Late Spring

From the 1930s and 1960s, Yasujirō Ozu crafted one of the richest filmographies in the history of world cinema, a prolific output of slow, reserved, and heartbreakingly tender family dramas. Ozu’s oeuvre documents the transformation of Japanese society before and after the Second World War, and the irresolvable tension between social tradition and emerging capitalist modernity. In Late Spring, this conflict plays out in microcosm, in the relationship between an ageing widower, who urges his adult daughter to move out and get married; she resists, refusing to abandon her father and the old world he embodies. With great nuance, Ozu acknowledges that progress cannot be resisted, and that tradition is unsustainable and often repressive, but nonetheless eulogises a generation and a way of life that predates alienated, materialistic modernity. Both a unique document of post-war Japanese society, and a universal story of change, family, and mortality, Late Spring is as urgent, humane, and quietly devastating as ever.

James O’Connell Nash