Casting a movie is a critical task for any director, but even more so for Ozu than most, as the chosen performer would often be called upon by the director not only to act a character, but to embody a particular type of human being with a rare completeness. His decision to hire Setsuko Hara for this and five other films during this period seems to me his greatest casting coup. (The other films with Hara are Late Spring (Banshun, 1949), Tokyo Story (Tokyo monogatari, 1953), Tokyo Twilight (Tokyo boshoku, 1957), Late Autumn (Akibiyori, 1960) and The End of Summer (Kohayagawa-ke no aki, 1961).) The qualities that make her unique as an actress are striking. Her eyes are amazingly expressive: always beautiful and alive, often revealing great depth and passion. She is considerably taller than most Japanese actresses, yet the odd awkwardness with which she moves and holds herself – which suggests the lingering self-consciousness of an adolescent girl too tall for her age group -- somehow makes her more attractive as a screen presence. (To see what I mean, view the final scene of Kozaburo Yoshimura’s wonderful film, A Ball at the Anjo House (Anjo-ke no Butokai, 1947), on YouTube here.) Lastly, the quiet intelligence she usually projects alternates often with an almost childlike playfulness that is very winning.
For Early Summer, Hara was called upon to “carry” the film to a greater degree than perhaps any other movie she made with Ozu. Some of its greatest and most poignant moments are therefore hers: Noriko’s mounting panic (which she does her best to conceal) as the pressure on her to marry slowly builds; her look of joy when she unexpectedly accepts a surprise proposal; and her desolation, almost despair, as she realizes the consequences of what she has done. The auteur theory notwithstanding, no great movie ever made has been the triumph only of a single artist. Though Ozu was very lucky to obtain the creative control he enjoyed with Shochiku Studios, he was luckier still to find a performer like Hara who could bring his artistic vision to life. She thus deserves, I believe, much of the credit for this masterpiece. (Interestingly, Hara chose to retire from films, at the height of her popularity, in 1963, the year Ozu died; she has never acted, been interviewed or even been photographed since.)
Finally, a word should be said about Ozu’s use of camera movement in the film. During the prewar era, the director liked to employ the occasional dolly or tracking shot in a scene, more often than not to make a comic point. But in the postwar movies, except for purely functional purposes (e.g., to follow two characters in conversation as they walk down a street), the use of such shots is practically unheard of. But Early Summer is the magnificent exception: the few, brief, moving camera shots in this film are more elegant, more beautiful and more poetic than those in any Ozu picture I know.
I will provide just two examples. When Noriko’s elderly granduncle comes to Tokyo for a visit, the family takes him to a performance of a kabuki play, which he watches with rapt fascination. A little later, the camera moves slowly forward through the now empty theatre, as if memorializing an evening the family will always cherish. Near the end of the movie, Ozu shows us a desolate stretch of beach and then the camera gradually begins to rise (in the only crane shot to appear in all his surviving work) to show us both Noriko and her sister-in-law Fumiko in the far distance, climbing a sand dune. In the following shot, the two women sit down on the sand to chat. Though the content of their conversation is banal, the unexpected lyricism of the opening shot gives the entire scene a lovely, elegiac quality.
Like any masterpiece, Early Summer can be viewed from many perspectives. It is to be hoped that those who have not yet experienced this work (or Ozu’s work in general) might be moved, through my exploration of several such ways of seeing, to seek it out and experience it themselves. 125 minutes; Black and White. Available on DVD through an excellent-quality Criterion Collection edition, with new English subtitles. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Summer
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