My Review of Late Spring (1949) directed by Yasujiro Ozu

Yasujiro Ozu's career can be divided up quite neatly: there's everything before Late Spring and everything he made after it. Though Tokyo Story (1953) is his masterpiece, this film marked the turning point in his career where his post-war style crystalized and the majority of his greatest films were made. Ozu had spent the majority of his films up to this point exploring generational conflict in Japanese families—mainly with The Great Depression as the back-drop. Starting with this film he would use the aftermath of WWII as the back-drop to exploring these conflicts and this movie set the tone of it involving a daughter being matched-up for marriage by her family. It all begins here with the story of a widower and his single daughter named Noriko.

The synopsis is that a widowed father and his young adult daughter Noriko are living happily together in post-WWII Japan. When an aunt decides that Noriko needs to get married before she gets "too old" (i.e. 30), it kicks-off the drama of the film as the daughter was happy were she was at and had no thought of getting married. The conflict is started by the aunt, but is really between the father and daughter as they struggle to understand their place in this "new" Japan. Though one could speculate what Ozu's thoughts on the characters' motivations, it never 100% certain who is truly right (though in the world of 2021 it would make more sense that the woman's opinion is the most important, this was not so in 1949). The ending is one of the most quietly devastating endings I have seen in a movie solidifying it as one of the great father-daughter movies. 

This film would kick-off the first of the many "Noriko" films of Ozu that would involve this female character (usually, but not always, played by Setsuko Hara) caught over whether she should get married (Hara would play a Noriko in Tokyo Story, but the circumstances of that movie are very different). These films would provide variations of Late Spring and some would be remakes. When Ozu found a story he liked, he stuck with it over-and-over. It is amazing how many angles he examined this topic from 1949 until his last film An Autumn Afternoon (1962).

We need to talk about the two main actors. Setsuko Hara was for Yasujiro Ozu what Toshiro Mifune was for Akira Kurosawa. She was Ozu's primary actor and no actor performed more dedicatedly for him than her. The father in the film is played by Chishū Ryū—who was for Ozu what Takeshi Shimura was for Akira Kurosawa. They were part of the Shochiku stock character ensemble. It is interesting to see these two actors, both established actors in the Japanese movie industry by 1949, as they were approaching their creative peaks. Ryu was, as always, playing a character older than he was since he was "old-looking" by design. 

Ozu was well-known by now for his camera-style and it is what most folks know about him at first glance. He shot most of his angles at near-ground level and he liked to put scene transition elipses in his movies. At this point he also had eliminated 99% of tracking shots in his movies. His career-long relationship with cinematographer Yūharu Atsuta helped make this style so iconic.

I don't know if more can be said on this film at this point. In a world where a woman's right over her body is still highly contested, this film was the beginning of Ozu's decade long examination of it in Japanese society. Though Ozu is certainly not the proto-feminist that his contemporary Kenji Mizoguchi was and definitely not the feminist that Kinoshita would turn-out to be in the early 1950s, he reflects part of a conversation that Japanese society was having in the post-WWII era about what place women (who got the franchise after the war) would have in it and what rights they could expect.