Late Spring

Saw Late Spring, an old Japanese film directed by Yasujiro Ozu about the tension between the old and the new. The protagonist is an adult, single woman who values tradition. Even her father calls her "old fashioned." She wrinkles her nose at her father's widower friends remarrying, calling them impure and unclean, although smiling fixedly while doing so. Throughout much of the movie she has a strange frozen smile on her face. I believe the smile is supposed to be sort of artificially picturesque and mannered although it comes off a bit more rigid and weird in this modern time.

Everyone urges her to get married. Her love of tradition extends to a horror of change and she confides in her father that she wishes she could live like this (alone, taking care of her widowed father,) forever. Her struggle mirrors the cultural struggle of Japan during the setting of this film. The woman bicycles past a sign urging her (in English) to drink Coca-Cola, but in a later scene she consults a match-maker about possibly arranging a marriage. The film even opens with a train station sign, written in both Japanese and English. The juxtaposition of the two languages is a nod to this friction. The central woman's best friend, who urges her most stridently to marry, is so alarmingly modern that she lives in a western-style house (complete with grandfather clock and baroque furniture) and supports herself as a stenographer. "If you don't like him, you can always get a divorce!" she tells the protagonist.

The repeated urges of her friends and family to get married and move out of her father's house seem to indicate an urging on the film's behalf for Japan to move on and get with the modern, post-surrender, post-Imperial times, but the woman's steadfast refusal indicates the film's sympathy with and nostalgia for the traditional. Initially in the film, she ambiguously flirts with her father's male secretary. The secretary is already affianced, we discover, but I believe the woman is flirting, in a way, with the idea of change and growth. The film is most interesting (for me) when viewed as a struggle between old and new. That said, this is not a terribly interesting idea for me to grapple with. Several times I had to struggle to stay awake through the film, particularly during an extended episode of Noh theatre. I'm not the most astute of viewers and am really better at enduring movies than engaging with them, so this may be one of my weaknesses manifesting, but watch it with some coffee on hand anyway. Just in case.