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Late Spring (1949) [The Criterion Collection] – DVD
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Like Robert Bresson or Andrei Tarkovsky, Yasujiro Ozu is one of those great directors with bullyboy supporters for whom the title "great" doesn't begin to scratch the surface. It's not enough for their man to be a pillar of the cinema: he has to be a moral axiom, if not part of the space-time fabric itself, and God help you if you merely like one of his crystalline masterpieces. (We've reached the point where even academics will intimidate you if you take a mildly contradictory position.) But we at FFC are a defiant bunch, so with trepidation I must announce that while Late Spring is a good movie, a solid flick–let's not get carried away. To be sure, there are plenty of thematic strands to suss out of its narrative, making it a film that rewards repeat viewings. Nevertheless, I can't say that it's a destroyer like Tokyo Story or any of the other legitimately great works in Ozu's canon. Don't hit me, I bruise easily.
It's easy to see how Ozu could have gotten into this mess. His is a gentle sensibility that takes great pains to respect the feelings in no-win situations. Late Spring demonstrates this by giving us a professor, Shukichi Somiya (Ozu staple Chishu Ryu), and his daughter, Noriko (Setsuko Hara, another of the director's regulars). Noriko is 27 and thus slightly past normal marrying age; still, she brushes off suggestions of marriage and walks away from a friendship with a man once it threatens to get serious. It turns out that she doesn't want to abandon her widower father, who would be left alone were she to decamp to a new life. If she stays, she'll be sabotaging her own happiness, and if she goes, her father will have no one. The implications of this are that the patterns of life break as much as they build, meaning a change necessarily cuts off relationships as much as it builds them.
As Richard Peña's DVD commentary points out, Late Spring is teeming with the cultural change brought on by the occupation, and not all of it is clear-cut. Noriko's refusal to marry is one such bellwether of women's recent full citizenship, and a new divorcée named Aya (Yumeji Tsukioka) also illuminates this–although her only narrative function is to urge Noriko that marriage is the only way, despite her own crapping out at the tables. Further, friend of the family Mr. Onodera (Masao Mishima) inspires Noriko's joking revulsion when he announces that he has remarried, and the fact that there's no visible unbroken family onscreen in the whole movie shatters the idea that the family unit is bulletproof. Change is everywhere in Ozu, creating fissures and discontinuities that are impossible to stop. Beginnings send you on to endings; and endings create new circumstances to which one must adapt.
I do not take any of this lightly, I merely wish to note that the subdued approach Ozu so brilliantly developed has its minor drawbacks. One can point out the genius of his low-angle, environmentally aware camera while acknowledging that it can iron the juice out of a scene–as well as that the constant smiley-faced politeness of the characters can be taken to such an extreme as to squelch the punch. Though there are times when the technique pays off (few things hit with the force of gently-spoken cruel remarks), just as often it sucks the emotion out of a scene, leaving it merely…there. Not enough, in this case, to destroy the movie, but enough for me to place it on the shelf away from Ozu's masterpieces (Floating Weeds and Ohayo among them). Be advised, however, that these quibbles shouldn't stop you from seeing one of his most accessible films, a potential gateway drug to his mastery.
THE DVD Where Late Spring is concerned, the folks at Criterion are, alas, working with battered elements. A persistent vertical scratch bedevils the egregiously windowboxed full-frame image, while a strange flickering around the edges of the frame produces an unintended iris effect. The transfer itself is largely unimpeachable, razor-sharp and subtle in its rendering of the infinitude of greys, but the perhaps-unavoidable condition of the source print is a drawback. Evidently the soundtrack's condition was much more ideal, as the Dolby 1.0 mono sound is for the most part defect-free. Housed on the second platter of this two-disc set (which comes in a double-wide keepcase), Tokyo-Ga fares much better all-around, the razor-sharp fullscreen transfer rendering Ed Lachman's cinematography with vivid saturation minus unsightly bleed-through. The audio (again Dolby 1.0 mono) is equally good–you'll hear each of Wenders's monotonous remarks delivered with kick-ass clarity and the right balance of crispness and potency.
Extras for Late Spring include a feature commentary from Film Society of Lincoln Center program director Peña. Although he's initially a tad cutesy, he provides an excellent crash course in Ozu from both aesthetic and historical perspectives. And he's quick to scotch a "timeless" approach to the film by mentioning its very specific temporal co-ordinates (i.e., the American Occupation), offering much interest in his exegesis of Ozu's technique. Rounding things out are liner essays by VILLAGE VOICE critic Michael Atkinson and renowned Japan scholar Donald Richie; suffice it to say, Atkinson reveals his more contemporary voice while Richie betrays his long range of experience through background detail. They're commensurately admirable additions to the package.
TOKYO-GA (1985) *½/**** directed by Wim Wenders
Ozu is, of course, a lightning rod for idolatry, and so Wim Wenders's tribute film Tokyo-Ga is not exactly unprecedented. But though he claims that his document of a trip to Tokyo–made during a break in shooting Paris, Texas–is "not a pilgrimage," I'm hard-pressed to come up with another tag for the production's "Where's Yasujiro?" tone. Wenders is barely on the subway before he notices a boy who refuses to walk for his mother and makes the lofty claim that the kid stands for all the rebellious children in Ozu's films. (Though he moments later admits he might be imposing that, we know he's just covering his ass.) Mostly, however, Wenders doesn't find what he's looking for, noting the crazy urban sprawl that's defiantly un-Ozuian and conferring with fellow Das Neue Kino blowhard Werner Herzog that the important stuff is all gone.
The whole thing degenerates quickly into the tourist game of Weirdo Japan, where one finds fragments of the famously impenetrable culture and notes their nuttiness. Wenders does this several times, once at a pachinko parlour (where he predictably finds "loneliness"), once in the production of the wax fruit that adorns restaurant windows, and most pointedly at a driving range: noting the use of targets instead of holes, he decides that the Japanese have transformed golf into "pure form"–ruling out the fact that putting doesn't have nearly the jolt of driving. Clearly under the influence of his formidable wank, he wanders the streets making similar baseless analyses, coming face-to-face–sort of–with the great Chris Marker, whose Sans Soleil could teach Wenders a thing or two about outsiders in Japan and pilgrimages to film locations.
As for those locations: both regular cast member Chishu Ryu and long-time DP Yuharu Atsuta come in for brief interviews, but only the latter does any sort of justice to the Ozu legacy. Noting his long career with the director (beginning as an assistant), Atsuta breaks down in tears remembering the great man's death and how it let the air out of his own career. As if acting out one of the master's plots, the cameraman tearfully recalls not having his heart in his collaborations with other directors and his loneliness after that wrenching change of life. It's here the movie shows what it could have been had Wenders not chosen to be a disingenuous child in the midst of the Empire of Signs–and why uncritical adoration of this type never penetrates what's truly valuable in the work being worshipped.
108 minutes; NR; 1.33:1; Japanese DD 1.0 (Mono); English (optional) subtitles; 2 DVD-9s; Region One; Criterion
