I am careful about how I talk about Yasujiro Ozu because he is prime hipster/weebo-bait. His "strangeness" and his adoration by Western critics make it hard to properly critique his films. It's even worse if you are a big fan of one of his contemporaries like myself😉. His static seat-level shots, his post-war near-elimination of tracking and panning shots in his films, and his full on framing of actors, places, and his use of transition shots as temporal ellipses have been analyzed to death–so I will skip it here. That gives me the chance to talk about the story which like most of Ozu's filmography deals with generational conflict and drama in a changing (Japanese) society.
Most folks might think that Ozu only dealt with domestic drama, but that's not true. What is true is that regardless if it is pre- or post-1945, Ozu's dramas tend to carry very similar themes (this is especially the case after Late Spring (1949)). Having watched Late Spring, Tokyo Story (1953), and An Autumn Afternoon (1962) for example have shown that when he found a story he liked–he used it and Early Summer does not break this trend. In his 1930s dramas it was The Great Depression that became the underlying catalyst for conflict; in his post-WWII films it was the Westernization of Japan that spurred conflict between the younger and older generations.
The plot of the film is one of the numerous variations on the plot of Late Spring. A woman named Noriko (played by Setsuko Hara) is unmarried and living with her best life with her family when a visiting uncle suggests that it is time for her to get married and drama ensues from there. One big issue that comes up is the changing status of women in postwar Japan. This is something that one would expect with Kenji Mizoguchi more than the more traditional-minded Ozu. The "debate" (in the Ozu sense of the word) is whether the family playing match-maker for Noriko is acceptable for her as a modern Japanese woman. In 1949's Late Spring, the unmarried woman is forced to marry her family's choice of husband against her wishes and has little say in the matter. In Early Summer (made just two years later), not only does the daughter not marry the man the family has picked for her, but she ends up marrying a man they don't approve of. During the course of these events we learn a good deal about the goings on about middle-class Japanese society at this time. I think the theme in this and others of Ozu's films about family separation has to do with the trauma of the war years.
One interesting thing about this movie was seeing Chishu Ryu playing a character (Noriko's brother) that was his actual age. Ozu always had Ryu play older male characters–even when he was in his early 20s. So it is uncanny to see Ryu in his 40s, playing someone in their 40s (just two years later, he was playing the elderly patriarch in Tokyo Story). Setsuko Hara would age less dramatically in Ozu's films, but by the late 1950s she would be playing the matriarch roles herself.
As with all his films, Ozu's Zen belief informs the narrative and technical aspects of the film. He uses temporal ellipses to such great narrative-effect that it almost creates an atmosphere of suspense since you don't know where the story is going to pick up after a scene has concluded. His insistence on stressing the impermanence of all things also connects all his films. You can argue that this was one of the most relatively optimistic of his dramatic films–a far cry from the sorrow that loomed over the ending of Late Spring. Early Summer has some optimism for Noriko and her family and Japan's future. It's also interesting to note that the most optimistic of Ozu's dramas has the woman making her own choice.
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