Late Spring

The widowed professor Shukichi Somiya lives with his twenty-seven-year-old daughter Noriko. Everyone around them pushes her to marry; she resists so as not to leave her father alone. When he says he intends to remarry she accepts an arranged proposal. The last section turns on the father's own decision, and we will not write here what is said there. Yasujirō Ozu directed and wrote it with Kogo Noda; the two reunited after fourteen years and worked exclusively together until Ozu's death in 1963. Setsuko Hara plays Noriko for the first time and becomes the archetypal Ozu woman; they made six more films together. Chishū Ryū plays the father. Ozu's formal signatures are settled here: the camera at the eye level of a seated person, static compositions, plain cuts instead of dissolves, and pillow shots between scenes that serve no narrative purpose. The most argued-over moment is at the inn in Kyoto. After Noriko speaks about the separation, Ozu cuts to a long shot of a vase and back to her weeping face. The philosopher Gilles Deleuze read that shot as time itself: that which endures through the succession of changing states. The American occupation censored things. It found the arranged-marriage meeting feudalistic and removed references to wartime naval service and to bomb damage in Tokyo. The scholar Lars-Martin Sorensen argues that Ozu resisted quietly by foregrounding traditional Japanese imagery: temples, Noh theatre and the gardens of Kyoto. It is the first film of the Noriko trilogy, followed by Early Summer in 1951 and Tokyo Story in 1953. In all three Setsuko Hara plays unrelated women who share the name. It opened on 19 September 1949, was named best film of the year by Kinema Junpo and won four Mainichi Awards. It placed 15th in the 2012 Sight and Sound poll. Rotten Tomatoes sits at 100 percent. Who it is for: viewers who like patient, quiet, formal films. Who it is not for: anyone expecting conflict. Nobody raises their voice and every break happens at a dining table.