Ozu’s marvellous heart-rending simple tale of difficult family decisions carries universal strength

Director: Yasujirō Ozu

Cast: Chishū Ryū (Shukichi Somiya), Setsuko Hara (Noriko Somiya), Yumeji Tsukioka (Aya Kitagawa), Haruko Sugimura (Taguchi Masa), Hohi Aoki (Katsuyoshi Taguchi), Jun Usami (Shuichi Hattori), Kuniko Miyake (Akiko Miwa), Masao Mishima (Jo Onodera), Yoshiko Tsubouchi (Kiku Onodera)

In post-war Japan, Professor Shukichi (Chishū Ryū) and his twenty-seven-year-old daughter Noriko (Setsuko Hara) live together in contentment. But what is to be done when her Aunt Masa (Haruko Sugimara) proclaims its time Noriko left the nest and made her own life, with a marriage Masa can arrange with a family friend. Can Noriko’s reluctance be overcome, or will it need the imminent threat of her own father’s potential remarriage to an attractive widow?

From a small-scale, intimate set-up like this – a slight story that can be summarised in little more than a few sentences – Yasujirō Ozu crafts a story of family, ageing, maturity and loss, sacrifice and regret that’s both uniquely Japanese and universal. So carefully is the whole film assembled, so patient Ozu’s intricate, formal structure of each scene that it’s ending of quiet, emotional force takes you overwhelmingly by surprise. It also leaves you challenging all sorts of perceptions you might have had about the rights and wrongs of duty and familial obligation.

Ozu’s Late Spring, like the greatest of his work – which this undoubtedly is – uses a series of carefully designed, stationary camera shots (so much so, it feels a shock when a camera tracks alongside Noriko and her father’s assistant Hattori, as they cycle to a beach) to carefully build a world both intimate and immediate and also oppressive. Furniture in rooms loom around the edges of the frame of the low positioned cameras or are lined up in such a way as if to force movement in one direction (such as, at one point, two parallel rows of chairs leading inevitably to a doorway). Characters are framed in doorways or surrounded by furniture, their choices visually whittled down to a single path.

It’s fitting for a film all about a decision – that everyone believes is for the best – being pushed directly onto Noriko. On paper of course, it certainly is. Surely, it’s no life for a young woman to essentially become nothing more than a housekeeper to her father? Noriko organises the house, dutifully prepares his meals, reminds him to shave – and seems completely content with this. But surely, it’s not what she should want – or indeed what anyone would want for her?

But yet it’s what she wants. Noriko is beautifully played by Setsuko Hara, in the first of her collaborations of Ozu. Hara creates a woman who is warm, bright, funny and greets every day with a beaming smile. She is content with her lot, shrugging off any idea of change. She barely seems to recognise the shy attempts at seduction that Hattori (a suitably bashful Jun Usami) tries – smilingly turning down his concert invitation (a concert we then see him attend alone, his hat filling the second chair he purchased) and reacting with smiling happiness when he reaffirms his long-running engagement is indeed progressing to marriage (far from, it is clear, his first choice).

Noriko’s world is only shaken by the suggestion of marriage, an idea that reduces her to withdrawn, downcast quietness, shuttering herself off from the world. The only thing that could horrify her more is the idea of her father remarrying – she’d already confessed her distaste at her honorary uncle, Shukichi’s colleague Onodera, re-marrying. Her rejection stems from her desire, it seems, for things to remain as they are – and people to do so as well. But that’s also because change requires the old life to be left behind – and her father makes clear he will accept a reduced role.

You could argue its right to push Noriko away from a life of sheltered self-sacrifice and towards something that feels more real and mature. That feels like the modern world. But isn’t this just the old social rules reapplying themselves in new ways? Late Spring takes place at a turning point in Japan. Shukichi and Masa are of a pre-war generation: their homes and clothing are as well, even their formal movements, speech, Shukichi’s love of Noh theatre and (in Masa’s case) clinging to old wives tales smacks of a pre-1945 way of thinking. There everything has a natural order – and Noriko’s marriage is an inevitable part of this.

But there are signs of a new Japan all around them – literally so, as the path to the beach is lined with American military and Coca-Cola signs and a Tokyo increasingly filled with Western coffee bars, along with kids playing baseball and giggling talk of Gary Cooper and other film stars. Noriko even has an alternative path presented in the form of her friend Aya (a charming performance by Yumeji Tsukioka). Aya has decided not to remarry after her post-war divorce, learned English, trained as a stenographer and dresses in the latest Western fashions. Her home is full of Western furniture and the traditional Japanese floor sitting leaves her with sore knees after minutes. She’s the sign of a new Japan on the horizon, one where traditions carry less weight, and choices can be more personal.

The problem is Noriko’s conservative choices don’t work in either worlds. She’s not radical enough to follow Aya (despite half-hearted enquiries), and the idea of non-marriage is alien in the world she wants to stay in. As Ozu and Hara make clear, this locks her into clinging to no change at all. She clearly would never-leave unless pushed. And a white lie from her father is what does it: for Noriko knows that would end her role in her father’s home and her duty to him would be leave. It’s the only duty that would never be her choice.

Nevertheless it’s clearly what her father believes is best for her. Beautifully played by Chishū Ryū, he’s a seeming curmudgeon at first who reveals himself to be a man of deep feeling and self-sacrifice – there is a beautiful moment when he outwardly denies his white lie about intended marriage, while his face subtly twitches. Ryū makes Shukichi a man of quiet dignity, determined to do the best for his daughter, regardless of his own feelings (which are clearly to continue things as they are).

So both parties work towards the ending of a way of life they both desperately want to cling to, doing so in a misguided act of duty towards the other. Is it though? Ozu makes that hard for us to be completely comfortable: our last sight of Noriko, in her wedding garb, sees her bow one final time to the father she loves while the film’s coda gives a heartbreaking moment of unbearable emotional toil for Ryū while he simply sits peeling an apple.

Does it have to be like this? The idea of a daughter subjugating her life to her father feels mistaken, but isn’t that her choice not ours? But how alien is such a conservative and non-traditional choice, in a country at a turning point between tradition and new possibilities? And can you blame people for sacrificing what they want, because they believe the result is better for someone else? It’s an eternally relatable scenario that gives Ozu’s film an undeniable, compelling emotional force, which creeps up on you and crashes over you like high tide waves Ozu closes the film with. Marvellous.