The Boston Phoenix
Review from issue: September 30 - October 7, 1999

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The composer's eye

Yasujiro Ozu shows us everything

by Chris Fujiwara

Late Spring Yasujiro Ozu's stature as one of the greatest filmmakers is not open to serious doubt. Although during his lifetime (1903-1962) he was less well known internationally than Akira Kurosawa and Kenji Mizoguchi, his work has been shown and admired increasingly since the '70s, and he is now probably the favorite Japanese director of most Westerners who have a favorite Japanese director. During October, the Harvard Film Archive will screen 11 Ozu films -- too few to show his full range (31 of his 53 features survive), but enough to reveal the subtlety, restraint, and emotional power of his work. If you know these films, you don't need to be told how much they reward revisiting. If you don't know them, the Harvard series could be a revelation.

Opinions about Ozu tend to follow one of two lines. In the more familiar view, defined by Donald Richie in Ozu: His Life and Films, the director is a Japanese traditionalist who celebrates the family and spirituality and regards its embattled position in the modern world with sadness. The dominant figure in recent Ozu studies is David Bordwell, who calls Ozu "one of the great experimental filmmakers" and advises us to attend to the virtuosic play with stylistic patterns in his work.

There's no need to choose between these points of view, and in the work of Richie and Bordwell, Ozu has certainly been better served by his critics than have most directors. There are, however, dangers in both approaches. Richie's "traditionalist" view can lead too easily to the assumption that Ozu's films are about something called "the Japanese family," remote from us in space and time. By doing so, we exoticize Ozu. It would be presumptuous to say that Setsuko Hara -- the quintessential Ozu heroine, beautiful, charming, docile, pouring sake for male companions but not drinking herself -- embodies the ideal of Japanese womanhood. It's just as presumptuous to take Ozu for a nostalgic cultural conservative when in fact his films radically attack the family and society and the roles they make available for men and women.

On the other hand, Bordwell's formalism threatens to turn Ozu into that forbidding figure, the art filmmaker. Ozu worked within the commercial film industry, making films for a mass audience. Paul Schrader has linked Ozu with Robert Bresson and Carl Dreyer, but though any number of Ozu films are as formally rigorous as Bresson's A Man Escaped, and several are as heartbreaking as Dreyer's Gertrud, in his relationship to the audience and in his ability to count on and play off its expectations about what a film as entertainment was supposed to do, Ozu is more comparable to the Hollywood directors Raoul Walsh and John Ford.

Ozu's energetic, brilliant silent films, influenced by Hollywood comedies and gangster films, show the populist basis of his art. I Was Born, But . . . (Umarete wa mita karedo, 1932; screens October 2 at 6 p.m.) is one of those late silent films (Japan, like Russia, was relatively late in adopting sound) in which camera, cutting, and acting styles both fully imply sound and in no way seem hampered by its lack. The central characters are two young boys who manage to dominate their peers when they move to a new neighborhood with their father but are crushed when they see -- in a home-movie screening -- their father acting like a fool to curry favor with his boss. Ozu is the greatest director of children, and I Was Born, But . . . is an astonishing, hilarious tour de force by its child actors. The film's frame of reference gradually expands, so that what you take at first for a charming glimpse of kids at play opens into a worldview as unsentimental as it is sympathetic, and what seems to be a light sketch of the compromises demanded by society becomes a stringent drama of disillusionment and loss.

Passing Fancy (Dekigokoro, 1933; October 10 at 7 p.m.), the logical companion film to I Was Born, But . . . , concerns an illiterate laborer whose hopeless infatuation for a younger woman leads him to fight with his young son. Passing Fancy shows how central the theme of family obligations is to Ozu's work. The scenes that deal with the father's relationship with the woman are uncertain in tone and rather predictable, but the film becomes suddenly powerful when it concentrates on the boy's shame and anger and the father's deepening attachment to his son. In this silent film, Ozu uses silence as a source of ambiguity, to withhold information and heighten your interest in what will come next.

