English-language critics who ritually praise Yasujiro Ozu’s late period films (that is, those released between 1949 and 1962, the year before the director’s death) don’t always recognize that these works by the great Japanese master are not universally beloved, either inside or outside Japan. It’s generally not known, for instance, that the films (almost all of them silent) that Ozu made before fascism, in the late 1930s, tightened its grip on Japanese culture, are usually more racy -- and often more fun -- than the director’s later classics. There exist some experts (e.g., Noel Burch) who much prefer those earlier, livelier pictures to the more famous, postwar ones.
Furthermore, the generation of Japanese directors that came of age in the late 1950s tended to regard Ozu’s then-recent work with hostility. Because these men were all “war babies” – survivors of the Depression, Japan's military defeat and the American occupation -- and had attained maturity in a social reality utterly unlike the gentle world depicted in films like Late Spring (Banshun, 1949), it’s not hard to understand their point-of-view. Finally, there are American film fans that just don’t get Ozu: his world seems much too stylized, too rarefied, too unreal. So I happen to be an Ozu fan who can understand (up to a point) the position of at least some of the artist’s detractors.
To make the strongest possible case for this artist, I naturally turn to one of his greatest works from this late period: the 1951 masterpiece Early Summer (Bakushu). It is for me, of all Ozu’s films, the most artistically clever -- not an adjective usually associated with this artist. There is a deadpan slyness in the way the director introduces the question that drives the plot (who will Noriko (Setsuko Hara) choose to marry?) and also in the manner in which he conceals, until almost the very end of the film, the reason why that question is so crucial: the ability of the Mamiya family to survive intact depends absolutely upon Noriko’s choice.
The movie begins -- and even after the marriage plot is introduced, mostly proceeds -- as a series of loosely connected anecdotes, all written and staged as beautiful little set pieces. (This approach seems to me analogous to the way an actual family would experience and collect seemingly insignificant incidents to define its history.) But Ozu understands that all families, like all persons, are mortal, and after all the amusing little incidents, there occurs a single, decisive moment that will destroy the family forever. When, afterwards, Noriko announces to the others the identity of the man she has chosen to wed, she who has never wanted to hurt a soul suddenly realizes that it will now be impossible financially for her parents to stay in Tokyo. Yet she is too strong-willed to back down: she stubbornly insists on marital happiness for herself. The family’s none-too-subtle pressure on her to find a good husband, and quickly, has worked all too well.
In Early Summer, none of the characters die, but something just as important, from Ozu’s point-of-view, tragically ends: a happy family must be ruptured so that a new family, Noriko’s, can be born. This process is painful and sad, but also, as Ozu demonstrates, necessary and even beautiful. And Ozu’s highly artificial, even Mannerist, style paradoxically conveys both this pain and this beauty with a rare immediacy and power.
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