve humor and surprise." In his view, "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."

Bordwell 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."

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]." 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. Geist thus claims "Her jealousy goads her into her own marriage and is thus the pivot on which the plot turns."

Major themes

The following represents what some critics regard as important themes in this film.

Marriage

The main theme of Late Spring is marriage: specifically, the persistent attempts by several characters in the film to get Noriko married. The marriage theme was a topical one for Japanese of the late 1940s. On January 1, 1948, a new law had been issued which allowed young people over twenty to marry consensually without parental permission for the first time. The Japanese Constitution of 1947 had made it much easier for a wife to divorce her husband; up until that time, it had been "difficult, almost impossible" to do so. Geist writes: "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." 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."

Tradition vs. modernity

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. 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. 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."

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. Noriko's friend Aya, on the other hand, seems to reject tradition entirely. Aya had taken advantage of the new liberal divorce laws to end her recent marriage. Thus, she is presented as a new, Westernized phenomenon: the divorcee. a very un-Japanese type of food. 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." 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." 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."

Sato considers Late Spring to be "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." (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")). 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.

thumb|left|The [[Noh scene: Noriko is consumed with jealousy because her father has just silently greeted the attractive widow, Mrs. Miwa (Kuniko Miyake, not shown)|alt=A theatre at which a Noh play is being performed: Prof. Somiya is wearing a business suit and tie and Noriko is wearing a simple, Western-style dress with a collar; Shukichi is looking straight ahead towards the left frame of the picture, smiling, and Noriko, not smiling, is looking toward the right frame of the picture towards an unseen person.]]

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 or other moist soil, in mid-to-late-spring.) 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.

As Norman Holland explains in an essay on the film, "the iris is associated with late spring, the movie's title", in which there is nevertheless no hint of anything incestuous or even inappropriate. 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.

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, particularly as to the issue of whether or not she freely chooses to marry.

Prof. Shukichi Somiya

Noriko's father, Shukichi, works as a college professor and is the sole breadwinner of the Somiya family. It has been suggested that the character represents a transition from the traditional image of the Japanese father to a very different one. 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" (sarariman, to use the Japanese term), or poor working-class laborers, who sometimes lost the respect of their rebellious children. 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]."

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." Some have considered it an anti-Hollywood style, as he eventually rejected many conventions of Hollywood filmmaking. Some aspects of the style of Late Spring—which also apply to Ozu's late-period style in general, as the film is typical in almost all respects—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."

Ozu's use of the camera

Low angle

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. An example of the low camera in Late Spring would be the scene in which Noriko visits her friend Aya in her home. Noriko is in a sitting position, while Aya is seated at a slightly higher elevation, 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."

There has been no critical consensus as to why Ozu consistently employed the low camera angle. Bordwell suggests that his motive was primarily visual, because the angle allowed him to create distinctive compositions within the frame and "make every image sharp, stable and striking." 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." Another critic believes that the ultimate purpose of the low camera position was to allow the audience to assume "a viewpoint of reverence" towards the ordinary people in his films, such as Noriko and her father. (As he himself would sometimes remark, "I'm not a dynamic director like Akira Kurosawa.") 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. 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.

Ozu's use of actors

Virtually all actors who worked with Ozu—including Chishu Ryu, who collaborated with the director on almost all his films—agree that he was an extremely demanding taskmaster. He would direct very simple actions by the performer "to the centimeter." 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 director 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."

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:

thumb|Aunt Masa ([[Haruko Sugimura) circles Noriko's room one last time.|alt=A middle-aged Japanese woman, wearing a kimono and carrying a suitcase in her left hand and a valise in her right, in the process of walking around the perimeter of a small room. There is a bookcase on the left and a straight-backed chair on the right and screens and a ceiling lamp in the near background.]]

<blockquote>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.</blockquote>

Editing

According to Richie, the editing of an Ozu film was always 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. This overriding tempo even determined how the sets were constructed. Sato quotes Tomo Shimogawara, who designed the sets for The End of Summer (though the description also clearly applies to other late-period Ozu films, including 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." According to one commentator, the lost work, The Life of an Office Worker (Kaishain seikatsu, 1929), contained a dissolve, and several extant Ozu films of the 1930s (e.g., Tokyo Chorus and The Only Son) contain some fades. But by the time of Late Spring, these were completely eliminated, with only music cues to signal scene changes. (Ozu once spoke of the use of the dissolve as "a form of cheating.") 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, when straight cuts are the norm. These units of film have been variously called "curtain shots," "empty shots" or, most frequently, "pillow shots" (by analogy with the "pillow words" of classic Japanese verse). 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."

Some examples of pillow shots in Late Spring—as illustrated on the ozu-san.com website and a shot of one of the pagodas of Kyoto during the father and daughter's visit to that city late in the film.—is the scene that takes place at an inn in Kyoto, in which a vase figures prominently. During the father and daughter's last trip together, after a day sightseeing with Professor Onodera and his wife and daughter, they decide to go to sleep, and 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 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 same vase, identical to the earlier one, as the music on the soundtrack swells, cuing the next scene (which takes place at the Ryōan-ji rock garden in Kyoto, the following day).

Abé Mark Nornes, in an essay entitled "The Riddle of the Vase: Ozu Yasujirō's Late Spring (1949)," 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." To one commentator, the vase represents "stasis," and is thus "an expression of something unified, permanent, transcendent." Another critic describes the vase and other Ozu "still lifes" as "containers for our emotions." Yet another specifically disputes this interpretation, identifying the vase as "a non-narrative element wedged into the action." 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. A fifth asserts that the vase is "a classic feminine symbol."

