FILM.
LATE SPRING
1949 | DIRECTED BY YASUJIRO OZU
I don't think a movie's ever made me feel this stunned.
It's downright quotidian and at the same time completely otherworldly. The pacing of slow cinema with the pull of a ghost story. Nothing in particular happens and I couldn't look away.
Noriko has a presence so fey she seems to become spectral in front of your eyes during those long, grainy close-ups. Like she’s ready to dissolve along with the film. Her expressions are confounding, affecting some alien, bottomless, impenetrable combination of emotions I’ve never seen before on a face.
She's also just an incredibly complex character. Extremely polite and courteous and yet unusually, unexpectedly blunt in moments. Magnetically smiley and friendly and also aloof and standoffish. Preternaturally happy and dismally sad, sometimes at the same time. She leaves you dumbstruck.
Her father's characterization has a comparable depth, although his is one of inner harmony counterposed to Noriko's inner conflict. A widow with enough separation from his ego to appreciate the cycle of life, he laughs at himself for being "let down" at a man marrying his daughter, acknowledging he once married another man's daughter himself.
When Noriko tearfully protests leaving him, with whom she is so happy, he calmly explains that his life is nearing its end while hers is just beginning, and that happiness is a lifelong project you build with someone, not a fixed state you inherit and expect to have last forever.
This isn't to say he's unaffected by his daughter's departure. He sheds a tear while peeling a lonely apple in the final scene. But he's at peace with it as a man at peace with the tides of life, which wash over the dark shore just before the credits roll.
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