There is a seemingly minor shot in Late Spring—a masterful, mid-career domestic drama from Yasujiro Ozu—in which a pile of magazines slides off a chair and falls to the floor. It occurs after one of the film’s many intensely quiet conversations among characters, thereby functioning as a visual exclamation point. Notice, though, how many times after this shot we see a character pick something up and set it on a chair or a table: a cloth, a piece of paper, in one case a dropped coin purse. Above all else, Late Spring is about putting things in their proper place.
But what is the proper place? In the mind of 27-year-old Noriko (Setsuko Hara), her place is to happily serve as caretaker for her widowed father Shukichi (Chishu Ryu), with whom she has a teasing, tender relationship. Though Noriko tends to her domestic chores with a wide smile and air of contentment, Shukichi—influenced by Noriko’s meddling aunt (Haruko Sugimura)—suggests to his daughter that she strongly consider getting married. To move things along, he even hints that he is considering marriage himself, to a younger widow.
Ozu’s films are notoriously quiet in every way—setting, volume, use of the camera. Late Spring is particularly demure, with occasionally striking shots (including one of a couple at the beach in the background, mirrored by the wheels of their bicycles in the foreground) that stand apart from the static images of domestic interiors, which are almost uniformly staged at the level of someone sitting on a tatami mat. From that perspective we observe family dynamics that could take place in any home, at any time; as Noriko and Shukichi tentatively negotiate the future of their family, they’re enacting a story that’s both distinct to post-war Japan and straight from the pages of Jane Austen.
Thanks to a piercing perception (which Austen also had), Ozu evokes the emotional immensity at play in these everyday affairs. At one point Noriko and Shukichi attend a play, where the widow he is considering marrying sits in a section adjacent to them. Through a series of smiles, nods, and furtive glances (and not a single line of dialogue) Ozu and his actors capture all of the complicated dynamics at play. Hara, in particular, is excellent here; without disrespecting the decorum that is called for in this social setting, Noriko conveys the betrayal she feels at her father’s pursuit of a future without her.
Is he really pursuing that future, however? At the end of the film—after Noriko has married, not against her will but also not because it was her personal preference—Shukichi confesses to a friend that he never intended to remarry himself, but only pretended to in order to nudge Noriko out of the nest. The movie at first plays this as a noble sacrifice, but I also wonder if there isn’t an element of lament, a wish that Noriko and Shukichi could have been left alone to live out their non-traditional form of domestic contentment. Consider, after all, one of the last shots in the film. Home alone, Shukichi sits in a chair and begins peeling an apple. After a moment, Ozu cuts to the peel as it drops to the ground, falling “out of place.” Shukichi lowers his head, and leaves it there.
(11/7/2022)
