Noriko walks into the room. Bows to the other women. Assumes the Japanese sitting position seiza. Noriko, played by Ozu’s favorite leading lady Setsuko Hara, proceeds to participate in a traditional tea ceremony. The camera lingers on the methodical, precise, ritual actions. A closeup one of the women’s face evokes zazen emptiness.
Ozu cuts away from the scene mid-ceremony and, with a few establishing shots of the bucolic Japanese countryside, cuts to his other BFF, Chishu Ryu, playing Professor Shukichi Somiya. The camera frames a home interior that is itself framed in shoji rectangles. In the foreground Somiya sits cross-legged on his living room floor leaning over a low table where he works on a manuscript. He casually chats with his assistant, confirming that Friedrich List (the economist) is not in fact spelled with a “z” like the more well-known composer. Off camera, a man calls out in salutation. Electric company. Meter check. Without getting up, Somiya tells the man to go ahead. In Ozu’s camera, the telescoping entrances in the partitioned Japanese house partially obscure the figure of the worker as he takes his reading in the other room while Somiya and his assistant go about their business.
As the conversation turns to a recent mahjong game, Noriko, returning from the tea ceremony, enters, all genki smiles. Her father barely looks up from his work. His speech to her consists of brusque, functionary statements. Where’s your aunt? Make us some tea. So this is post-war Japanese family dynamics, you say to yourself. Heavy on the patriarchy and all the rest. But when Somiya, mind on mahjong, suggests they stop to play a round, it is his daughter who inside her billboard smile asserts that there will be no game until the work is done. In a huff that is understood by everyone present to be nothing more than bluster, Somiya can only retort, Hey! Where’s that tea?
So begins Yazujiro Ozu’s Late Spring (晩春, Banshun, 1949).
When I used to recommend to folks the films of Yazujiro Ozu I used to quote a quip I’d read somewhere by some trying-to-be-witty critic who said watching an Ozu film was akin to watching paint dry.1 Saying this was at best my attempt at expectation-setting, at worst a kind of apology for that something in Ozu films I really, really like that most people probably really, really don’t like.2
Take the scene where Somiya and Noriko watch a Noh performance. The camera, stationary, as it is in most of Ozu’s shots, sits seiza watching the slow, esoteric moves of the Noh performer. Ozu dares the audience to a staring contest. It turns out that the scene does contribute to the plot – Hara sees her father’s to-be second bride in the audience and we watch her struggle with a future reality she doesn’t want to accept – but that plot point could very well have been done somewhere other than a lugubrious Noh show.
There is nothing plot-wise that justifies the amount of time – minutes, which in movie time feels like hours – Ozu lingers on the actual Noh performance. Which is just what he’d done in that opening tea ceremony. So, being brought up on the whole Cleanth Brooks/I.A.Richards/John Crowe Ransom way of treating a work of art as a hermetically-sealed Thing whose exegesis starts from an axiom – and whether the axiom is true or not doesn’t really matter – that everything in the work of art is there for a reason and contributes to its meaning and effect, I’m left thinking there’s something else going on here, folks.
Yep, I have the sense – and have some recollection of having read this, too – that Ozu was intentionally leaning into creating a pastoral vision of post-war Japan. Most of the homes in the film are of traditional Japanese design, including wall to wall shoji, a life slowly and deliberately lived. He was crafting a reality that really didn’t exist, not even way back in the Japanese mid 20th century.
But in Late Spring Ozu also draws his, yeah, I know, romanticized-and-nonexistent-vision-of pastoral Japanese life with fault lines. The character Aya has divorced her husband and taken a job as a stenographer because she can’t stomach the idea of moving back in with her parents and lives in an apartment starkly different from the rest of Ozu’s home settings: hinged doors, big Western style chairs, and in a moment that in Ozu’s subtle hands gently echoes the opening tea ceremony, she serves coffee to Hara, pouring, creaming, and sugaring with a mindlessness that had to be intentional direction on the part of Ozu. The scene is saying: look at America. Look at what’s changing.
Or the scenes at the sake bar where the stark wooden shelving behind the bartender is conveying more than any line of dialogue could. Or the off-handed mention of the ravages of the war, seeded subtly in conversations about other things. The framing of the bicycle ride along the beach, with the “Drink Coca Cola” sign heavy in the foreground.
Ozu has just got to be thinking about Japan in the wake of World War II.
And how could he not?
But it’s not just that. The scenes and details are so resistantly unstraightforward, so comfortaby nestled in the ineluctable blergh that is the domain of the evocative. What the film is saying – asking? – just can’t be summed up in some nice tidy thesis about confronting change in post-war Japan.
Read the climactic scene, where father and aunt gaze at Noriko in her bridal kimono, all three of them sitting seiza.
Aunt: Nori-chan, you have your fan, right?
Noriko: Yes.
Aunt: Such a beautiful bride. I wish your mother could see you. [weeps]
Somiya: Well, shall we be going? We don’t want to be rushed.
Aunt: Anything to say to her?
Somiya: No, I’ve nothing more to say.
Aunt: Are you sure? Then Nori-chan, let’s go.
[All rise to leave. Then, glancing at her father, Noriko returns to seiza]
Noriko: Father…for your loving care these many years, I thank you.
Somiya [nodding]: Be happy, and be a good wife…
[Noriko bows]
Somiya: Be happy… You’ll be a good wife, won’t you?
[Noriko assents]
Somiya: Now, shall we go?
Reading this in the abstract as dialogue you get a very different impression than what’s happening when you watch the film. There’s something else going on here, folks, something in the Ozu technique says worlds more than what is heard, or like a wordless melody says nothing at all but still means, still feels.3
Whatever story I’m on, whether film or lit or lyric or ritual, my brain tunnel-vision defaults to seeing the scene in service of a plot which is in turn serving some kind of point. My personal little Big Idea watching Late Spring is that, for Ozu, the point serves the plot that serves the scene.4
When I used to tell people about the films of Yazujiro Ozu I used to quip that watching an Ozu film was like watching paint dry. I’m not going to use that line anymore.
(1) Incidentally, as in in a moment of precognition, one scene in Late Spring involves a young boy glumly sitting out the kids baseball game because the red paint he put on his bat hasn’t dried!
(2) Unless you like films by Michaelango Antonioni, Kelly Reichart and Jim Jarmusch?
(3) Which is I think what some theorists would say about the medium of cinema itself (cf. Lacan?).
(4) Not that I’m a film critic, but I think I’d also describe Kubrick this way. Not that I’m a film critic.