----Excerpt from Donald Ritchie's "Ozu"
movie "Late Spring" filmed in 1949, the fourth year after Japan's defeat. Director Yasujiro Ozu was born in 1903 at the age of 46.
The story told in "Late Spring" is very simple: Professor Zeng Gong's daughter Noriko is 27 years old. The professor listened to the opinions of Aunt Noriko and others, and started to find her daughter's husband's family to marry. And Noriko is at ease with her current life, and she is afraid that after she leaves, her elderly father will have no one to take care of, and she is unwilling to get married. The professor lied to his daughter that he was going to remarry. Noriko finally got married.
The relationship between the characters in the film is also very simple: around the professor and his daughter Noriko, there are Noriko's aunt, the professor's assistant, the professor's friend, Ayako, the friend of Noriko, and the professor's "remarriage" object Akiko. There is some connection, but there is no direct character conflict. Therefore, the movie also doesn't have much dramatic climax in the plot.
Taiwanese film master Hou Hsiao-hsien commented on Ozu's films, often with simple stories, but with undercurrents. It is often easier to explain and understand simple things, simple things.
In terms of expression, "As a traditional and conservative Asian, Ozu does not believe in any essence that terms like 'humanity' might imply to us." Wait, so there is no such thing as 'humanity', only individual men and women. To some extent, Asians understand this better than Westerners." However, nearly 70 years later, the decline of Eastern thinking today , which may be the reason why it is more difficult for people to fully understand Ozu. It also just proves that Ozu's films retain the style of the times from more and deeper aspects, and today form a conflict between eras and eras. People interpret his works, interpret that era, and interpret the most famous director in the eastern world.
The ending point of the story of "Late Spring" is mainly divided into three layers:
(1) Noriko's situation in the face of marriage:
◆Currently, Noriko's life is very happy.
In the beautiful and peaceful Kamakura, the father and daughter are living happily , so that Noriko is already 27 years old without realizing it, and she still does not want to get married when she is of marriageable age. The movie also mentioned that Noriko's health is not very good, and the time when she was young was wasted helping the family to carry food during the war. This explains why she's 27 in the blink of an eye.
◆Arranged marriage
Noriko and her father revealed their hearts. Noriko knew that the current marriage could not make her happier; the father took his own life as an example and told Noriko that marriage was very difficult at the beginning, and only perseverance could bring happiness.
◆Freedom
marriage The representative of freehold marriage is Noriko's friend Ayako. And her independent marriage just ended in divorce not long ago. Ayako also told Noriko about the marriages of other girls in their class reunion. Some girls deliberately missed one because they had too many children, and some girls had children without getting married.
◆Ayako's comfort
Ayako comforts Noriko and asks Noriko to face her marriage partner with a smile. If she doesn't like it, she will get a divorce in the future.
(2) Problem solving
◆Professor lied that he wanted to remarry
In order to dispel Noriko's fear that she would have no one to take care of herself after she got married, the professor lied that she would remarry a woman named Akiko.
◆A trip
The professor and Noriko went on a trip to see the professor's friend and the remarried wife of the professor's friend. Noriko finally felt relieved and let her father remarry.
And her father also persuaded Noriko about marriage: marriage may not mean happiness at first, and it is a wrong idea to expect sudden happiness. Happiness is something you need to wait for and create it yourself. Marriage does not equal happiness, happiness lies in the tempering of a new life shared together. Maybe in a year or two, maybe even five or ten years. Happiness can only be achieved through hard work, and only then can you be called a real couple.
(3) At the end
of the epilogue, Noriko married off-site, and the professor who lied about her remarriage and Ayako had a conversation in the tavern, then returned home and cut an apple for herself alone.
When we sort through the whole story, we will find that for the father and daughter who were originally living happily, the daughter's marriage is more like an incident that was inserted in the middle. Noriko, who is 27 years old, naturally when it comes time to talk about marriage, she also naturally faces the marriage situation that is dominated by arranged marriages. Fathers can remarry to find new happiness, and daughters can be married as daughters. These are traditional lives. "Life (following) tradition assumes that man is part of a larger group; that group contains both the dead and the unborn. It assumes that man is part of various natural natures, including human nature." As a father, because The incident happened suddenly and for a reason. The professor had no choice but to lie that he would remarry Akiko, leaving Noriko to face her own marital situation head-on. But whether the professor's remarriage is a lie or not, it can only be the impetus to move the whole thing forward and not help Noriko's marital situation itself. In the matter of her daughter's happiness, the happiness that was promised after the distant years was far more uncertain than what Noriko already had at the moment.
"They arouse our compassion neither because they are victims of their own flaws, nor because they are victims of an imperfect society. They were born to suffer, and that's how life is."
About the director Yasujiro Ozu, a consistent theme in his many films is the breakdown of the family. In his early works this collapse was mainly due to economic downturns, unemployment, poor working conditions, etc.; "It was not until later that Ozu discovered that the shackles that came from within man himself were the more important shackles." "Unfortunately, Because we are born as human beings, and we are eager to reach a realm that is beyond our reach." In the
movie "Late Spring", Ozu also abandoned the prejudice that "misfortunes are entirely caused by the mistakes of society", through a pair of fathers The experience of the woman deeply depicts the love, marriage, family and other features at that time, forming her own unique image style. Family and family tradition, as the common goal of mankind, dismantle the happiness that existed in the life of the father and daughter. In the later stage of creation, the characters depicted in Ozu's stories gradually changed from lower-class families to middle-upper-class families, describing those "characters who apparently avoided social misfortune". With this gradual process, it's hard to say that the reality in Ozu's films is diminished.
In addition, in the real world, director Yasujiro Ozu (1903-1963), never married; the actor of Noriko in the movie, a famous actor, actress for the Queen of Ozu, Hara Setsuko (1920-2015), never married.
(The quotations in this article are all quoted from "Donald Ritchie's "Ozu")
2016.02
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