A Film Canon

Early Spring relocates Ozu's tension between tradition and modernity from marriage to the workplace, presenting the transition from craftsmanship to "the fate of the salaried worker" as the most enduring scar of the war. In place of the extended families of the Noriko trilogy, Ozu elaborates a mass-produced line of office workers - at desks, in bars, in parks, in front of bathroom mirrors - that tends to preclude his characteristic 360° conversational editing, as well as his use of the stationary, low-level tatami shot, both of which are reserved for the fleeting domestic intimacy of the central couple. At the same time, he ruptures his minimalistic aesthetic with a rare use of the mobile camera, an elaborate imprisonment of long-shot characters within domestic and corporate architecture, and a marked increase in his depictions of the exterior world, which start to resemble conventional establishing shots, rather than the exquisite abstractions of his earlier works. This produces an unusually visceral tone, encompassing broad, bawdy comedy, overt displays of sexuality, and frequent depictions of drunkenness, and perhaps reflecting the Western demographic opened up by the international success of Tokyo Story. As a result, the film doesn't quite manage to transform its narrative preoccupation with mono no aware into the sublime melancholy of Ozu's earlier works, although this may in itself be a deliberate response to the banality of the subject matter. Certainly, the final sequence manages to imbue a brick factory, and the lonely, meditative community that surrounds it, with the grandeur of a Buddhist temple, while qualifying it with the subsidiary melancholy of the fact that Tokyo is only a day's journey away by the omnipresent trains, as to offer a wry, final link between working life and Ozu's earlier familial preoccupations.