Early Spring (1956)
Directed by Yasujirô Ozu

Film Review

Early Spring is the film that Yasujiro Ozu made after Tokyo Story, one of his biggest commercial and critical successes, although it came after a three-year hiatus during which time Ozu assisted the actress Kinuyo Tanaka on her second film as a director.  In the interim, tastes in Japanese cinema had changed markedly amid a burgeoning youth culture and a growing willingness to accept western influences.  Ozu's home dramas (Ofuna-cho) were looking decidedly outdated and his bosses at Shochiku, keen to move with the times, put pressure on Ozu to modernise, dispensing with paternalistic characters, making greater use of young and popular actors, and adopting elements of Hollywood-style melodrama in his films.

For Early Spring, his longest surviving film, Ozu takes the bare bones of a conventional American melodrama - consisting of adultery, estrangement and reconciliation - and weaves these in a complex character study that is remarkably perceptive in its probing of the psyche of young Japanese men and women.  In addition to Ozu's familiar domestic concerns, it brings in many modern themes that would have been unthinkable in Japanese cinema a few years previously - suicide, premature death of children, the crushing monotony of office work, indeed the degrading nature of work - and this added greatly to its appeal, showing that Ozu had moved on and was able to keep up with prevailing cultural trends.  Ozu retained all of his cinematic idiosyncrasies (framing, low camera positioning, mostly static shots) but, by using younger actors and tackling themes that were of interest to younger audiences, he injected a badly needed shot of modernity into his art.

Early Spring is a natural extension of the home dramas that Ozu had been making for the bulk of his career up until this point, but here the home, or rather the family unit, is far less robust, less central than in the director's previous films.  It is constantly threatened, by the misfortune of child mortality, by the constant temptation of adultery, and an ever-growing ennui which is exacerbated by the unchanging routine of work.  The film begins by showing us hundreds of anonymous young people dutifully making their way into work, pouring from train stations into the roads that lead to their skyscraper offices like robotic ants.  We are reminded of similar scenes in René Clair's À nous la liberté (1931) and Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times (1936), in which human beings are reduced to the level of an insignificant cog in a massive corporate machine.  It is a life that offers security, a reasonable standard of living, but no variety, no fulfilment - it is merely a relentless treadmill that leads nowhere but to the grave.

No wonder Shoji Sugiyama, the central male character, is so disillusioned with life and so susceptible to temptation when it comes his way, in the guise of a flirtatious typist named Goldfish.  Ozu betrays his aversion to the classic melodrama by not dwelling on the sordid details of the affair.  We do not even know whether Sugiyama continues the affair after he has bedded Goldfish for the first time.  It is possible that he may have had a crisis of conscience and given up the affair - this could explain Goldfish's offended outburst when Sugiyama's colleagues subject her to a kind of inquisition in the unlikely setting of a  noodle-eating party.  Likewise, the impact of Sugiyama's indiscretion on his wife is alluded to very subtly, almost en passant, and we cannot be entirely certain whether the adultery was the main reason for her leaving her husband.  It seems the couple were already estranged before the pouting, hip wiggling Goldfish came onto the scene, driven apart by their own frustrations with a married life that had so far proven fruitless and unsatisfying.

Early Spring concludes with one of the most downbeat and ambiguous endings of any Ozu film.  Sugiyama and his wife appear to be reconciled and willing to make a fresh start in what looks like a Garden of Eden compared with the concrete anthill that is modern Tokyo.  There is no discernible sense of joy visible in either character, just a quiet acceptance that is the best they can hope for, the closest they will ever get to true happiness.  It is a sombre ending with only the faintest glimmer of hope, and, in those last lingering shots of a raw landscape dominated by towers belching black smoke, you can sense the gnawing sterility of the empty years that stretch ahead of the protagonists as they tread their slow and weary path towards death.

Film Synopsis

Shoji Sugiyama is a young salaryman who works for a company that manufactures fire bricks in Tokyo.  Every day, he takes a crowded commuter train into the city centre, to the crowded office where he works.  After the death of his infant son some years previously, he has grown disillusioned both with his work and his marriage.  He envies his friends who are not salarymen, thinking they have more freedom and a greater prospect of happiness.  During a hiking trip Shoji strikes up a friendship with an attractive typist nicknamed Goldfish on account of her large eyes.  Within no time, the two have embarked on an illicit love affair, which is noticed both by Shoji's colleagues, who chastise Goldfish for threatening a marriage, and his wife, Masako.  When Shoji confesses that he has been having an affair, Masako leaves him and promptly returns to live with her mother.  Fearing he has lost Masako for good, Shoji reluctantly agrees to be transferred to an office in a provincial town, far from the bustle of Tokyo and the woman he once loved...