Daily Archives: Monday, October 26, 2015

  • Late Spring

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Banshun

    Yasujiro Ozu (1949)

    Noriko Smiling, Adam Mars-Jones’s 2011 essay on Late Spring, made me want to see the film and I liked it – not as much as Mars-Jones’s erudite and entertaining book but more than An Autumn Afternoon.  The themes and storyline of the two films are similar but Late Spring has a tighter focus on the relationship between a father and daughter, and what the young woman’s marriage will mean for them both.  Noriko (Setsuko Hara), an only child, keeps house for her widowed father, Professor Somiya (Chishu Ryu), on the outskirts of Tokyo.  Somiya’s sister, Masa (Haruko Sugimura), persuades her brother that it’s high time the twenty-seven year old Noriko was married.  Neither father nor daughter is keen for their domestic life together to change.  The drama of Late Spring is centred on how both come to accept that it must change.  As always, it takes a little time to adjust to the disjunction between the words in the subtitles and the Japanese actors’ faces and tones of voice.  It was Chishu Ryu, now more familiar and so easier to read, who drew me into the story.  Ryu’s Somiya fights quietly but compellingly against feelings of self-interest:  he’s affecting in his anxiety about the prospect of losing Noriko to another man; in his sadness when he recognises that she will marry; and, especially, in his resigned melancholy when he returns home after her wedding.  I found Setsuko Hara a more gradually acquired taste.  In the early stages, Noriko’s giggling modesty seems too much (when Aunt Masa suggests that Noriko alter a pair of her uncle’s trousers and takes these from a bag, I thought the giggles were even mistimed).  But Setsuko Hara is an increasingly strong presence, especially when Noriko’s feelings are not so obviously expressed.  I must admit that, as usual, I found it easier to interpret the pantomime of the actors with more Western features – like Jun Usami, who plays Somiya’s assistant Hattori.  Haruko Sugimura’s match-making Masa is readable for a different reason; the character is an obvious one.

    Somiya at first suggests that Hattori might be a good husband for Noriko, who laughs at this ridiculous idea:  the young man, she explains to her father, is already engaged.  Hattori is nevertheless keen to spend time with Noriko.  They go on a cycle ride together and he then invites her to accompany him to a violin concert in Tokyo – an invitation that Noriko declines.  I assumed that this signalled, rather than a change of heart, Noriko’s alertness to social convention; that accompanying Hattori to a concert would be unacceptably public (even though the bike ride to the seaside and Noriko and Hattori’s conversation there allows for greater intimacy between them).  Noriko’s most startling sexual attitude is expressed in her reaction to the remarriage of her father’s colleague Onodera, whom she bumps into during a shopping trip to Tokyo.  Like Somiya, Onodera (Masao Mishima) was a widower and has a daughter.  Noriko tells him – although with a characteristic smile on her face – that she thinks his second marriage is ‘dirty’.  Onodera subsequently reminds Noriko, twice, of this.  He does so humorously but the sense that Noriko was serious in what she originally said persists under the jocular tone of Onodera’s later conversations with her.  Noriko is obliged to think again when she actually meets Onodera’s second wife and perceives her to be a decent woman – but has her mind already been changed by the threat of her own father’s remarrying?  (And, by the time she meets the new Mrs Onodera, Noriko is herself preparing to be married.)  The threat of a stepmother for Noriko takes the form of Mrs Miwa (Kuniko Miyake), a widow who is introduced to Somiya by Aunt Masa.  When Somiya and Noriko go to a Noh play, the widow is also in the audience and Noriko sees her father smile at Mrs Miwa:  Noriko’s jealousy and horror at the prospect of losing her father to another woman are plain to see.  (To put it mildly:  even allowing that the rest of the audience are concentrating on the onstage performance at the theatre, Noriko’s face is too obviously miserable in reaction to the smiles exchanged between Somiya and Mrs Miwa.)

    This clearly raises questions about the nature of Noriko’s love for her father.  Adam Mars-Jones rejects the school of Late Spring thought that sees her as a Daddy’s girl with an Electra complex.  I agree that’s a reductive reading of Noriko’s complex personality yet it’s one that’s hard to ignore when, after Noriko’s wedding, Somiya mentions to his daughter’s friend Aya (Yumeji Tsukioka) that he pretended he was going to marry Mrs Miwa in order to persuade Noriko to marry.  This suggests that Noriko is, by her father’s ruse, forced to recognise that he is going to have a new partner so she may as well get a new partner too.  (Does she also think the idea of Mrs Miwa is so ‘dirty’ that she would rather separate herself from Somiya?)  The bedroom arrangements of father and daughter, when they visit Onodera and his new wife in Kyoto, are also immediately surprising to a Western viewer.  Soniya and Noriko sleep on futons in the same room, side by side:  one assumes that’s not unconventional but the mutual regret both father and daughter express that this time in Kyoto will be the last they spend together as a couple is harder to ignore.  So is the fact that Satake, the man whom Noriko marries, never appears in the film.  Late Spring, which Ozu and Kogo Noda adapted from Father and Daughter, a short novel by Kazuo Hirotsu, was particularly topical on its release in 1949.   The new Japanese constitution effective from 1947 made it easier for a woman to divorce her husband – as Aya in Late Spring has recently done.  From the start of 1948, those aged twenty or over were allowed to marry consensually without their parents’ agreement.  Noriko is so strongly individualised, though, that it’s hard to see her as representative of young women of her generation more generally.  This is partly a result of Setsuko Hara’s characterisation but it’s partly already in the script:  Aya reminds her friend that, of all the girls in their class at school, only Noriko and one other girl have not yet been married.

