User Reviews

Early spring is a time to renew one's hopes, to believe once again that happiness is possible. Sometimes that hope takes the form of betrayal: an extra-marital affair may appear to be the answer to a life that is insufferably routinized and devoid of the thrill of adventure. The "salaryman" (in the US: "white-collar worker") is someone especially vulnerable: he enters the corporation filled with hope for his future, but, we are told, he soon discovers only disillusionment and "dissatisfaction" (a word that surfaces throughout the film). There are, of course, the blandishments of Japan's new consumer society: Note the presence of posters advertising foreign destinations throughout the film (Paris, Colombia, Finland); and note the reference to the withering of the plum trees (Japan's own) on a rich man's estate while bouganvilleas (a foreign import) thrive. But there's little to indicate that Ozu thinks these foreign bagatelles can bring happiness. Indeed, the film has a spareness about it, reflecting a world that has yet to become hopelessly cluttered with objects, which is, as we know too well, the other (the American) solution to dissatisfaction and disillusionment in human relationships and work. Each character tries to shape a life of work and relationships into something satisfying, but there's no simple formula to be found here for happiness in the modern world. There is only the dignity (or lack of dignity) of each individual in their attempt to find happiness. Ozu has brought to life characters who never gush in emotion, who don't even touch one another in the most intimate of reunions (the final husband and wife scene), and whose very restraint makes us feel all the more strongly about them. We feel honored to have shared a part of their lives.

Ozu's genius is to examine universal human dilemmas (tension with aging parents in Tokyo Story; mid-life crisis and boredom with the routines of job and marriage in Early Spring) in a way that is firmly rooted in a specific time and place--Japan in the post-war period. We learn much about Japanese life in the early years of the boom: the look of homes and offices, the way people commemorate the happy and sad events of their lives, how people eat in a noodle shop, a dying man's way of facing death, playing mah-jong, the switch from western to Japanese clothing for different moods and times of day. The camera moves hardly at all and records everything carefully and beautifully, almost like an ethnographic documentary, from its location near the level of a tatami mat. The vistas of office corridors and train lines are breathtaking, not boring. The plot is both moving and slow-moving, a lyrical and thoughtful Japanese version of The Seven Year Itch (married salary worker tempted by flirtatious fellow commuter). Ozu makes traditional values seem convincing and necessary--he doesn't hit us over the head with family loyalty but portrays it as an essential part of life that the protagonist ultimately embraces voluntarily and with full understanding of its meaning, though not without a sense of loss and resignation. Only a filmmaker of Ozu's stature could make me tearful with joy at the sight of a brickyard!

The first impression I had of this masterpiece of Ozu's production was a both nostalgic and familiar one. However, this is not a feeling of an old and ended passed time but the somehow sad premonition of the society we still live in.

At the beginning Sugiyama couple wake up with an alarm and the wife starts her duties while the man is going to get the train bound for Tokyo. And the train itself, that opens this movie, gives us the idea of a time no more natural but subjugated to work and money. Another thing that suggests this mood is the job of the main character of this story, Mr. Sugiyama. He works in a busy and big office in Tokyo as salary man. He is nothing without a company that can provide him a sum of money to live. A salary. We can understand it when Sugiyama speaks to two of his former comrades that are artisans, that's to say people still making something tangible. More simple minded but also less stressed and unconscious of the future. The Japanese salary men, especially in this movie filmed soon after the WWII, seem young students without concerns. They eat near the imperial palace as in school trip and they organize a day-trip to sea, a noodle party and, this the main point of the movie, romance between them. The romance that so develops between Sugiyama and Kingyo, the young and single female secretary of the company the main character works in, is the symbol of a new generation. People far from house, without material skills and less practical and patient. As children of a new future. The one made by train, timetables, offices, papers and ties we, as well as Japan, nowadays live in. The betrayed wife of Sugiyama, after her discovery of the relation of the husband, decide to leave him in order to make him concern. However, after the solicitations by her mother and the old colleague of his husband decide to come back to him, transferred in Okayama for three years. This shows how the maybe old fashioned and domestic patience can resolve things in order "to not make them more difficult than they are" as the mother of Mrs Sugiyama says. Because as the colleague suggest "these are proofs that can enforce the couple and not make it end". At the end the couple decide to stay together after all happened in a town of offices and business but no patience and warmth. Not as in their final destination Okayama. A city below chimneys and so more practical but also more traditional and patient.

