Late Spring

Often times, a movie from a different culture and/or time period will have varying responses from others who view it because it either doesn’t match with their current mind set, isn’t experiencing something similar to those around the same era, or it features culturally specific elements that aren’t going to connect with people outside of that country’s bubble. This isn’t always a hindrance as many foreign films can still connect with audiences through universal elements like character, story, and themes, but what happens when something feels like it only works in that specific country. Can a movie be a masterpiece in one country, but not as strong in the other? The 1949 Japanese film, Late Spring, kind of falls into that camp. In a post-war Japan, Noriko (played by Setsuko Hara) is the twenty-seven-year-old unmarried daughter to Professor Shukichi Somiya (played by Chishu Ryu), and she is perfectly content with her single life with her father. Despite this, everyone around her, mainly her father, her friend Aya (played by Yumeji Tsukioka) and Aunt Masa (played by Haruko Sugimaru), wishes to see her with a husband so that she can move on with her life. However, her connection with her father proves to outweigh her concern for her own future, and she can’t see a life for herself outside of the two of them being together, and things get even more complicated when she realizes that her father has fallen in love with another woman and is considering remarrying himself, which she views as wrong. These conflicting ideologies will have to clash by the end and Noriko will have to decide for herself what path she wants (or even needs) to go down. Based on the short novel Father and Daughter (or Chichi to musume) by Kazuo Hirotsu.  Late Spring was more than just a simple Japanese film that garnered a lot of praise from its public as well as the American audience when it was released overseas, it’s been considered one of the greatest Japanese movies ever created, yet many who watch it nowadays, may be slightly confused. So, what exactly is the key strengths and weaknesses of this film?

This film is much more than the sum of its parts, and some of these other aspects help demonstrate the wider issues with the film. The movie acted as a start to the ‘’Noriko trilogy’’ for director of the film, Yasujirō Ozu, which were three consecutive movies that told different stories with a similarly named character and actresses all connecting with a similar type of theme. The film falls into the shomingeki genre, which is a Japanese type of cinema which deals with the ordinary lives of working-class people in the modern age, with simple plots, stationary camera shots, and primary focus on stories about Japan’s war aftermath. Considering this was written and shot during the Allied Powers Occupation of Japan, it had a closer connection with that mindset than some other films of its type did. All these aspects combined, also factoring in that this movie had zero Hollywood involvement, makes it a different animal for the time period and because of such, it does feel and act very different from even other movies at the time. Even for a concept like this, the story is pretty paper thin and despite there being potential to work with Japanese tradition and an era where things weren’t great for the country, it doesn’t really factor much into anything as it was a movie that was heavily censored to remove anything connected to the war at all. What should just be the starting point for the film never really adds anything that dramatically complex, adult or even realistic to the script handled by Ozu and fellow screenwriter and frequent collaborator, Kogo Noda, to give it that unique flair, and the odd stance and eventual outcome of the film (somewhat-arranged marriages were treated very different in Japan during a different time), it makes it hard to fully comprehend the tone and mood the movie is going for. It’s hard to determine whether or not to feel sad, happy, relived, or something in between all of that,  it’s a bit of a mess. One of the key reasons why the movie does work through some of these flaws is the man behind the film; director Yasujirō Ozu has a lot of experience in film-making and his expansive roster in other films (especially in silent films) come across here, mostly for the best. He does carry this sense of perfectionist in his structuring of the film and that did lead to a pretty heavy control over the production and direction of the movie, but with it comes a sense of honest natural beauty that shines through in the writing, acting, cinematography and even the story. It is basic but doesn’t feel like its handled poorly or awkwardly.

Despite being characterized as one of Ozu’s most character-driven films of all time with such complex flawed roles, it doesn’t feel much like that when you watch it. This isn’t to say that the characters in question are actively awful or even lack a sense of complexity, it just feels like a lot of potential for deep emotional baggage and complicated thought is lacking in this film, instead getting exactly what you’d expect from a movie and a story like this. Everybody in the film is clearly doing their best acting wise, but a quality of Ozu’s directing apparently made it so that they weren’t allowed to express emotions as strongly as they could have, which does result in the emotional range of the characters being very straightforward and their expressions usually being pretty up-front about what they represent. It also feels like silent film acting in moments, where sometimes the movements and expressions of the character feel like they would in a silent movie (most likely because of Ozu’s past work on them). But with that said, while the acting is slightly odd and maybe a little by the numbers, it is still good acting for what the movie requires, and nobody is truly a bad actor in this. Setsuko Hara especially stands out as the lead in the film; being a big name at the time and having a relatively strong career throughout her life, her more casual and even westernized feel helps her stand out in this mostly traditional Japanese environment, and she is actually very effective at emoting with her face where a general happy smile can hide a cold daggery glare or a face of anguish that really looks pained and broken, she is the best part of the film and while her character is a little underdeveloped and even a little strange in parts (her insistence of not marrying doesn’t have too much reasoning outside of just not wanting to leave her father and even that obsession is a little weird without further explanation), it works out in the long run.

The other truly strong element of this film that everybody should be able to get behind is the cinematography by Yūharu Atsuta and shot composition. Another aspect that Uzo is well know for, the quality of the camera work in this film is incredibly top-notch especially for the time period; the cleanness and crisp visuals of the shots look like how a black and white movie would be shot in modern time, it really looks incredible. There is something to be said about how much Japanese culture is present in this film; not just in actually having Japanese actors play Japanese people (in the 1940s, that is a massive deal sadly), but in how the environments look, how the clothing looks, how its fully in Japanese, even the quaint respectable presence of the entire film, it truly does feel like its made and representing a quality of the country itself and that is very nice. The movie has a lot of static shots of things that honestly look pretty pointless, and the movie does have an odd habit of overly focusing on elements of the film that really aren’t important in the grand scheme of things (you see the entirety of a Noh performance when really you didn’t need to), but it weirdly doesn’t feel too bad when you’re watching it. A lot of the shots feel very well composed and even if they lack movement or are positioned in a place where it has something odd in the focus or leaves an actor to walk a great distance from afar, it never feels out of place or like it was sloppily handled, it always feels like it was the director’s intention to shoot the film like that and he went for it.

If a movie with a similar plot came out in the modern age, Late Spring maybe would be more harshly critiqued due to its quality over substance stance on making a movie. Even from the director’s viewpoint, it feels like the purpose was to get across a style, a genre, and a theme as opposed to a strong story or defined characters with expressive emotions. Considering what Japan was going through at the time, it feels like this is the strongest we could get for a movie of its type and despite its obvious flaws, the movie honestly is perfectly fine. It does suffer due to its plot being mostly straightforward and not featuring many striking elements to prevent it from being dull, and the characters could be stronger and have a wider range of expressions (the amount of times the lead gives a ‘’sitcom wife’’ smile is pretty funny honestly in the first half), but with good directing, decent actors, an impressive lead and splendidly simple yet clean visuals, Late Spring is a perfectly decent film of the era and one that holds more weight for what it accomplished than instead of what it stands for now. The other films in this ‘’Noriko trilogy’’ sound much stronger, but for what it is, this one isn’t an awful film to check out.