Father (Chishu Ryu) and daughter (Setsuko Hara) contemplate their future in Yasujirō Ozu masterpiece
LATE SPRING (BANSHUN) (Yasujirō Ozu, 1949)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Friday, June 7, 1:00, 3:10, 5:20, 9:30, Saturday, June 8, 1:00, 3:10, 5:20, 7:30, 9:40, Tuesday, June 11, 1:30
Series runs June 7-27
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org
It is rather appropriate that Film Forum’s three-week, thirty-plus-film “Ozu” series, held in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of director Yasujirō Ozu’s death, kicks off with Late Spring. Not only is it late spring right now in New York, but the work marked a late spring of sorts in the Japanese auteur’s career as he moved into a new, post-WWII phase of his long exploration of Japanese family life and the middle class. Based on Kazuo Hirotsu’s novel Father and Daughter, the black-and-white film, written by Ozu with longtime collaborator Kogo Noda, tells the story of twenty-seven-year-old Noriko (Setsuko Hara), who lives at home with her widower father, Shukichi Somiya (Chishu Ryu), a university professor who has carved out a very simple existence for himself. Her aunt, Masa (Haruko Sugimura), thinks Noriko should get married, but she prefers caring for her father, who she believes would be lost without her. But when Somiya starts dropping hints that he might remarry, like his friend and colleague Jo Onodera (Masao Mishima) did — a deed that Noriko finds unbecoming and “filthy” — Noriko has to take another look at her future. Late Spring is a masterpiece of simplicity and economy while also being a complex, multilayered tale whose every moment offers unlimited rewards. From the placement and minimal movement of the camera to the design of the set to the carefully choreographed acting, Ozu infuses the work with meaning, examining not only the on-screen relationship between father and daughter but the intimate relationship between the film and the viewer. Ozu, who never married, has a firm grasp on the state of the Japanese family as some of the characters try to hold on to old-fashioned culture and tradition while recovering from the war’s devastation and facing the modernism that is taking over.
LATE SPRING kicks off three-week festival at Film Forum in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of director Yasujirō Ozu’s death
Hara, who also starred as a character named Noriko in Ozu’s Early Summer and Tokyo Story, is magnificent as a young woman averse to change, forced to reconsider her happy existence. And Ryu, who appeared in more than fifty Ozu films, is once again a model of restraint as the father, who only wants what is best for his daughter. Working within the censorship code of the Allied occupation and playing with narrative cinematic conventions of time and space, Ozu, who died on his birthday in 1963 at the age of sixty, examines such dichotomies as marriage and divorce, the town and the city, parents and children, the changing roles of men and women in Japanese society, and the old and the young as postwar capitalism enters the picture, themes that are evident through much of his oeuvre. In his 1977 book Ozu: His Life and Films, historian, director, and writer Donald Richie wrote, “For him the givens of his pictures were indeed so everyday that, once decided upon, he neither considered nor questioned their effect. This was shown by his surprise that anyone would want to ask questions about his material and his methods, and by his indifference, even obliviousness, to the many similarities among his pictures. Not in the slightest doctrinaire, he early found a way to show what he wanted and saw no reason to change.” A masterpiece from start to finish, Late Spring is screening in a 35mm print on June 7, 8, and 11 at Film Forum; the series, which is dedicated to Richie, who died earlier this year at the age of eighty-eight, continues through June 27 with such other Ozu works as A Story of Floating Weeds, Equinox Flower, Record of a Tenement Gentleman, Tokyo Chorus, Dragnet Girl, A Hen in the Wind, The Munekata Sisters, and Tokyo Twilight. (Late Spring will be having encore screenings July 14-15 as part of Film Forum’s “Reprise Presentation” of eight of the films through July 25.)