Late Spring (1949) by Yasujiro Ozu

Overview

Late Spring is about as gentle a film can get. The opening music score sets the tone for tenderness and understanding of a simple story of an unbreakable bond between a daughter unwilling to marry and her caring, patrichal father. Despite the emotional potential latent in the screenplay that Ozu and Noda writes, Late Spring shows how Ozu’s terse direction never allows himself, his characters and his films fall into an overtly sentimental, sappy mood. The result is a subdued sense of emotion that broods as an ebbed flow throughout the film, seeking empathy from the audience through objectivity.

Mise en Scene

This review picks up from the earlier review on Ozu’s Tokyo Story, where the use of narrative ellipses was explained against the backdrop of Tokyo Story. For Late Spring, I have chosen to discuss about the distinctive way in which Ozu shoots his symmetrical shot-reverse-shots during conversations and breaks the 180 degree rule. Through that, I feel that Ozu articulates off-screen space elegantly as we peer into the private lives of these ordinary Japanese characters.

In Late Spring, as in Tokyo Story, shot-reverse-shots are almost never filmed in the traditional over the shoulder fashion that is typical of Hollywood films. In fact, safe to say, non-Hollywood films are also fond of shooting conversations using over the shoulder shots that cut across characters in a conversation following the 180 degree rule because it is part of a foundation film grammar that helps ground films in traditional continuity. Audiences will thus not be confused with the screen direction (ie. Character A, who first appeared screen right, does not “jump” to screen left)

I feel that over the shoulder shots give a particular sense of voyeurism, where we as viewers, are “peering” into the lives of the characters without their knowledge. The most apparent effect of symmetrically composed shot reverse shots that do away with placing the receiver of the conversation in the foreground is that of immediacy.

Rewatching Late Spring again, I noticed several occasions where a character deliberately breaks the fourth wall, speaking directly into the camera rather than ahead of it (which Ozu usually does). While I cannot say for sure that Ozu intentionally has his characters break the fourth wall (because he seems to do it almost capriciously rather than at certain high points in dialogue), I think it has the effect of placing viewers in the center of the conversation. It was almost as if we, as viewers, are sitting in the center of two characters conversing about very personal details of their lives (ie. Noriko’s final conversation or plea with her father not to let her marry in their last evening of their last trip together). Most heartwarming of all, was that it felt like the characters didn’t mind us ‘being there’, sitting beside, or rather in the middle of them, witnessing them at their most private moments. Rather than secretive voyeurism, Ozu was almost saying to us: “This is a slice of their life, as it were. We have nothing to hide.”

Another effect of Ozu’s shot-reverse-shots was that it sometimes felt like one character’s face or indeed fate was written over that of the other, vice versa. While most directors would possibly employ the use of cross dissolves from one shot to the next to express this particular relationship between two characters, Ozu uses the straight cut, consistent throughout Late Spring, as in Tokyo Story. I think this is consistent with how Ozu’s concern is primarily with the relationship between his characters, rather than their inner, subjective psychological landscapes. Ozu appears to be expressing the notion that his characters are intrinsically bound together in a symbiotic, unbreakable relationship. Life then, is not only “disappointing” as Noriko puts it in Tokyo Story, but also inevitable. In later reviews, I intend to explore this notion of inevitability and unbreakable bonds against the context of Zen Buddhism.

In I lived, But… (1983), a documentary of Ozu’s life and work, it was shown that Ozu’s symmetrically framed shot reverse shots also reflect the director’s almost obsessive attitude towards graphical continuity and geometry. Because Ozu did away with the 180 degree system, graphical continuity maintains the smooth flow of the film from cut to cut, most apparent of which seen in his shot-reverse-shots. It has to be acknowledged that Ozu was often playful even with the most severe of his films. Some of the things he did, such as the symmetrically centered shot reverse shots, probably had no particular intentions on the effects that I experienced and tried to explain in the last two paragraphs. But it has to be acknowledged that Ozu was an artist that kept his style and expressions of the film grammar consistent through the oeuvre of his films. In fact, one can see how Late Spring is a beautiful culmination of Ozu’s style that evolved and grew from its roots in his early silent comedies.

While others have argued that Ozu’s camera is undisputedly self-conscious, almost possessing a mind of its own (often stating the example of I Was Born… But tracking shots of students and bored office workers), I still feel that Ozu’s intention, especially in both Tokyo Story and Late Spring, was objectivity. This is not to say that Ozu’s camerawork in Late Spring and Tokyo Story wasn’t self-conscious. As a matter of fact, I think that there was plenty of self-consciousness in the camerawork; in keeping the camera static and low,  and then framing shot reverse shots symmetrically centered.

Experience

If I had to sum up the entire film in a word, it would be ‘tender’. The experience was beautiful, and the telling of a story, so refined, elegant and graceful it sometimes felt like the screen directions of Noriko was that of a dancer, floating in and out of screen space. At times though, Noriko’s relationship with her father felt like it had Electra undertones, though the extreme care and gentleness that Ozu took in his direction quickly steered me away from a Freudian reading of the film. I just couldn’t bear to think of such an untainted, beautiful relationship between father and daughter in any other Western way of thought.