Interpretations

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 and inevitable "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 works, calls for a distinct critical approach, and that the work is in fact critical of marriage, or at least the particular marriage depicted in it.

The film as part of "life cycle" series

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."

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." 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." 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." 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." 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. 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."

Reception and legacy

Reception and reputation of the film in Japan

Late Spring was released in Japan on September 19, 1949. 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. 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." In addition, that year the film won four prizes at the distinguished Mainichi Film Awards, sponsored by the newspaper Mainichi Shinbun: Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Actress (Setsuko Hara, who was also honored for two other films in which she appeared in 1949).

In a 2009 poll by Kinema Junpo of the best Japanese films of all time, nine Ozu films appeared. Late Spring was the second-highest-rated film, tying for 36th place.

Ozu's younger contemporary, Akira Kurosawa, in 1999 published a conversation with his daughter Kazuko in which he provided his unranked personal listing of the top 100 films 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."

Reception and reputation of the film outside Japan

New Yorker Films released the film in North America on July 21, 1972. 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 (John Simon of New York) gave it a "mixed" review.

Canby 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 this discipline." He called the characters played by Ryu and Hara "immensely affecting—gentle, loving, amused, thinking and feeling beings,"

In Variety, Robert B. Frederick also had high praise for the work. "Although made in 1949," he wrote, "this infrequently-seen example of the cinematic mastery of the late Yasujirō Ozu... compares more than favorably with any major Japanese film... A heartwarming and very worthy cinematic effort."

Modern genre critics equally reviewed the film positively, giving the film an aggregate score of 100% on the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes from 25 reviews as of 2020. 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." Norman Holland concluded that "Ozu has created—in the best Japanese manner—a film explicitly beautiful but rich in ambiguity and the unexpressed." Leonard Maltin awarded the film four out of four stars, calling it "A transcendent and profoundly moving work rivaling Tokyo Story as the director's masterpiece."

In 2012, the British Film Institute published its decennial Sight & Sound "Greatest Films of All Time" poll, one of the most widely respected such polls among fans and scholars; Late Spring appeared in 15th place among all films from the dawn of cinema. It was the second-highest-ranking Japanese-language film on the list. (Ozu's Tokyo Story appeared in third place.) or the directors' "Top Ten" lists. The film ranked 53rd in BBC's 2018 list of The 100 greatest foreign language films voted by 209

film critics from 43 countries around the world. The Village Voice ranked the film at number 112 in its Top 250 "Best Films of the Century" list in 1999, based on a poll of critics.

Films inspired by Late Spring

One remake of Late Spring has so far been filmed: a television movie titled A Daughter's Marriage (Musume no kekkon), directed by Kon Ichikawa and produced by the Japanese pay television channel WOWOW. It was broadcast on December 14, 2003, two days after the 100th anniversary of Ozu's birth (and 40th anniversary of his death). The film recreated various idiosyncrasies of the late director's style. For example, Ichikawa included many shots with vividly red objects, in imitation of Ozu's well-known fondness for red in his own color films (although Late Spring was not itself shot in color).

In addition, a number of works wholly or partly inspired by the original 1949 film have been released over the years. The most obvious variation of Late Spring in Ozu's own work is Late Autumn, which deals again with a daughter who reacts negatively to the false rumor of the remarriage of a parent and ultimately gets married herself. One scholar refers to this film as "a version of Late Spring", Other Ozu films also contain plot elements first established by the 1949 film, though somewhat altered. For example, the 1958 film Equinox Flower (Higanbana), the director's first in color, focuses on a marriageable daughter, though as one scholar points out, the plot is a "reversal" of Late Spring in that the father at first opposes his daughter's marriage.

The French director Claire Denis has acknowledged that her 2008 film 35 Shots of Rum (35 Rhums) is a homage to Ozu. "This film is also a sort of... not copy, but it has stolen a lot to [sic] a famous Ozu film called Late Spring... [Ozu] was trying to show through few characters... the relation between human beings."

Because of perceived similarities, in subject matter and in his contemplative approach, Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien has been called "an artistic heir to Ozu." In 2003, to celebrate Ozu's centennial, Shochiku, the studio where Ozu worked throughout his career, commissioned Hou to make a film in tribute. The resulting work, Café Lumière (Kōhī Jikō, 2003), has been called, "in its way, a version of the Late Spring story, updated to the early 21st Century."

Perhaps the strangest tribute of all belongs to the Japanese pinku (pink film) genre of softcore films: Abnormal Family, also known as Spring Bride or My Brother's Wife (Hentai kazoku: Aniki no yomesan, 1983), by director Masayuki Suo. It has been called "perhaps the only film that ever replicated Ozu's style down to the most minute detail. The story, style, characters, and settings constantly invoke Ozu's iconography, and especially Late Spring." As in Ozu's classic, the narrative has a wedding which is never shown on screen

Home media

Late Spring was released on VHS in an English-subtitled version by New Yorker Video in November 1994.

In 2003, Shochiku marked the centennial of Ozu's birth by releasing a Region 2 DVD of the film in Japan (with no English subtitles). In the same year, the Hong Kong-based distributor Panorama released a Region 0 (worldwide) DVD of the film, in NTSC format, but with English and Chinese subtitles.

In 2004, Bo Ying, a Chinese distributor, released a Region 0 DVD of Late Spring in NTSC format with English, Chinese and Japanese subtitles. and Donald Richie. In 2009, the Australian distributor Madman Entertainment released an English-subtitled Region 4 DVD of the film in PAL format. In April 2012, Criterion released a Blu-ray version of the film. This release contains the same supplements as Criterion's DVD version.

Notes

References

Works cited

External links

Late Spring at AllMovie
Late Spring: Home with Ozu an essay by Michael Atkinson at the Criterion Collection