Late Spring

A highlight of Ozu's post-war work, and rather more didactic than the late films I'm familiar with. There is apparently a lively discourse over the extent to which Ozu is critical of the painfully arranged marriage the film ends on. Noriko is in the late spring of life – 27 and unmarried, happily living with her widowed father in a state of arrested development. Eventually her father puts his foot down and explains to her the necessity of leaving home and starting her own family. Ozu will abandon such lecturing in future, but here his thinking is very plainly spelled out. Noriko's situation is unnatural. Her devotion to her father, while honourable, is also self-serving. She is comfortable and content, but her duty is to work at creating her own happiness with a husband. Noriko assents and admits that she has been selfish.

I don't think Ozu ultimately wishes to question the demands that tradition places on people. They are a source of pain that must be endured. The father is left bereft by his daughter's marriage – there will be no one to look after him in his old age. Likewise Noriko must try to build a relationship with a man she barely knows. These are wrenching transitions, but the naturalistic title of the film implies that they are inevitable parts of the cycle of life, and must be borne with fortitude and determination. Happiness requires work. You can't just coast on the achievements of your parents.

The film is humane enough to linger on the melancholy and bitter emotions created by the necessity of marriage. The famous scenes – at the Noh play, the empty vase – are showcases for Noriko's jealousy and shame. The interesting thing about Late Spring is that future films will valourise the Noriko character's attachments as signs of overbearing loyalty rather than selfishness. Ozu keeps returning to the archetype of the dutiful daughter and her slightly warped attachment to the old ways (where remarriage is unaccountably a filthy thing to do), but he will become more tender in his portrayal of her.

Noriko's vivacious best friend is a sign of things to come – a less conservative film-maker would have made her the hero. She has taken advantage of the freedoms after the war to divorce the pig of a man she married, and is making her own money as a stenographer. Noriko is attracted to the independence of not having a husband, but unlike her friend she buys this by looking after her doddery father who she can wrap around her little finger. Tellingly, even her entirely modan gaaru best friend insists that Noriko should get a husband already. It's a part of growing up and becoming your own person, even if it's still couched in the traditions of marriage and male authority.

The film established Ozu's famous late style. A rigidly, almost obsessively, static camera – which doesn't move even when the characters are on bikes. The low angles which position the audience as reverent observers of the quotidian interactions of middle-class families. The ambiguous pillow-shots, which sometimes serve to establish a setting, sometimes as moments of reflection, or in the famous example of the vase, to show time passing between Noriko's change of mood. The film opens on the image of a train station – perhaps a symbolic suggestion of the journey out of the family home Noriko must undertake. It ends on footage of waves on the beach – an image grounding the action of the film in the timeless movements of nature. It's a masterpiece, but Ozu's themes are still rather close to the surface. He will become subtler and more ambiguous as he continued to revisit these stories in the films that followed.

Floating Weeds

A gorgeous film by Yasujirō Ozu, and fittingly given it’s a story about a theatre troupe, a showcase of fine acting talent. Ganjirō Nakamura plays a hammy actor paying a visit to an old flame and an illegitimate son who thinks he’s just an embarrassing uncle. It’s a very subtle performance, conveying the ironies of a man trying and failing to lead a business and a family, someone who expects authority but doesn’t earn it.

The title is entirely metaphorical, perhaps a way of evoking how exposed the itinerant actors are to the whims of fortune. But floating weeds tangle around each other and clump together, which is exactly what we see the characters do in the film. Nakamura has two families, the acting company and his former lover's household, and they intertwine in ways he doesn’t want but cannot prevent. His arrogance leads to him losing both, and having to set out again on his own.

Nakamura is backed up by a veritable who’s who of Japanese acting talent. Machiko Kyō (of Rashomon fame) gives a star turn as the jealous Sumiko, and Ayako Wakao (who will become Masumura’s favourite in the 60s) is stunning as the young actress who is a master of seduction. Ozu stalwarts Haruko Sugimura and Chishū Ryū also give fine performances in minor roles. And the three horny actors trying to chat up the town’s young ladies are great fun. This is one of Ozu’s most enjoyable films.

Tokyo Story

This is a long film, and it accrues significance with each scene. The effect is something like the epiphanies Joyce builds to in his Dubliners short stories, except that here the first one hits about half way through, with each scene after that adding fresh ones.