Ozu seems to say us that the patience that helped Japanese people during war and natural disasters, the one which the foreigners still today admire the most, can be blown away if the practical and stoic spirit loses the strength in front of a crazy rush for money. The money itself the samurai of old Japan despised.

This movie so can be read as the warning of an father in front of a son that is going to became adult and the leader of a new generation. We have a sort of Tokyo Story without the two old parents as main characters. However, also here, the wise and elder helps the younger. The gloomy smoker mother and the humble smiling colleague.

Japan should have seen this movie more before the bubble era, the crazy consumer tendencies and today lack of identity among many of its people. That time was early spring but now we are already in full summer.

This is another 'slice of life' film from famed Japanese director Yasujirô Ozu. The protagonist is Shoji Sugiyama, a late 30s 'salary man' (white collar office worker), who lives in Tokyo with his devoted wife, Masako. The couple had a child who died (for unknown reasons) and they now appear to resign themselves to being a childless couple for the rest of their marriage.

Ozu spends a good deal of time also focusing on Sugi's colleagues at the office. One major theme is dissatisfaction. There is little chance that any of the workers have a chance to advance to a higher position and all seem to agree that it's very difficult making ends meet on such a low salary. Prospects for retirement are even more dim, given the virtually non-existent retirement benefits. Nonetheless, the workers try to make the best of their drab and routine lives by engaging in communal activities such as 'noodle parties' and trips to the beach.

It's on one such trip to the beach, when Sugi gets to know a younger office worker, 'Goldfish', played by Keiko Kishi (the super attractive Kishi can be seen in middle age in the acclaimed 1983 film, 'The Makioka Sisters'). She aggressively goes after Sugi and they end up having a brief affair. The rest of the film focuses on the conflict between Sugi and Masako, after she gets wind of the affair, and how they eventually resolve the conflict.

Ozu wisely does not simply focus on the conflict between the two principals, but also brings in other characters, that depict the wider canvas of the community. Two strong scenes come to the mind: first, after Sugi's get together with some war veteran buddies, he invites two of them home and in perhaps the film's most comic scene, the two make fools of themselves, as they are completely intoxicated; a later more dramatic scene, features the male office workers castigating Goldfish, for her rumored affair with Sugi. What's interesting about this scene is how Goldfish steadfastly denies any involvement with Sugi, despite our knowledge to the contrary.

The major problem with 'Early Spring' is its slow pace. It's a good half hour before the break into the second act, the aforementioned extra-marital affair, actually occurs. Ozu also throws in a seemingly unnecessary sub-plot of the dying co-worker, Miura. Is the point to introduce the more universal theme of the 'fragility of life' or to suggest that this particular officer worker was freed from the shackles of a lifetime of drudgery as a devoted 'salary man'? Whatever the case, it simply is dragged out and goes on for much too long.

While Sugi and Goldfish's affair may have been risqué for its time, the resolution is markedly more staid. After Goldfish gives up on 'stalking' Sugi (she has a number of 'meltdowns' in front of Sugi, when it's clear he's no longer interested in her), eventually she shakes his hand at a farewell party and now has given up on the idea of pursuing him.

As for Masako, against her mother's advice, she decides to leave Sugi, to teach him a lesson. Eventually, after Sugi is transferred to a provincial town, she takes her mother's advice to 'not make things worse' and joins him there and agrees with him, to 'start over'. If only more couples in America were willing to follow Sugi and Masako's course of action, martial disputes that occur here, might have better resolutions.

I ended up watching 'Early Spring' a second time and found it more absorbing upon second viewing. Nonetheless, this is a film that still needed quite a bit of judicious editing. The running time of 145 minutes is way too long for a film that could have been 45 minutes shorter.

I think Early Spring would make a good double feature with Billy Wilder's The Apartment. They both have their characters working in the same stifling and soul killing corporate world of the post-war era. Characters in Early Spring and The Apartment have extramarital affairs - Wilder plays this up more than Ozu. The characters drink alcohol and smoke a lot - Ozu, however, out does Wilder with the cigarette smoking. Both movies feature game playing as well as the consumption of Asian food. Pills are used for suicide attempts, although only the Early Spring character is successful. Auld Lang Syne is sang near the end of both films.

Despite the grim happenings in Early Spring and The Apartment, both end on a hopeful note.