LGM Film Club, Part 442: Early Spring

Yasujiro Ozu is one of my favorite all-time directors, but I confess that I haven’t watched many of his classic films in recent years. The only film I of his I watched last year was one I hadn’t seen before, 1931’s Tokyo Chorus, which is more historically interesting than great. Before that, I’m not real sure how long it has been. Why he would slip away on me a bit, I don’t know. I expect the answer is probably that his films are of a very particular type, with no action or jokes or crime. They are just films of people living their lives and if I want “entertainment” I might not go in that direction all the time.

So I decided to get back into Ozu the other night, watching 1958’s Late Spring. The longest film Ozu ever made, this also was his ode to the salaryman developing in postwar Japan. That had existed prewar and of course expanded to define the Japanese labor force as its economy exploded. The scholarly literature on the Japanese office worker and their work culture is vast and many of us know about it–it’s kind of terrible. Ozu gets that across more or less. The men here are pretty unhappy.

What’s interesting about the film though is that for all of that, the women are the far more interesting characters. The story is this–there’s a young salaried worker (Ryo Ikabe) who is married to a pretty forthright woman for Japan (Chikage Awashima). It was clearly a love marriage but he and his wife are definitely not happy with each other. He isn’t too happy at work either. So when his coworker and friend (the very hot Keiko Kichi who was about to become something close to an international star after this) throws herself at him, well, he’s not really trying to resist. The story isn’t that much more complicated. His wife finds out at about the same time he gets asked to transfer. What will he do? He has some mentors, including the legendary Ozu hand Chishu Ryu, but he’s mostly on his own. All of the women are really compelling characters, including our salaryman’s sympathetic mother-in-law, who basically expects men to stray unlike her daughter who has some standards.

Of course, most Ozu films aren’t that much more complicated than this. Shot at the level of the viewer, with the characters usually speaking directly into the camera, Ozu films are about human nature and the reality of life. He really peaked in his later films, getting at the heart of the complexities of a rapidly changing Japan. He didn’t really like contemporary Japan but then he really didn’t like the old ways either. He’s a sympathetic critic of society with an extra emphasis on sympathetic, since there never really are “bad” characters in these movies, just a lot of flawed humans. This isn’t my favorite Ozu, as it really is at least 20 minutes too long. But it’s certainly a solid entry into his amazing work,