A Film Canon

Late Spring marks the beginning of a new period in Ozu's career, in which the issue of arranged marriage is used as a pretext both for wider reflections about tradition and modernity, and for a more systematic pursuit of mono no aware - the sadness of things - via a refinement of wabi-sabi - imperfection, assymetry, transience. These are respectively encapsulated in the dynamic between Setsuko Hara's laugh and Chishu Ryu's smile, both of which become synonymous with just this bittersweet, comprehensive repose (partly as a result of Ozu's increasingly static camera, and use of 360-degree editing), and a radical refinement of those ma, or empty spaces, which punctuate the narrative, and have, up until The Record Of A Tenement Gentleman, been more or less narrativised themselves, but here achieve the nexus between abstraction and signification sought by scribe Somiyu (Ryu), culminating with an extended depiction of a pebble garden, in which the use of overlapping blocks of space prevents any concrete orientation. Similarly, the narrative turns on an exquisite, melancholy conflation of tradition and modernity - Noriko's (Hara) refusal to enter into an arranged marriage, but predominantly for the sake of caring for Somiyu, her father, while the most vocal advocate of such a marriage centres her argument on pragmatic, rather than traditional, imperatives. Hence an increasing oblivion to transience, or mono no aware, as the most accurate, available affirmation of it, as evinced in the spectacle of a lone Coca-Cola advertisement set against the ocean, as well as in the elegant fusion of Japanese and Western domestic topographies, clearest in the gradual translocation of tea drinking from floor to armchairs (one of Noriko's friends complains of sore knees), and from tea itself to cake, coffee, sugar, spoons and the emergent world of consumer items that lies just beyond them, as if the central crime of modernity - and consumerism - were a failure to recognise its own inevitable ephemerality.