For the father, it's when he gets drunk with some old friends and the mask of respectability slips. He's finally able to be honest, and reveal his disappointment with his children. But unlike his more impatient drinking buddies, he at least realises that his expectations may be too high.

For the mother, it's when she stays over with her son's widow Noriko, after being turned out of her daughter's house. There she urges Noriko to let go of her late husband, and try to find a new partner. (The devoted young woman who refuses to marry and stray from her family is a recurring Ozu motif).

The final big whammy concerns Noriko herself – not a blood relative, yet does more for her adoptive parents than their own sons and daughters. Why? The sense of duty she displays is overwhelming. When she bursts into tears in front of the grandfather at the end of the film, she admits to feeling lonely and worried about the future as a single woman living alone in Tokyo. Although she is ashamed of her wish to move on and find a new husband, it's also obvious that she yearns for the surrogate family she already has, perhaps the only family she has (her own parents are never mentioned – they may have died in the war).

There is something vampiric about the care Noriko shows for her late husband's parents. As she explains to her sister in law, the distance between parents and children grows as time passes. It's a normal development that will happen to her eventually as well. That's why her gift of a watch from the grandfather is such a laden symbol. Time dissolves all attachments. Although given as a memento, it will also serve as her key to freedom.

The End of Summer

More reflections on Ozu's very particular style after watching the follow-up to Late Autumn. The End of Summer has its fair share of brilliantly framed compositions, which are accentuated by the static camera. The film really is photography with voices sometimes. There are more 'pillow shots' as well – not just used to establish a new scene but to indicate the passing of time or to add space and extend a dramatic moment (frequently using music to do so). Only once is a jump cut used to highlight a contrasting change of tone.

I may have been wrong to describe the actors as looking 'beyond' the camera, and in this film very often Ozu establishes where characters are sitting, and then has them directly address the viewer, with the actors definitely looking at the camera. This should place the audience within the scene, but paradoxically it doesn't. Maybe this is due to the placing of the camera at naval height rather than at eye level (elevating the characters in the process). But also there is something weirdly fourth-wall breaking about a direct address to camera. Ozu's style (perhaps accidentally) creates this intermediate space whereby the audience is continually aware of a world being portrayed, and their fleeting, intercutting presence in it.

Which is a good place to start thinking about the themes of the film. The title's appeal to nature's rhythms is a gloss over the intimate portraits of parents and children and how one generation replaces the next. The End of Summer is about the death of a patriarch, an "incorrigible sinner", an overgrown boy always on his summer holidays. Likewise Late Autumn is about Setsuko Hara approaching middle age, and the choices she has to make as a result. The audience, rather than identifying with particular characters or following a plot, take the part of serene observers of these natural rhythms to human life.

Late Autumn

My first time watching an Ozu film, and I started with one of his final ones where his style is the most pared down and 'pure', following the recommendation of the Guardian's John Patterson. And it's all there: the camera placed a little below waist-height rather than at eye-level (so we are always looking slightly up), the characters in mid-shot almost but not quite facing the audience, the deep focus compositions of frames within frames. And of course, the camera never moves. Ever.

The combined effect of this extremely particular style is worth thinking about. The tilt up from waist-height puts the audience in a humble position, close to the ground, reverential. The mid-shot portraits feel weirdly artificial – we're almost behind the eyes of the person being addressed, but the actors always look slightly beyond the camera. It's as if the audience slides literally in between the conversation (how the actors worked with a camera placed this way is really difficult to imagine). The layered depth of field isn't distractingly stage-y, but does enforce a sense of spaces sliding open and closed between the characters, invisible barriers only occasionally being lifted. The score is more conventional – accentuating moments of comedy but also supercharging melodramatic scenes.

While the plot and concerns of the film are minute – marriage, family and manners – the style in which they are presented does much to elevate them in the audiences eyes (Patterson's comparison with Jane Austen is a great way of thinking about it, and rubbishes the notion that these films are impenetrably Japanese). Ozu is supremely sensitive to the heroic sacrifices generations of women make, and the callousness of powerful men who meddle in women's lives for their own amusement. Throughout the film, Setsuko Hara grins maniacally, and a little bit scarily, through conversations with the male matchmakers. It ends with her alone, deprived of her daughter, but with a genuine smile on her face. The film is all about the conflict between public conformity and private happiness – all of which is captured in that sad smile.