The
concept of mono no aware is said to define the essence of Japanese culture.
The phrase means "a sensitivity to things", the ability to experience a
direct connection with the world without the necessity of language. Yasujiro
Ozu sums up this philosophy in Late Spring, a serene depiction of
the acceptance of life's inevitabilities and the sadness that follows it.
The film shows the pressure in Japanese families for children to be married
as the "natural order" of things, regardless of their wishes. One wonders
if Ozu, who never married, is sharing his own family experience with us.
In Late Spring,
a widowed Professor, Somiya (Chishu Ryu), must face the inevitability of
giving up his daughter, Noriko (Setsuko Hara) to marriage. Noriko, however,
wants only to continue to live at home and care for her father and insists
that marriage is not for her. Yet the social pressure to marry continues
to build, coming not only from her father but also from Somiya's sister
Masa (Haruko Sugimura) whom she calls "Auntie", and from a friend, the
widower Onodera (Masao Mishima) who has recently remarried. Masa, unrelenting,
presents Noriko with a prospect named Satake who reminds her of actor Gary
Cooper, but she is still reluctant. To make it easier for Noriko to decide,
Somiya tells her that he is planning to remarry and she will no longer
need to take care of him. Noriko's agonizes over her decision and her once
beaming face increasingly carries hints of resignation. At the end, the
old man sits alone peeling a piece of fruit as the ocean waves signal the
inexorable flow of timeless things.
Howard
Schumann
Many
people, including the current editor of Halliwell’s Film Guide,
rate Yasujiro Ozu’s magisterial Tokyo Story (1953) as the best film
ever made. Less well-known is Late Spring (Banshun),
made four years earlier, which would surely rank as Ozu’s finest were it
not for the 1953 masterpiece.
Featuring many of the
same actors as Tokyo Story, including Ozu’s alter ego Chishu Ryu
who starred in virtually every film he made, Late Spring is a little
more “Japanese” in the sense that it opens with a traditional tea ceremony
and includes an extended excerpt from a Noh play (a beautiful scene which
drives the story forward). So it lacks a little of the universality
of Tokyo Story, but in its own way it is perhaps even more perfect.
The film is the first
of six which the actress Setsuko Hara would make with Ozu, and is the first
of the so-called “Noriko trilogy”, so called because she plays a character
of that name in Late Spring, Early Summer, and Tokyo Story.
Following Ozu’s death in 1963 Hara, by now one of the biggest stars of
Japanese cinema and known as “the eternal virgin”, abruptly announced her
retirement, reverted to her original name, and went into lifelong seclusion.
The film’s title refers
not just to the time of year in which it is presumably set, but also to
the time in Noriko’s life; while still eligible for marriage, she is a
few years past the age at which most of her friends married. In fact
she sees her role as looking after her widowed father, and brushes off
all suggestions from father, aunt, and friends that a husband should be
found for her. Not only that, but she regards as “unclean” the notion
of her father’s friend, a widower, marrying a much younger woman.
So when she comes to believe that her father has just that intention for
himself she is horrified, and reluctantly agrees to become betrothed to
a man found for her by her aunt.
Ozu’s trademark style
is well-established by this time: a seldom-moving camera held permanently
at the level of a seated person, characters often speaking straight to
camera, shots held for a while after characters have left the room, and
scene changes marked by shots of buildings or landscapes. Other characteristic
little touches include, for example, instances of a character who, on leaving
a room at the end of a scene, returns briefly to pick something up from
the floor or a table.
Three scenes in Late
Spring are particularly memorable, beautiful, and important.
The first is the aforementioned Noh scene, lasting several minutes.
In the audience are Noriko, her father, and the woman she believes her
father is to marry. With the only on-screen sound coming from the
Noh performers, a sequence of looks and glances between these three characters
tells us all we need to know.
The second memorable scene
comes during a trip to Osaka, after Noriko has reluctantly agreed to marry.
After going to bed, with Noriko lying awake while her father has just fallen
asleep, we twice see a shot of a vase silhouetted in the twilight, an archetypal
Ozu shot signifying stasis, a coming to rest, a decision finally made and
accepted.
Following a little plot-twist
(always assuming that an Ozu film can be said to have a “plot”), there
is the famous closing scene, where the father, left alone after Noriko’s
wedding, silently and sadly starts to peel an apple as tears come to his
eyes. “Life is disappointing”, as another Noriko says in Tokyo
Story, and as is the theme of nearly all Ozu’s later films. The
very final shot of waves breaking on the seashore indicates that life goes
on, as generation succeeds generation.
Alan
Pavelin
