Late Spring (no 7) *****

 

by Allan Fish

(Japan 1949 108m) DVD1/2

Aka. Banshun

Waiting for a good ball

p  uncredited  d  Yasujiro Ozu  w  Yasujiro Ozu, Kogo Noda  ph  Yuharu Atsuta  ed  Yoshiyasu Hamamura  m  Senji Ito  art  Tatsuo Hamada

Chishu Ryu (Prof Shukichi Somiya), Setsuko Hara (Noriko, his daughter), Yumeji Tsukioka (Aya Kitagawa), Haruko Sugimura (Masa Taguchi), Hohi Aoki (Katsuyochi Taguchi), Jun Usami, Kuniko Miyake,

Ozu’s masterwork is often referred to as the first of his Noriko trilogy (followed by other masterpieces Early Summer and Tokyo Story) in which Setsuko Hara plays a girl called Noriko.  It can also be seen as the original version of the tale tackled in his last film, the marginally inferior An Autumn Afternoon. 

            Professor Somiya is a 56 year old widower whose daughter Noriko is in her late twenties and nearly beyond marriageable age, but who is still living at home looking after her father.  Though she is everything to him, he realises that her looking after him is selfish so he contrives to try and see her married.  Yet Noriko does not want to go, so her father pretends that he intends to remarry himself, to relieve her worries of his not taking care of himself, so that she will marry.  Of course, he never intends to remarry. 

            Though Autumn and Spring share largely the same plot, the tones of the two films are poles apart.  Autumn really tells the story as seen from the point of view of the father, whereas Spring really shows it on the part of the daughter.  That’s not to say that Spring isn’t told from the father’s point of view, because in the last act in particular it most certainly is, but the title of this film is Late Spring, and it’s Noriko who is in the late spring of her life, with Ryu perhaps rather at the end of his summer than in his autumn.  He loves his daughter too much to see her left alone when he eventually spins off this mortal coil, observing to her “we can’t be together forever.  You must marry sometime.”  And even though you know he’s done the right thing, it’s still heartrending to watch, as she tries to suppress tears on her wedding day, and he finally succumbs once he returns home.  Indeed, Spring is undoubtedly one of Ozu’s most despairing films, filled with humour, affection and warmth, but haunted by the spectre of the onset of loneliness.  Only when he turns to peel an apple in the last sequence does the professor realise that he now faces a period of perhaps perpetual solitude. 

            What perhaps make Spring so special, though, as with many of its director’s films, are the little observations, achieved with such subtlety and Zen-like calm as to be almost unsettling.  Just take two conversations that take place during the film; one between Hara and her friend is filmed almost like a double ‘Talking Heads’, with each character talking directly to camera, and editing between the two, with no medium shots of them both while anything is being said.  Here we can construe that observing the reaction of the other as one speaks is unimportant as nothing important is being said.  Compare this to the conversation between father and daughter on their final visit to Kyoto.  Close ups, yes, but medium shots, too, and the reactions are equally the key to unlocking the emotions in the scene.  And his actors, hand-picked as always, are magnificent.  It’s safe to say that Hara and Ryu were his favourite actors, and their special relationship on screen is once more in evidence.  Hara again embodying the warm serenity of Japanese womanhood, but her trademark eternal smile is often conspicuously absent here.  In Tokyo Story she smiled through the despair of a lost husband to please her in-laws.  Here she has lost the will to keep her head up and carry on smiling and is often caught glancing downwards in despair.  Ryu, for his part, is again a peerless joy, his smiles, too, betraying a sense of loss in the final sequence, where we see the tide come in as time catches up with him and the tears finally burst from their ducts.  Donald Richie called Spring “one of the most perfect, most complete and most successful character studies.”  Others called Ozu a “film-making God.”  In truth, he’s a far better film-maker than that.