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"Banshun (Late Spring)" was my first experience with Yasujiro Ozu and among the first Japanese films I approached not long ago. Having never read any reviews about it, I had no idea what to expect, especially since I was just coming off watching colossal works like Ran and Ugetsu Monogatari, respectively by Kurosawa and Mizoguchi: but there was no trace of samurai, greedy filthy peasants, and women cruelly tormented by fate. Rather, it is Japanese society (from the early decades of the '900s to the post-war period) that is represented through exquisite images that seem as if they come from old black and white family albums; Ozu's films, one way or another, are always children of their time.
The thing that immediately caught my eye and impressed me the most about these films is that absolutely nothing sensational happens: we are shown people eating together, drinking tea or sake, discussing trivial matters; riding bicycles, walking through sunlit streets under a clear sky, surrounded by lush but quiet nature; performing everyday gestures within the welcoming walls of home, smiling, or perhaps crying. All of this inserted in very drawn-out, seemingly dead times. The very few events that mark the stories are as normal and ordinary (for better or worse) as one can conceive: some get married (often reluctantly), some age, and some die. We are far from Mizoguchi's disgraced women, and even further from the despicable or heroic (yet always mythical) characters of Kurosawa's more medieval days. Ozu's characters, for their part, undergo no construction: they are real, palpable, close to us.
Nevertheless, it cannot be said that the cinema of late Ozu shines for inventiveness: the cast is roughly the same, the style is always rigorous, extremely sober, with low, still, and detached camera shots, the screenplays all somewhat resemble each other, and the adorable Setsuko Hara, the true muse of the director, usually plays the part of the woman who should marry, although she doesn't really want to. Summing up the plot of these works would take just four crossed words.
And so it happens in Banshun. Noriko is 27 years old, lives with her widowed father (the omnipresent Chishu Ryu), and has no intention of getting a husband and starting a new life; she is happy as she is, and through the eyes of dry and resigned realism, yet calm and absorbed, we are given no explanation for this choice, except for the fact that she does not want to leave her father alone. It's a matter that clearly doesn't concern us, just as certain barely hinted details that we might instead find interesting (why and when did the mother die? why are we not even shown the protagonist's future husband?) do not concern us. In Ozu's cinema, there is no room for in-depth analyses or psychological artifices: we live joys and dramas in real-time, in exchanges of glances and gestures, in the small things that become great mirrors of life, in the time that flows and takes us by surprise, in the intimate atmosphere marked by simple dialogues or modest silences, barely filled with a bittersweet but never overly sweet soundtrack, and especially in social conventions (now more than ever in contrast with the emerging modernity) that drive our protagonists to behave in a certain way, limiting their happiness.
Noriko, thanks to (or because of) a simple stratagem devised by her father, will eventually get married. It takes a full two hours to tell such a thin and superficially predictable story, yet the images that remain symbolically impressed are many and invaluable; above all the ending, one of the most touching I have ever seen: the father who, after the daughter's marriage, returns home and finds himself facing the loneliness of old age by peeling an apple, a gesture he will have to perform alone for who knows how much longer, with hands increasingly wrinkled and trembling; the father who, now bare, lets the peel fall to the ground along with his imperturbability, and then bows his head, slowly, with composure, in a moment of despondency destined to reflect on the deserted beach framed before the word "end" and, perhaps, to drown among (our?) tears even after the screen has gone black.
Banshun, a masterpiece as composed and essential in form as it is filled with tenderness and drama in the finely conveyed feelings, was for me just the beginning of a journey into Ozu's filmography. While not considering it his best work, a title that rightfully belongs to Tokyo Monogatari, it will always hold a special place in my heart. To giants like Kurosawa or Mizoguchi I recognize the merit of having created the greatest and most invaluable works that cinema has ever bestowed upon me; but it is with the poetry of Ozu that I am most able to come into intimate contact, and recognize myself in the humblest gestures, the austerity of a frame, the humanity that can shine through a single, simple glance.
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