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page 14
find a husband who can support her. The professor reluctantly agrees. When his daughter opposes any idea of marriage, he tells her he is also going to remarry. That is a lie, but he will sacrifice his own comfort for his daughter’s future. She marries. And that, essentially, is what happens on the surface in Yasujiro Ozu’s Late Spring (1949). What happens at deeper levels is angry, passionate and – wrong, we feel, because the father and the daughter are forced to do something neither one of them wants to do, and the result will be resentment and unhappiness. Only the aunt will emerge satisfied . . . This is rather a partisan account. Nothing in the film spells out with any clarity that the future will be miserable both for the bride in her new home and for the father left alone. Most viewers, admittedly, get a sense of pathos, even bleakness, from their last sight of the father, using a knife on an apple, whose scroll of peel he seems to want to keep intact until the moment that it falls to the floor. The final shot of the film shows the sea, transcending human suffering or indifferent to it, either absorptive or rebuking of our small concerns. There’s a famous statement in the Richie and Anderson book about the director’s concentration on domestic issues: ‘In every Ozu film the whole world exists in one family. The ends of the earth are no more distant than [the] outside of the house.’ Late Spring disproves this in any fuller synopsis, with Noriko’s lively, unthreatened friendship with Aya, a divorcée. 8
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Western critics have gradually woken up to the fact that Ozu breaks as many rules as he keeps, and that he makes up plenty of his own. Being Japanese is not a state with a single dimension. Cultural skewings of reputation happen all the time. In fact the sane-seeming episodes of cultural transmission (the Beatles conquer America) are outnumbered by the other kind: Jerry Lewis storming Paris, Norman Wisdom marching through Albania. How sensible would Japanese critics seem on the subject of Ivy Compton-Burnett, for instance, if her novels happened to have a wild vogue in Japan? If they kept saying how English she was, we would be hard put to deny it. But those books would be a very eccentric source of ideas about family life and domestic conversation. Japanese cinema, as we have come to understand it from that post-war golden age, and despite Kurosawa’s strong counter-example, is hushed, ­serene and inexplicit. It takes a particular interest in women, their lives and choices. Ozu first directed a film in 1927, and by the time of the late style inaugurated by Late Spring had more or less dispensed with camera movement. Angles are invariably low, at eye level if your eye happens to be a couple of feet above a tatami mat. Periodically there will be a cut to a view of a room or a courtyard, a shot humming with neutrality which nevertheless bears some relationship to the reaction shot, except for the 9

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find a husband who can support her. The professor reluctantly agrees. When his daughter opposes any idea of marriage, he tells her he is also going to remarry. That is a lie, but he will sacrifice his own comfort for his daughter’s future. She marries.

And that, essentially, is what happens on the surface in Yasujiro Ozu’s Late Spring (1949). What happens at deeper levels is angry, passionate and – wrong, we feel, because the father and the daughter are forced to do something neither one of them wants to do, and the result will be resentment and unhappiness. Only the aunt will emerge satisfied . . .

This is rather a partisan account. Nothing in the film spells out with any clarity that the future will be miserable both for the bride in her new home and for the father left alone. Most viewers, admittedly, get a sense of pathos, even bleakness, from their last sight of the father, using a knife on an apple, whose scroll of peel he seems to want to keep intact until the moment that it falls to the floor. The final shot of the film shows the sea, transcending human suffering or indifferent to it, either absorptive or rebuking of our small concerns.

There’s a famous statement in the Richie and Anderson book about the director’s concentration on domestic issues: ‘In every Ozu film the whole world exists in one family. The ends of the earth are no more distant than [the] outside of the house.’ Late Spring disproves this in any fuller synopsis, with Noriko’s lively, unthreatened friendship with Aya, a divorcée.

8

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