Yasujiro Ozu's Early Spring

Ozu is a Japanese director who is seldom talked about today but whose elegant films are one of the glories of movies.  When Tokyo Story (1953) opened in New York in 1972 at The New Yorker Theatre it was sold out for months, but then Ozu returned to relative obscurity.  Last week Turner Classic Movies showed Ozu's Early Spring, presumably --at least in part -- because of the title.

Early Spring (1956) is like music, with almost no camera movement and most shots framed from low angles (whether this is meant as a view from a tatami mat is disputed among Ozu scholars).  Early Spring is a domestic drama, with very little happening -- a Japanese married salaryman, Sugiyama,, has a brief affair with a co-worker and is transferred far from Tokyo, where his wife, Masako, eventually joins him.  Most scenes are composed geometrically and introduced by shots of trains and buildings, these shots themselves having a geometric beauty.  Everyone is struggling with the aftermath of WW II and those who were in the war together meet often and reminisce about it, finding it difficult to move on with their lives.  Sugiyama and Masako had a child who died in infancy and their sadness and lack of income makes them wary of having another.  Most of Sugiyama's co-workers feel they cannot afford children and few have cars or  a TV.  An older man tells Sugiyama, as they sit on a bridge watching the river flow by, that he is in "the Spring time of life," but he seems unconvinced.

Ozu made 54 films in his 36-year career and they can be watched and seen in many different ways.  Some feel that his films are "too Japanese" for Western audiences, more so than Kurosawa's perhaps, but no more than Mizoguchi's mostly-period films. Ozu often used the same actors and his movies have very similar titles (Early Summer, Late Autumn, etc.), all of which can be confusing but for me add to their beauty;  he creates his own world that is very much like ours but is both more problematic and more serene:  we are distanced from it but invited to enter it and are highly rewarded if we do. Ozu shows clearly that each phase of life, like each season, has its own problems and its own pleasures