Watch Late Spring For Free

Best movie of this year hands down!

As Good As It Gets

It is not deep, but it is fun to watch. It does have a bit more of an edge to it than other similar films.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

LATE SPRING is a film that is perhaps overly praised for something that the audience acts as real. Name the movie is lucid and alludes to something that should not be delayed anymore. End of something and the beginning of a new. The film was made with a lot of taste. Focused on internal emotion and characterization.Description of the story that has not at some point be described as subjective. Only life middle-class family, irrespective of external changes retains inner warmth and feelings. Here we can talk about the connection and closeness people with outside influences.The essence is in the relationship between father and daughter. Middle-aged professor is afraid that his daughter to remain a spinster. The daughter wants to continue to live with his father. Everything after that is a compromise, not conflict of opinions. At a certain point in life one must accept and understand the change. In this case, happiness is relative. The tendency of the director is to reach out to the audience with the warmth of family relationships between the characters in the film.

The "Noriko Trilogy", as some call it, comprises arguably Ozu's three best known films "Late Spring" (1949), "Early Summer" (1951) and "Tokyo Story" (1953), all with a key character (in some case THE key character) named Noriko."Tokyo Story" was first introduced to the Western world nine years after Yasujiro Ozu's (1903-1963) death, as both the late Roger Ebert and the New York Times film critic (not sure if his name means much to today's movie fans, or whether he is "the late" or not) sounded a little embarrassed and apologetic in their respective reviews published in 1972. Today, "Tokyo Story" has a place in any all-time top ten list anywhere in the world.The three Norikos, all played by Japan's eternal screen goddess Setsuko Hara (1920-2015, living a long life but resolutely left the movie industry soon after her mentor Ozu's death), are very different characters. Noriko in "Tokyo Story" is a widow. The Norikos in "Late Spring" and "Early Summer" superficially appear to be quite similar in being a daughter at the age to be married off (some likens the plot line to Jane Austin's). They are however very different. As I watched the Noriko Trilogy backwards chronologically, I am going to focus on "Late Spring" which I watched just recently. For background to facilitate comparison, here is my IMDb posting on "Early Summer":http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0043313/reviews-27 "Late Spring" is very much the intimate story between father and daughter, and immediately brings to mind more recent works such as "Poppoya" (1999) (where Ryoko Hirosue and Ken Takakura play daughter and father), "Hana to Airsu" (2004) and "Flowers" (2010). In the latter two, the father-and-daughter story plays only a small part in the multi-plot-line film. In both, the daughter is portrayed by Yu Aoi, who also plays Noriko in "Tokyo Family" (2013), Yoji Yamada's remake of "Tokyo Story" in tribute to Ozu. In "Toyko Family" however, Noriko is an entirely different character, but Yamada cleverly attributed some of the dialogues of the original Noriko to her.Enough (too much, in fact) background. With apologies, I shall now really focus on "Late Spring". In Ozu's unhurried pace, we see the gentle, blissful life of Noriko and her widower father, an academic, in which her remaining unmarried is just a minor issue. Her father's gentle nudge is laughed away when she tells him that this potential perfect candidate, a student of his that is on very friendly terms with her, is in fact engaged to be married soon to another woman. As well, her buddy, a recent divorcée, seems to be a perfect argument for Noriko that marriages are not made in heaven.Then, dark undercurrents gradually surfaces in the father's apparent intention to remarry. Noriko's reaction, not in words but in facial expression, is bitter. This development, in any event, has the effect of having her argument for not marrying swept from under her feet. The bridegroom, by all accounts (he never materializes on screen) is a heaven-sent match. The final revelation (to the audience only) is that the father lied to her to make sure that she does not sacrifice her life and happiness caring for him. The closing scene is much talked about: the father alone in the house, peeling an apple for himself.I don't think written words can do justice to the richness and depth of emotions carried by Ozu's minimalist style.

Ozu by now had reached a sublime maturity in his eye. This flew in the back of two decades of film work of course, it's why I think Ozu continued in the silent format longer than his peers, slowly evolving that eye. The achievement is not in any impeccable composing he does, I'm not interested in an aesthetic look of him. I'm for looking for images that vibrate with a more fleeting sense of life that hides in them, that Buddhist nothingness or nonself that is Ozu's gravestone message (the ideogram "mu" is inscribed there).The film is all about the inevitable necessity of having to go, about separation and stepping out on your own for the long journey of life. In a slightly different context it would have been about death. Here it's marriage, the daughter having to abandon the idyllic childhood home where she lived with her father for so long and open up to the world.I'll keep with me two marvelous scenes that encapsulate this: at the shrine near the end where father and daughter are waving to each other from opposite banks of a stream, and back in their room as they pack up their things and prepare to go, it's as if a last farewell is understood, quietly hanging in the corner of the room. All you need to know is right there in these scenes, powerfully conveyed with resonance, each one a parting memory.On the other hand a forward-looking sense about the future is missing in the girl, an even mildly curious excitement as ambiguous counterpoint to the sadness, something constructive about the journey ahead. Leaving her simply crushed and resigned that she must go gives me a somewhat unpleasant sense, an almost neurotic childishness in the character. Here I encounter again Ozu's persistent flaw from previous films, made all the more obvious because he is so refined by now in every other respect. The realization of why she must go doesn't spring from inside, it does not dissolve visually in the air. It comes in a long instructive speech by the father. Ozu's eye is clear, the story is lucid flow. But the deeper point is resolved as ordinary drama, from the outside.This makes me all the more curious about his next films in this his more celebrated period. These flaws are interdependent, inner realization in the story and wholly cinematic brushstroke from it. Both are a matter of meditating, of embodying the insight rather than saying it out loud. So it might be that this is only the first step of a larger journey about a character like Noriko, that Ozu grows himself as he looks to sculpt a more effusive insight about being. The titles of some of his later films imply a connectedness. I pick up the thread there.

I have watched two Ozu films by this point. This and Tokyo Story. While Tokyo Story is the favorite of the critics I found this one to be more emotionally engaging and indeed one of the best films I have ever watched.The Japanese films tend to be much more emotionally sensitive than Western films, which enables them to attain a degree of affecting depth equal or perhaps even greater than anything that I have watched from Hollywood. That applies to live films such as this one and those by Kurosawa and also to the anime films of Miyazaki and Takahata. Though Ozu reaches a certain degree of purity and honesty in this film that it is hard to think of anything more dramatic and elegant.The film is expertly constructed and doesn't waste a single second of film and deliver 108 minutes of pure drama dealing with the inevitable sadness of change in life.