Late Spring (1949)

Directed by Yazujirô Ozu. Written by Kôgo Noda and Yazujirô Ozu

One of the core tenets of filmmaking is that a movie begins by presenting an equilibrium, which is then upset by an external force. Over the course of the movie, the drama is provided by how a new equilibrium is found. Simple as. 

The equilibrium of Yazujirô Ozu’s Late Spring is the harmony within which a daughter, Noriko, and a father, Shukichi, live. They have a contented routine, bound in deep affection for each other, and the beginning of Ozu’s movie has the feel of a triumphant epilogue, offering assurance people are as happy as they can be and will remain so. 

On the heels of the Second World War, peacetime feels like a new dewy equilibrium. People’s cheeks are filling out again after food scarcity left them gaunt, the aches of work camps are fading; food’s now abundant again, and the greater horrors of the war are repressed. But, while the future’s just barely here, its presence is outsized. Coca-Cola advertises alongside the road, cafés with foreign names serve tea and coffee, their signage in English. Gary Cooper is a heartthrob, and boys play basketball in high school. 

Noriko’s a dutiful, devoted daughter, and this modernity that promises greater independence for women has her thinking marriage needn’t be her end goal. Taking care of her beloved father doesn’t inspire dread. Shukichi, a widower, has been slow to consider his daughter’s future. Both will find the present to be fast-eroding ground as old habits die hard and cultural expectations even harder. Noriko will be pressured to leave her father’s home to live with a stranger. With the hidden power of a bursting raincloud, Ozu reveals the opening sequence to be an elegy. 

Late Spring is perfect assembly. Clear as a mountain stream, its flow is unhindered and effortless, belying the painstaking artistry at work: on the written page, behind the camera, and in front. Ozu’s sense of composition and framing is already masterful: simple, yet exacting and picturesque. Characters say things that appear curt, but the performances lay bare the growing angst hiding behind the matter-of-factness. These exchanges, direct and intense, combine with the vivid but rigid visuals to produce something akin to prose poetry, full of punch and elegance.

The punch here is that the central characters of Late Spring are good, kind people who were happy in their current state, and suddenly have their arms twisted by civil society’s expectations. There’s nothing to say what transpires in Late Spring would not have come to pass on its own in time, and the actors involved in bringing about this new circumstance aren’t malevolent either. Sometimes everyone acts with good intentions, but the outcome can be for the worse. It’s a melancholy ache that way. Late Spring submerges you in it. 

As Noriko and Shukichi, Setsuko Hara and Chishû Ryû devastate. The cultural differences that exist sometimes make performances in Japanese dramas, especially the ones that date back decades, seem rigid and repressed compared to the wilder gesticulation and fiery tempers of Western art. Hara and Ryû are warm to the touch here, though, alive, human, and perfect embodiments of people straining against something that grows inescapable. 

Ozu’s direction doesn’t insist upon itself. It doesn’t draw attention with flashy moves or emotive fireworks. It is, however, a powerful experience guided by an expert hand and to watch these two people, who are each other’s world entire, be slowly, but mercilessly, pulled apart by the outside world, is completely heartrending.  

Late Spring is one of Ozu’s greatest accomplishments, a perfect example of his talents, preoccupations, and power, showing us a pristine portrait of a family undone by the turmoil of a rapidly evolving world, and wrecking us with sorrow as the bonds of family, thought inviolable, are slowly untied to flutter in the winds of change.