    I understand that the Noh performance is central to Late Spring and may well give the film its title:  according to Wikipedia, the work being performed ‘is called Kakitsubata or “The Water Iris.” (The water iris in Japan is a plant which blooms, usually in marshland or other moist soil, in mid-to-late-spring)’.  Even so, the Noh sequence is punitively long. I don’t really get Ozu’s ‘pillow shots’ either.  But he presents vivid images of Japan under American occupation.  The most obviously striking is a Coca-Cola sign on the beach where Noriko goes with Hattori but there are other American – specifically Hollywood – references.  Aunt Masa recommends Satake to Noriko as a suitable husband for reasons which include his facial resemblance, Masa claims, to Gary Cooper – ‘especially his mouth … but not the top half’.  The bridal music on the soundtrack as Noriko leaves home for her wedding incorporates here-comes-the-bride phrases familiar at the matrimonial climax to countless American films of the period.

    27 February 2015

  • Savage Grace

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Tom Kalin (2007)

    What’s the point of this listless film?  The true life story of the wealthy Baekeland family is too extraordinary to be capable of suggesting anything typical or essential in the relationships of mothers, fathers and only sons – but Barbara Daly Baekeland (a beautiful social climber, who’s married out of her class), her husband Brooks (a scion of the inventor of Bakelite) and their son Tony aren’t interesting, let alone compelling, as individuals.  The voice-over narration is by Tony; it’s obvious from the word go that his relationship with Barbara is going to be pathologically close.  Yet Tom Kalin and the  scenarist Howard A Rodman appear to assume that it’s enough just to reveal the fact of Tony’s bisexuality and eventually incestuous relationship with his mother – if only there was as much penetration in the direction and writing as there is on the screen.  The presentation of the various couplings – and one threesome – is largely pictorial; and the characters seem drawn to each other less by psychological or sexual impulsion than by want of anything better to do – and by the lack of available options.   Most of the possible permutations occur in the course of Savage Grace.  Tony’s girlfriend is Blanca but he prefers boys and pairs up with Jake.  Brooks leaves Barbara and sets up house with Blanca.  Sam, a supposedly homosexual ‘walker’ for Barbara, moves in and seduces Tony – then Barbara, before Tony joins them both in bed.   Finally and fatally, it’s Barbara and Tony.   The film moves from New York in the late forties to Paris in the late fifties to Spain in the late sixties and back to Paris before Tony kills Barbara in a London flat in 1972 (although I was drowsing by this point).   The closing credits tell us that he was found guilty of manslaughter, went to Broadmoor for eight years, returned to the USA in 1980, attempted to murder Barbara’s mother, was put away again, and committed suicide a year later.

    Julianne Moore lacks the energy to dramatise the tensions arising from Barbara’s modest background, her husband’s social discomfort with and personal contempt for her clumsy pretensions.   As usual, she’s remarkable to look at but the characterisation is limited:  we understand that the women Moore is playing are unhappy but not much more.   Her motor seems usually to run at the same slow pace; she becomes animated only at moments which are implausibly melodramatic – here, at a lunch party and in a scene at Mallorca airport when Barbara starts yelling purple prose and expletives at her husband and his young Spanish mistress.  Eddie Redmayne’s colouring and cheekbones make him a good physical match with Moore but he’s vacuous as Tony – as if the character’s helplessness justified sleepwalking through the part.   In the overdone opening scenes in New York, Stephen Dillane telegraphs his feelings about Barbara and her mother.  But Dillane’s a good actor and, once the action moves to Europe, his combination of tensile strength and the way he seems to shrink physically in avoiding suffocating life with Barbara makes for the best performance in the film.  It’s impossible to understand, however, how their marriage has lasted so long; if it’s a mutually satisfying sex life that transcends their other incompatibilities, there’s no sign of this.    Hugh Dancy gives a not surprisingly uncertain performance as the walker-mentor-bedfellow.  Others have more success in smaller parts – not least because they’re relatively believable human beings – including Elena Anaya as Blanca, Belén Rueda as the wife of one of Brooks’s Spanish friends, and, especially, Anne Reid as Barbara’s mother.   The closing credits are very hard to read:  this may be either smart thinking or a final example at artiness that ends up being as uncommunicative as most of what’s preceded it.

    14 September 2008

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