I’ve been viewing and re-viewing the films of Yasujiro Ozu available on DVD through the good offices of the Criterion Collection, for an upcoming film series at the Clark in celebration of the opening of the Tadao Ando-designed “Stone Hill Center” on the Clark campus in June, with initial exhibitions relating to Japanese design. Here’s my survey:
Early Summer (Bakushu.) (1951, 125 min.) Six years after Japan's unconditional surrender, only the memory is scarred by war and the American occupation is invisible, except in the subtle struggle between the old ways and the new, between traditional Japanese norms and the influx of Western modernity. The struggle is played out in the matrimonial conflicts of a 28-year-old woman who lives in a well-off seaside suburb of Tokyo, in the house of her retired father and mother, along with her doctor brother, his wife and two boys. She’s an independent-minded working girl, who is gradually succumbing to the pressure to marry, and finds she has to make up her own mind, while everyone around her is relentlessly matchmaking. The woman in this situation, as is typical of Ozu, is called Noriko and played by the incomparable Setsuko Hara. The other Ozu favorite, Chishu Ryo, plays her irascible brother. Quiet and controlled, yet funny and moving, this is Ozu at his very steady best. I watched the whole thing unsure whether I had seen it before, or only seen the same characters in the same situations in other Ozu films. In the end it didn’t matter, everything was familiar yet surprising at the same time. This filmmaker’s concentration of approach requires -- and amply rewards -- a special sort of attention. *8*
Late Spring (Banshun.) (1949, 108 min.) This slightly earlier film seems underpopulated in comparison, with the focus more exclusively on Ryo and Hara, here as a widowed professor and the daughter who devotes herself to him goodnaturedly, but whom he must trick into consideration of accepting marriage herself by lying that he is going to remarry. In this case the subsidiary characters are not as vivid, and serve more as foils for the father and daughter. Otherwise, it’s prime Ozu. But just as well, I showed this in my previous Ozu series, so it makes sense to reverse judgment this time and select others. *7+*
Tokyo Story. (1953, 135 min.) What once seemed an isolated pinnacle of cinema, when so few Ozu films ever made it to these shores (and this one took 19 years), now seems very much of a piece with his others, except for the added focus on the older mother and the poignancy of her story. She and her husband (Ryo) travel the long way to Tokyo by train to visit their grown children. They are not particularly welcomed by their self-involved offspring, except for the widow (Hara) of their dead soldier son, and after some mild misadventures they return home. The actors and their family relations, the domestic scenes and settings, the resolutely formal approach to filming -- all are in Ozu’s signature mode. Perhaps the sentiment of quiet resignation is most touching here, but Ozu’s practice is amazingly consistent, ringing changes on a small (but big) set of themes and characters. The strangeness of his distinctive approach melts away when seen in the context of his ongoing career, and you can simply (and complexly) enjoy the varieties of chamber music that can be drawn out of a few familiar notes and shadings. *9*
Early Spring (Soshun.) (1956, 149 min.) Ozu focuses on the younger generation in this tale of salarymen and a new sort of woman in the workplace. A young couple has lost a child, and their connection along with it. The man drifts into an affair with a flirt at work. The wife steels herself against the straying husband, and does not follow when he is transferred. This thread of narrative is woven into a larger canvas of relatives, neighbors, and co-workers, but lacks the multi-generational family intimacy of Ozu’s other films, and seems overlong, though the observational quality is still intriguing. *6+*
Equinox Flower (Higanbana.) (1958, 120 min.) This is Ozu’s first color film, and it blooms into a real enhancement, making the domestic interiors and dress even more evocative of a distinctive Japanese aesthetic. And again he uses the family as the crucible for tensions between a traditional society and liberalizing Western ways. The main character is a businessman who is Janus-faced, punishing his daughter for choosing her own mate while advising the daughters of his friends to follow their own hearts. The humor is prevalent but low-key, as the patriarch is oh-so-slowly brought round to self-recognition, by the deferential strategies of all the women around him. You can almost count on an Ozu film to begin with an onrushing train to represent the invasion of modernity, and to resolve with the family laundry drying on poles, symbolizing some restoration of order and the transcendance of ordinary life. It makes me think of my favorite poem by a living author, Richard Wilbur’s “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World,” where clothes on the line are taken for angels: “Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,/Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam/And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.” This is a definite for showing at the Clark. *8*
Late Autumn (Akibiyori.) (1960, 128 min.) A reworking of the story of Late Spring, this again features Setsuko Hara, but instead of the daughter she is now the young widowed mother of a daughter, whom she must convince to marry and leave her to live alone. But she is still sublime, with a transcendent final shot of her as she kneels alone in her apartment and waves of emotion pass over her face, which is an echo of the famous conclusion of the earlier film, where Chishu Ryu as the father peels an apple and drops his head as the peel falls. So it’s the same film, but utterly different -- you know exactly what’s going to happen, but you are taken unawares, by laughter and tears, but most of all by compassion. As Ozu himself declared, “I want to make people feel without resorting to drama,” and my goodness, does he succeed! Besides the mother and daughter, this is the story of three comical old gents and the brash young woman who sets them straight in matters of the heart. *8+*
The End of Summer (Kohayagawa-ke no aki.) (1961, 103 min.) Ozu’s penultimate film is death-weighted in manner that suggests he knew his own end was approaching. As much as Jane Austen’s novels, all his films are obsessed with the economic and emotional task of making a good marriage, but this one ends with a funeral instead of a wedding. The retired patriarch of a family of three daughters has left management of his Osaka sake brewery to his son-in-law, but is more involved in his own hanky-panky than marrying off his eldest, widowed daughter (Hara again) or his youngest (the actress who was Hara’s daughter in the previous film is now her sister.) The first shot of the film announces in neon that this is the “New Japan,” and not the least significance of late Ozu is the gradual emergence of a modern country from the ashes of a feudal militarism. The beauty of traditional ways is on display but on its way out, though its passing is comic as well as sad. The conservative Japanese-ness of Ozu is usually summed up in the concept of mono no aware, a resigned sadness to the cycles of life, a sense of “the tears of things.” *7+*
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