Yasujirô Ozu

Late Spring

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Noriko laughs

Late Spring is the title and late spring is the condition of its central character, a woman who, at the advanced age of 27, is almost too old for marriage – she’s in the late spring of her adult life. It’s 1949 and in Japan the American occupiers are running the show after the end of the Second World War. 27-year-old Noriko is the smiling, gracious, pretty and dutiful daughter of kindly widower Shukichi (Chishû Ryû). As far as he’s concerned she’s perfect in every way except one – she really doesn’t want to marry. When Noriko meets one of her father’s old colleagues, a man who has recently remarried, she tells him that … Read more

Tokyo Story

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Shukichi and Tomi at the spa

1953’s Tokyo Story is based on a film its director, Yasujirô Ozu, hadn’t actually seen. But his writer, Kôgo Noda, had. And so the 1937 movie Make Way for Tomorrow was adapted into what is regularly described as one of the best movies ever made – 2012’s Directors Poll by Sight and Sound magazine put Tokyo Story in the number one slot. Both are punishing weepies, both “could make a stone cry” (as Orson Welles said about Make Way for Tomorrow), but Ozu’s film is also an exercise in an equally punishing minimalism. There are no movements from Ozu’s static camera. Actually, there is one, and that’s quite telling. On top of that … Read more