Part of the uniqueness of Ozu lies in his mastery of the art of what comes next. He makes you pay attention to transitions -- linking dialogue scenes with intermediate shots of empty corridors, trains, streets, houses, and objects -- and he loves delay and ellipsis. In his later work, plot virtually disappears, or is reduced to a series of apparently banal incidents, through which you gradually perceive the idea and emotion of the film. Late Spring (Banshun, 1949; October 22 at 9:15 p.m. and October 23 at 9:30 p.m.) is about the relationship between a widowed, middle-aged professor (Chishu Ryu, Ozu's favorite actor) and his daughter, Noriko (Setsuko Hara), who is in her mid 20s. Noriko won't get married because, she says, her father would be lost without her. Deciding that she needs to become independent from him for her own good, her father tells her that he plans to remarry. At first shocked and jealous, Noriko lets herself be talked into accepting an arranged marriage.

Late Spring is one of the cinema's great love stories: a love story between a father and a daughter. The train ride they take together near the beginning of the film is a study in happiness: they say little; their faces reflect contentment with life and the pleasure each takes in the other. Hara's sublime performance is the film's center. Radiant throughout the first half of the film, Noriko spends much of the second half huddled, turned away from the other characters, darting resentful and hurt glances at them, or running away from them. As her wedding draws closer, she becomes reconciled with her father. It's in this last movement of the film, with Noriko's last-ditch attempt to hold on to the only happiness she believes in ("Please, father, why can't we remain as we are?"), that Late Spring becomes deeply upsetting. The film is uncompromising in its insistence that the separation of father and daughter is a tragedy for both.

Early Summer (Bakushu, 1951; October 15 at 8:30 p.m. and October 17 at 8:30 p.m.) might be a sequel to Late Spring. Setsuko Hara again plays an unmarried daughter named Noriko, but this time Chishu Ryu is her brother, not her father, and the focus shifts from a single relationship to the extended family. Like Late Spring, Early Summer starts like a comedy (and is very funny -- Ozu has a wilder sense of humor than he's sometimes given credit for), especially in the absurdist scenes involving Ryu's two little boys. The film's sharp changes in mood are full of surprise.

Early Summer is one of several Ozu films whose stylistic freedom seems limitless: cutting to follow a character through the various parts of a house, Ozu achieves both an atmospheric evocation of place and a specific rhythm not tied to place but born from composition and cutting. Whereas most directors impose spatial coherence through establishing shots and camera movement, Ozu refuses to construct a wholly intelligible, fluid, proscenium-like space. He gives us only the exact slices of the world -- rooms, hallways, and spaces around low tables (into which the actors drop as neatly as coins into slots) -- that correspond to the encounters that take place within it. His visual universe is as filled with gaps as are his narratives.

The relaxation of Ozu's late color films -- starting with Equinox Flower (Higanbana, 1958; October 8 at 9 p.m. and October 10 at 9 p.m.) -- goes along with an increased emphasis on the role of composition in creating meaning. Rather than adding detail to the visual field, color lets Ozu flatten the value of detail. His pure, hard pastels give presence to such objects as vases, flowers, bowls, kettles, chairs, and wall hangings without deforming his compositions. Color thus becomes a decorative, atmospheric element while meaning is conveyed largely through the actors' positions in the frame. Throughout Equinox Flower, the father who (in a reversal of the Late Spring paradigm) refuses to allow his daughter to marry is visually isolated in numerous subtle ways; the key moments of the film, which is filled with oblique confrontations, are those in which the daughter and other characters face him head on, trying to force him to see reason.

Ozu's last film, An Autumn Afternoon (Samma no aji, 1962; October 29 at 7 p.m. and October 30 at 9 p.m.), is a masterpiece. The film repeats the situation of Late Spring: again, widower Chishu Ryu seeks to marry off his daughter. This time, the absence of plot is total -- the film is an accumulation of events whose point, we gradually discover (as the emotional stakes of seemingly innocuous situations become clear), is that they are beside the point: they merely allow the characters to avoid confronting the irremediable. What Ozu does in An Autumn Afternoon is remarkable and perhaps without precedent: he represents the texture of everyday life, the underlying assumptions and values of society, the sense of time passing -- in short, everything -- with a lightness that passes as dispassionately objective, and from that he brings us to an awareness of catastrophic loss and of the inability of the "objective" to contain or express subjectivity.

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