Playful and light, a Japanese work in black and white striking for its realism and its themes imposing remorse and reflection despite the fact that the whole sometimes leaves impressions a little too new-wave.
A unique little music, immediately
recognizable, at the same time 'perky' and sad, melancholic and soothing…
stripped. Some are sensitive to it, others not. Those who manage to get used to
this particular universe no longer get tired of it. Some even make it their
cinematic Nirvana: "I’m talking about the most beautiful films in the
world. I’m talking about what I consider to be the lost paradise of cinema. To
those who already know him, to those who are wealthy, who will still discover
him, I speak to you about the filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu. If our century still gave
its place to the sacred, if it were to erect a cinema sanctuary, I would
personally put there the work of the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu… Ozu’s
films speak of the long decline of the Japanese family, and thus the decline of
a national identity. They do so, without denouncing or scorning the progress
and appearance of Western or American culture, but rather by lamenting with
distant nostalgia the loss that took place simultaneously. As Japanese as they
are, these films can claim a universal understanding. You can recognize all the
families in all the countries of the world, as well as your own parents, your
brothers and sisters and yourself. For me, cinema was never before and never
again since so close to its own essence, its ultimate beauty and its very
determination: to give a useful and true image of the 20th century". This
moving declaration of love from one filmmaker to another is by Wim Wenders,
from his magnificent documentary, Tokyo Ga...
Early Spring recounts once again the
monotony that emerges within a couple but this time without almost any element
of comedy; a film more in the usual tone of the last Ozu. This is almost the
only time in his career that the filmmaker will approach the subject of
adultery at the same time that he will draw a naturalistic portrait that is at
least demoralizing of the condition of white collar in Japan. As the country’s
economy begins to rise, the flip side of the coin is that it is not really good
to be an executive or an employee at that time. I wanted to highlight what
could be called the pathos of this employee’s life. I tried to avoid any
dramatic elements and to collect only moments of everyday life,” the filmmaker
said. While some artisan buddies envy him to be in an office, Shoji shows them
that there is really nothing to it because, like most of his colleagues, he
does not have a high opinion of his condition as a wage earner: it is necessary
to endure the daily routine for a ridiculous pay, waiting for promotions that
will probably never happen, retiring without a penny in their pocket and having
a lot of difficulty finding work in case of dismissal, due to lack of skills
and knowledge. Ozu had no longer been leaning towards this wage-earning milieu
since his silent period; what he discovered in the 1950s is not frankly
cheerful and makes him say once again that work should not be an end in itself,
that it is difficult and not especially necessary to flourish there and that it
is better to devote oneself above all to one’s family.
Family, or rather couple, who is also put
at risk in this intimate drama. They’ve been married for over seven years, had
a child who died very young. Since then, Shoji has refocused on the world of
work with everything that revolves around it, with outings with colleagues
becoming his only real distractions. His wife, who, by gestures of annoyance or
disdain, seems to refuse to give himself to him, stays at home only out of
respect for decency; she cannot help but denigrate her husband every time she
visits her mother. But the day she discovers that he has a mistress, she can no
longer bear it and leaves the marital home. Everyone will find excuses to her
adulterous husband thus marking the strengthening of the position of the man on
the woman in the traditional Japanese society. Her mother will tell her to
relativize and be more accommodating as her own husband had made her worse,
having gone to a ‘whorehouse’ on her wedding night. Only 'Goldfish', Shoji’s
mistress, succeeds in bringing out a somewhat less 'reactionary' discourse
touching the non-enviable status of women in these times of economic
prosperity.
While she was with Shoji in a bar, she
said, guess what your wife is doing right now? She prepares your meal and
waits. She makes herself beautiful for you. It’s really stupid to be married.
You’re sitting there sipping a beer while she’s waiting for you.” But that
won’t stop her from attracting him as her lover. “Goldfish” is a very special
character in Ozu’s filmography. While most of the individuals in his films do
not make any guess of their emotions, she is on the contrary surprisingly
extroverted: she kisses (yes, something extremely rare and quite unusual in
Ozu’s very modest cinema!), she screams, gets angry, insults, claw and does not
hesitate to say what she thinks of others at the risk of hurting them. Too modern
and too liberated for his colleagues who will not lose the opportunity to
lecture him. A totally hypocritical morality provoked by jealousy since each of
them dreamed of being able to cheat on his wife as Shoji did. Outraged by her
low-level moralists and humanists, she decides to cut ties with them. Ozu thus
makes here of the ‘fatal woman’ the spokesman for women’s liberation!
As in The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice,
Shoji will be offered a mutation but this time in a small village lost and by
the fact that these relations with a colleague were eventually known.
Basically, it is sent to “Siberia” so that this immoral conduct does not
reflect on society. And as in the previous film, this forced relocation will
mark the beginning of a new life, the two spouses deciding in a moving final to
forget their wounds of self-esteem, to forgive each other and start from
scratch with more maturity and a stronger couple. As a true humanist, Ozu tells
us to go forward, to forget the nuisances and to maintain a family unit that
seems to him to be against all the ultimate bastion of the little happiness
that can be expected from life. A very beautiful sequence shows us a very sick
young man who discovers at the point of death that the daily routine is not necessarily
negative or boring and that life can be beautiful if we take the time to stop
on simple things. Always this “positive resignation” or Eastern Zen, a constant
attention to the trivial rituals of everyday life that still make it the salt,
these sake-filled drunks that say a lot about the weariness of employees after
a day’s work, these visually stunning shots of men and women walking to the
station, rushing to the offices and the description always right, lucid and
credible of all these characters up to these galleries of second roles that we
did not have time to evoke but that are always constituted by the same family
of actors that we find with pleasure from film to film.
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