“Early Spring” (1956)
After “Tokyo Story,” Ozu took an almost unprecedented three years off (he was remarkably prolific across most of his career — and indeed this was no holiday, but he was instead helping actress Kinuyo Tanaka with her second directorial feature), before returning with a film that marks something of a break with the themes of much of the other films he made in this period, “Early Spring.” Not often ranked high in the Ozu canon, but one of our personal favorites, the film is less involved with older family dynamics, and more in infidelity in a younger marriage. It stars Ryõ Ikebe as a salaryman in a Tokyo brick company who begins an affair with a colleague (Keiko Kishi), with his wife (Chikage Awashima) swiftly coming to suspect that something is wrong. Abandoning his usual themes of the difference between generations and family politics (at the behest of his studio, who felt that they’d gone out of fashion and wanted him to cast younger actors), Ozu nevertheless tells an atypical story in his career with his usual understated, delicate style, skipping over what lesser filmmakers would consider key scenes and letting the audience fill in the blanks (or keep guessing as to whether they took place at all). As ever, life bursts in from outside the frame: this isn’t so much a story as it is a slice of reality. Ozu’s usual nuance and fine eye for human nature means that both the affair and the eventual reunion of the married couple feel authentic and utterly earned, but it also serves beautifully as a portrait of the 1950s salaryman, feeling like a precursor to Billy Wilder’s “The Apartment.” Feeling as his films often do, both traditional and surprisingly ahead of its time, it’s one of the best films ever made on the subject of infidelity and marriage.
“Floating Weeds” (1959)
Perhaps fittingly for a filmmaker whose work is so elegaic and so concerned with the different ways that a young and an old person might see the world, Ozu returned to his own stories more than once, with “Late Spring” inspiring “Late Autumn” and “Equinox Flower,” and “I Was Born But…” returning as “Good Morning.” But the closest of his remakes of his own films was probably “Floating Weeds, a re-do of “A Story Of Floating Weeds.” The original, a silent from 1934, had been one of Ozu’s most successful movies, and he’d often talked about a remake, but finally got the chance when he was left with a slim window between his films for Shochiku Studios to make one for a rival company, Daiei, using a pre-existing story to save time. The story, though updated to contemporary times, is much the same, tracking a traveling actor, Komajuro (Ganjiro Nakamura), who returns to the seaside town where he fathered a son (Hiroshi Kawaguchi), only for his current mistress (Machiko Kyō) to attempt to engineer a romance between another actress (Ayako Wakao) and the boy. Arguably plottier than most of Ozu’s later work (thanks to using a plot from 25-years-earlier), it nevertheless feels quite different from the original, despite sometimes sharing compositions: it’s palpably a film made by a man approaching his sixties rather than one just in his thirties, one who knows the absolute minimum he needs to tell the story, and taking advantage of every syllable and frame to do so. Ozu’s compassion hadn’t been lessened in time: if anything, we understand every character’s position a little more clearly the second time around. But his visual instincts might have improved: it was the director’s second film in color, and it’s an absolute feast for the eyes, even while the camera remains ever-neutral. It’s a film that makes a fine argument that every great director should revisit one of their masterpieces years down the line.
We could keep going all day on Ozu’s finest work, and we hope to return to him with a more comprehensive retrospective down the line, but if you’re looking for more after the five above, we’d also recommend the early, crime-themed trio of “Walk Cheerfully,” “That Night’s Wife” and “Dragnet Girl,” the sweet “Passing Fancy,” the heartbreaking “The Only Son,” which was his first talkie, the wonderful marital-strife drama “The Flavor Of Green Tea Over Rice,” the aforementioned “Early Summer,” “Late Autumn” and “Equinox Flower,” and elegiac late films “Tokyo Twilight,” “The End Of Summer,” and “An Autumn Afternoon,” among many more. Did we leave off your fave Ozu? Talk it up in the comments.