Essentially the last of Ozu's marriage-related films (as in films about couples), Early Spring is among the finest I have seen in this sub-genre. Few films have better articulated the minutiae of a slowly eroding marriage, and even fewer have been expansive enough to simultaneously include the realities of the world beyond it—in this case the mundane nature of workplace life—in order to depict its reciprocal effects. At times the film plays like a a more exhaustive version of Naruse's remarkable 1951 effort Repast, not to mention his other similarly-themed films of the early-Fifties. Ozu goes even further by contrasting a salaryman's life with that of those who are self-employed, but without offering a solution because there is none. Though…

Conquering Ozu's seasons-related English international titles

"The life of the flower is very short. That is why it should be appreciated immediately."

Such was the lesson that we learned through Mikio Naruse's 1955 postwar portrayal of a failed relationship because of two drastically contrasting souls, each one subdued to their respective irrational impulses. Ozu masterfully dissects a dying marriage affected by the disaster of an extramarital affair against the backdrop of a torn post-war Japan and its capitalist facet with a resulting industralization phase. Like a direct response to Naruse's statement with a stronger emphasis on capitalism influences and a strong commentary against the "loneliness and disillusion" caused by a salaryman's life that realizes that life is void and disappointing,…

Often the problem with critiquing white collar culture is that it emphasizes the drudgery of the actual work and the inhumane treatment of employees without analyzing in depth how the details of the company matter. Here, we have a worker pushing paper in some sort of brick company, a company driven by capitalist desires, and the sense we get of his disconnection is rooted in the systems of the office and his life outside. The film layers in how the company's function--to make money--is where these systems derive. It's just there, haunting the atmosphere, draining the souls of those trapped in it, but never stating it explicitly.

Ozu sees no happy ending; the wistful dreams teased at the end are…

With films like Early Summer and Tokyo Story preceding it, Early Spring was not Yasujiro Ozu's best film to date. I don't think that's a controversial opinion. What I will say about Early Spring however is that it might have been, up to that point in Ozu's career, his most scathing and his most complex. This only makes it so much more satisfying when Ozu takes a step back and shows how small everything is from a distance, as he so often does. It isn't to detract from his characters and their conflicts, but rather to paint an atmosphere of stillness, one that's painfully or perhaps beautifully unaffected by the drama within it.

This may also be Ozu's greatest use…

You'll notice in Ozu films that any time a character is in an office they hardly ever work. Maybe they write a few things down, but usually they are looking off into space or are on screen only long enough for someone to come in and start talking to them. Early Spring is a movie entirely about an office worker and his colleagues, yet somehow all of them are shown far more out of the office—on a hike by the beach in a setting reminiscent of the famous bicycle scene in Late Spring, drinking at bars, or playing mahjong—than in one.

This is one of Ozu's bleakest films—in some ways like its predecessor, Tokyo Story. However, in Tokyo Story the…

Yasujirō Ozu builds on a simple premise, the life of an efficient young employee, to talk about post-war japanese society. It is a society that is rapidly modernising, in which the influence of the west is increasingly present but behind the apparent prosperity, the wounds of war are still palpable and a strong social change has already began to take shape. Shoji Sugiyama is an office worker in Tokyo whom we accompany in his daily life; we observe the distant relationship with his wife, his routinary job, and the emergence of a fleeting romance with a colleague, with the imposing and cold city as the backdrop in which the duty is imposed over happiness.

Sōshun portrays the dissatisfaction of the…

"The world today isn't very interesting. Everyone's dissatisfied." It's a perfect quote to summarize the monotony of postwar Japanese life, of salaried workers complaining about their lives, of marriages trapped in boredom, of finances difficult to pay, and where adultery is just another form of intoxication to ease the meaninglessness of life. Ozu returns to the impersonal toil of the salaryman struggling to reconcile his domestic life with his office life, a familiar device used in his 30s films to ruminate on the impacts of Westernization and industrialization on Japanese life. Here Ozu portrays "the pathos of the white-collar life," showing crowds of white-shirted workers pour out of trains and into office buildings like cogs in a wheel. It all…

Man muss bedenken, das sind Melodramen a la Ozu, heisst, es gibt keinen Kitsch, kaum Melodramatische Momente, diese sehen wir Zuschauer zumindest nicht. Sie werden spaeter von den Charakteren nur erwaehnt. "Frueher Fruehling" ist ein sehr nuechterner Film, sehr ehrlich und realistisch. Die Geschichte eines Paares, dessen Ehe nicht mehr funktioniert, die durch auessere und innere Einfluesse nun den Weg gehen wie so viele Paare es immer wieder tun. Ein langweiliges Leben, keine Erwartungen und Traeume werden erfuellt, und man zerstoert mit der Zeit seinen Traum. Nicht nur durch das Fremdgehen des Mannes, auch durch das Benehmen. Sehr gut verdeutlicht in der Szene, als der Mann nach Stunden des Trinkens mit zwei volltrunkenen Kumpanen in das stille Haus in der…

I’m a little unmoved by this one because I’m not sure what it’s interested in exploring. There’s the married couple, but the dynamics of the troubled marriage didn’t seem to parallel, or even relate to, the shifting culture of the working class. 

The culture shift in Ozu’s work is usually shown by a generational gap but those characters are not prominent in this film. It’s a shift in values, and this film shows characters who are a little more lost after World War II. Some of their children have died, their skills and jobs are being replaced by modern soul-sucking office jobs, and their joys in companionship are not satisfying. Nobody is satisfied in their lives. There’s a resolution to…