Sōshun
Yasujiro Ozu (1956)
The season of the translated English title[1], with its promise of warmth to come, is at odds with the spiritual weather described and explored by Yasujiro Ozu in this, his longest-ever film (145 minutes) and the next to last that he made in black and white. Its immediate predecessor in the Ozu filmography is Tokyo Story (1953). According to Nick Wrigley’s booklet essay accompanying a BFI DVD release of Early Spring in 2012 (an extract formed the programme note for this screening), Ozu was ‘profoundly ashamed that Tokyo Story was considered to be an ordinary melodrama that makes audiences cry’. He was at pains in his next film to ‘avoid anything dramatic, and instead piled up scenes where nothing at all happens, so as to let the audience feel the sadness of their existence’. His strategy succeeds. Early Spring is impressive but formidably pessimistic.
Shoji (Ryo Ikebe), a white-collar worker at a Tokyo brick-making company is, in his mid-thirties, dissatisfied with his job and his home life. He starts to cheat on his wife, Masako (Chikage Awashima), with the younger Chiyo (Keiko Kishi), the office flirt, whose big eyes have earned her the nickname Goldfish. By the time that Shoji is transferred to a provincial outpost of the company, he and Masako have separated, and he travels to his new base alone. A few days later, Masako decides to join him there. They agree to make a new start. That’s about it, in terms of essential plot. The storyline doesn’t sound very original but Ozu takes care to deprive familiar events in a marital-cum-midlife-crisis drama of the emotions with which they’re usually charged. There’s next to no passion in Shoji’s affair with the Goldfish. He and Masako eventually reconcile without any suggestion that their relationship has been reinvigorated.
The couple once had a son, who died of infant cholera. The scene that reveals this, some way into the narrative, is perhaps the most startling illustration of Ozu’s approach in Early Spring, which he wrote with his frequent collaborator, Kogo Noda. Shoji tells a male work colleague that he hadn’t wanted to be a father in the first place but got used to his son and, when the boy died, ‘I cried and cried’. He and Masako tried for another child but it didn’t happen. Although the bereavement has no doubt contributed to Shoji’s disillusionment, there’s little to suggest that he and his wife were happy in the early years of their marriage. And children aren’t presented in this film as wholly and wonderfully transformative in their parents’ lives. Another of Shoji’s colleagues drily remarks that ‘babies come along more often than pay rises’.
The principals, in other words, aren’t the only disappointed people in Early Spring and the pervasive atmosphere of disenchantment is numbing: characters don’t seem to fight for their marriages or their ‘salaryman’ jobs or even, in one case, to stay alive. There is companionship – at work, in bars and mahjong parlours – but, in sharp contrast to Tokyo Story (and other Ozus), little interaction between different generations of a family. Several sequences feature people singing together, including ‘The Fireflies Glow’ (to the tune of ‘Auld Lang Syne’), but even convivial exchanges have a going-through-the-motions quality. As always in Ozu, domestic scenes still predominate but to bleak effect on this occasion. They mostly take place in Shoji and Masako’s home, which is not only loveless but welcomes few visitors. (Despite that, the cast seems, for this director, unusually large. The well-known faces include Chishu Ryu and Haruko Sugimura.)
Occasional outdoor shots – notably of work buildings, with the brick factory chimney belching smoke – compound rather than relieve the characters’ sense of claustrophobia. As usual in Ozu films of this period, you’re reminded, in references to military service, of the recentness of the World War. The legacy of Allied Occupation, which ended in 1952, is evident in English language advertising on display, such as a lone, rather confounding travel poster that urges a visit to Finland.
19 October 2021
[1] According to Google’s Japanese-English translator, the original Japanese title is climatically neutral with ‘sōshun‘ translated as ‘seasonal’.
