Film Review
Early Spring is the film that
Yasujiro Ozu made after
Tokyo Story,
one of his biggest commercial and critical successes, although it came
after a three-year hiatus during which time Ozu assisted the actress
Kinuyo Tanaka on her second film as a director. In the interim,
tastes in Japanese cinema had changed markedly amid a burgeoning youth
culture and a growing willingness to accept western influences.
Ozu's home dramas (Ofuna-cho) were looking decidedly outdated and his
bosses at Shochiku, keen to move with the times, put pressure on Ozu to
modernise, dispensing with paternalistic characters, making greater use
of young and popular actors, and adopting elements of Hollywood-style
melodrama in his films.
For
Early Spring, his longest
surviving film, Ozu takes the bare bones of a conventional American
melodrama - consisting of adultery, estrangement and reconciliation -
and weaves these in a complex character study that is remarkably
perceptive in its probing of the psyche of young Japanese men and
women. In addition to Ozu's familiar domestic concerns, it brings
in many modern themes that would have been unthinkable in Japanese
cinema a few years previously - suicide, premature death of children,
the crushing monotony of office work, indeed the degrading nature of
work - and this added greatly to its appeal, showing that Ozu had moved
on and was able to keep up with prevailing cultural trends. Ozu
retained all of his cinematic idiosyncrasies (framing, low camera
positioning, mostly static shots) but, by using younger actors and tackling
themes that were of interest to younger audiences, he injected a badly
needed shot of modernity into his art.
Early Spring is a natural
extension of the home dramas that Ozu had been making for the bulk of
his career up until this point, but here the home, or rather the family
unit, is far less robust, less central than in the director's previous
films. It is constantly threatened, by the misfortune of child
mortality, by the constant temptation of adultery, and an ever-growing
ennui which is exacerbated by the unchanging routine of work. The
film begins by showing us hundreds of anonymous young people dutifully
making their way into work, pouring from train stations into the roads
that lead to their skyscraper offices like robotic ants. We are
reminded of similar scenes in René Clair's
À
nous la liberté (1931) and Charlie Chaplin's
Modern
Times (1936), in which human beings are reduced to the level
of an insignificant cog in a massive corporate machine. It is a
life that offers security, a reasonable standard of living, but no
variety, no fulfilment - it is merely a relentless treadmill that leads
nowhere but to the grave.
No wonder Shoji Sugiyama, the central male character, is so
disillusioned with life and so susceptible to temptation when it comes
his way, in the guise of a flirtatious typist named Goldfish. Ozu
betrays his aversion to the classic melodrama by not dwelling on the
sordid details of the affair. We do not even know whether
Sugiyama continues the affair after he has bedded Goldfish for the
first time. It is possible that he may have had a crisis of
conscience and given up the affair - this could explain Goldfish's
offended outburst when Sugiyama's colleagues subject her to a kind of
inquisition in the unlikely setting of a noodle-eating
party. Likewise, the impact of Sugiyama's indiscretion on his
wife is alluded to very subtly, almost
en passant, and we cannot be
entirely certain whether the adultery was the main reason for her
leaving her husband. It seems the couple were already estranged
before the pouting, hip wiggling Goldfish came onto the scene, driven
apart by their own frustrations with a married life that had so far
proven fruitless and unsatisfying.
Early Spring concludes with
one of the most downbeat and ambiguous endings of any Ozu film.
Sugiyama and his wife appear to be reconciled and willing to make a
fresh start in what looks like a Garden of Eden compared with the
concrete anthill that is modern Tokyo. There is no discernible
sense of joy visible in either character, just a quiet acceptance that
is the best they can hope for, the closest they will ever get to true
happiness. It is a sombre ending with only the faintest glimmer of
hope, and, in those last lingering shots of a raw landscape dominated
by towers belching black smoke, you can sense the gnawing sterility of the
empty years that stretch ahead of the protagonists as they tread their
slow and weary path towards death.
© James Travers 2013
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Next Yasujirô Ozu film:
Tokyo Twilight (1957)
Film Synopsis
Shoji Sugiyama is a young salaryman who works for a company that
manufactures fire bricks in Tokyo. Every day, he takes a crowded
commuter train into the city centre, to the crowded office where he
works. After the death of his infant son some years previously,
he has grown disillusioned both with his work and his marriage.
He envies his friends who are not salarymen, thinking they have more
freedom and a greater prospect of happiness. During a hiking trip
Shoji strikes up a friendship with an attractive typist nicknamed
Goldfish on account of her large eyes. Within no time, the two
have embarked on an illicit love affair, which is noticed both by
Shoji's colleagues, who chastise Goldfish for threatening a marriage,
and his wife, Masako. When Shoji confesses that he has been
having an affair, Masako leaves him and promptly returns to live with
her mother. Fearing he has lost Masako for good, Shoji
reluctantly agrees to be transferred to an office in a provincial town,
far from the bustle of Tokyo and the woman he once loved...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.