Late Spring (1949) - film review

Professor Somiya, a widower in his fifties, lives in the suburbs of Tokyo with his 27-year-old daughter Noriko.  It is an arrangement that suits them both.  Somiya has someone to look after him and Noriko enjoys more freedom than most women of her age.  One day, the professor’s sister, Masa, persuades him that it is high time his daughter was married.  In a few years, she will be past marrying age and will end up having an insecure and lonely future.   As Masa looks around for a suitable husband for her niece, Somiya tries to convince Noriko that it is in her own interest to get married.  Realising that his daughter will not leave him if he were to remain single, the professor deceives her into thinking he intends to get married.   Noriko now has no alternative but to marry...

The conflict between an individual’s freedom and societal constraints is a subject that features heavily in Japanese cinema in the decade following WWII but no film handles this more delicately or more forcefully than Yasujirô Ozu’s Late Spring.  In one of his most perfectly crafted and intelligent pieces of cinema, Ozu daringly portrays marriage as a necessary evil, something which human beings are bound to enter into, not for personal gratification but for the good of society.  This is an unusual departure for the conservatively minded Ozu, who is often seen as someone who is happy to promote the virtues of marriage.  

In what is surely the absolute antithesis of the conventional Hollywood melodrama, Late Spring likens the ceremony of marriage to a grotesque human sacrifice.  Its characters’ repeated assertions that people can only be happy by being married have a hollow ring to them when we glimpse the heart-ache that is incurred along the way.  The film is not anti-marriage as such, but is rather an attack on arranged marriages which preclude the possibility of marrying for love.  At the time when the film was made, arranged marriages were not uncommon in Japan, so the idea that a young woman could be coerced into marrying a stranger against her will was not as far-fetched as it may seem today.   

Late Spring is an exquisitely poignant film whose simplicity belies the rich complexity of human feeling that lies just beneath the surface.  Ozu’s trademark static camera and minimalist compositions have never seemed more appropriate, since these give the film a stillness which allows the spectator to discern more easily the emotional conflict that is assailing the two central protagonists.   The inner turmoil which afflicts a father and his daughter as they face up to their supposed responsibilities is vividly conveyed by Chishû Ryû and Setsuko Hara, two great actors who bring a heart-wrenching pathos to the film’s devastating conclusion.  

The film also has an allegorical interpretation, relating to the westernisation of Japan in the aftermath of WWII.  The influence of western culture pops up repeatedly in this film, almost as an unwelcome interloper.   Noriko and Hattori’s coastal cycle ride is punctuated by a huge signpost advertising Coca-Cola, a proxy for the American flag that dominates the landscape, as if to remind the locals who won the war.   One of the main attractions of Noriko’s prospective husband, we are told, is that he resembles Gary Cooper (albeit only the lower half of his face).  The forced marriage that provides the film with its tragic denouement can be seen as a metaphor for the contrived fusion of Western and Occidental cultures and interests, an undesirable and yet necessary outcome to safeguard future peace and prosperity.  No wonder they cry at weddings.

© James Travers 2010

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