Late Spring (1949) critic reviews on MUBI (2024)

In Yasujiro Ozu's 1949 film, rigid formality leaves much unsaid, but Ozu reveals the hidden depths of ordinary life with a quiet astonishment and observes his characters with an exacting subtlety of expression..

Though Ozu would revisit and refine Late Spring's themes and motifs throughout the final stretch of his career, no other movie speaks more to his ability to invest tremendous emotional weight into the completely quotidian, building to what's become the single most debated moment in his body of work: A mysterious four-shot sequence that cuts between Noriko's face and an empty vase, suggesting complex currents of feeling, change, and resignation.

While the master is often said to have deliberately over-rehearsed and micromanaged the feeling out of his actors (not unlike Robert Bresson after him), Late Spring is a testament to the power of perfectly calculated gestures and movements, one so fascinating that it is easy to forget to cry until the very end.

Movies resurrect the beautiful dead, Susan Sontag once wrote, and there's no better way to commemorate Hara than to watch her in Late Spring, a film in which she is heartbreakingly vibrant.

When American audiences were devouring the action-packed samurai epics of Akira Kurosawa in the 1950s (films equally great in their own right), Ozu was seen as being too restrained, too traditional, "too Japanese." But now, in retrospect, as Richard Pena points out in his commentary track for the Blu-ray and DVD, Ozu can be regarded as one of cinema's exceptional modernists. He ranks among the international masters of the form, and Late Spring is one of his best.

Few films have expressed, with as much force and lyricism as Ozu's Late Spring, the various emotions associated with the ongoing, perpetual dissolution of "the world as we know it." Like so few other films, Late Spring illustrates that we might acknowledge, even celebrate, the moment when we are rushed, unceremoniously, from life's stage by the ceaseless momentum of youth and currency and newness, there's no rule that says we have to be happy about it.

Achieves tremendous power in its final scene by abruptly shifting focus, revealing that the film is in fact about the sacrifices parents make for their childrens' happiness. However, Noriko's dilemma, which occupies the vast majority of its running time, feels so alien and abstract to me that I'm somewhat detached until those last couple of minutes.

Like many Ozu movies, Late Spring (1949) is a triumph of sympathetic, respectful clarity and a surgical strike at the heart, but it also stands alone as a turning point in his development as a sociopolitical artist. It is, first of all, the magisterial archetype for the shomin-geki—the "modern family drama"—a genre Ozu helped define and that remains his kingdom to reign.

By focusing on this critical juncture in the life of a family, Ozu found endless grace notes on the theme of generational conflict, cultural changes (reflected visually in Ozu's painterly attention to the changing seasons), and the character of Japan. While the Criterion Collection has done a fine job at making Ozu's later works available on DVD, viewers will be rewarded by seeing them in a theater; there, they are (to paraphrase Jim Jarmusch on TOKYO STORY) transformative experiences.

Few feelings in Late Spring are ever articulated; instead, they're relegated to awkward exchanges and private moments of despair, often via something as simple and powerful as a resigned bowing of the head. For those weaned on Hollywood melodrama, Ozu may seem to possess the most foreign of sensibilities, but he knows that life's most dramatic moments often pass with a sigh, not a bang.

Ozu's later, more refined style had been gradually percolating throughout the 1940s and Late Spring (Banshun, 1949) became the first and finest telling of a story Ozu was to remake, with variations, many times.

By providing minimal plot and eliminating external catalysts, Ozu portrays an honest reflection of contemporary Japanese middle and lower class family life, the shomin-geki. Stripped of a manipulative and artificial storyline, Late Spring reveals a sincere concern for the plight of the common man, an affectionate celebration for the subtle beauty of everyday life, and a profound sympathy for the inevitable passage of time.