Ozu's Late Spring and The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice

Halloween weekend in Madison has attracted some unwanted infamy these past few years, although the partying this year seems to have been more Bourbon Street Mardi Gras than Devil's Night. Since I find that two's a crowd in most situations, there had to have been some pretty compelling reasons for finding myself on campus both nights of Halloween weekend. On Saturday night, there would be an I've-died-and-gone-to-heaven program with the Pro Arte Quartet performing Beethoven's E-flat major String Quartet (Op. 127) and the Schubert String Quintet in C major (D. 956) (two-cello, with guest cellist Jean-Michel Fonteneau joining forces with Pro Arte cellist Parry Karp). And on Friday night, it had been time for more Ozu: a double feature of the films Late Spring and The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice.

Late Spring is the story of a widowed man whose unmarried daughter is still at home. He's an absent-minded professor who couldn't manage to keep himself in clean shirt collars, much less keep himself fed and his house clean without her care. Or is that the story?

The daughter's in her twenties, and if you'd ask anyone around her (especially her busybody aunt), they'd tell you that it's getting past time for her to marry. No question that she'd be a catch. She's beautiful, kind-hearted and selfless. And if you'd ask her, she'd tell you that she would never leave her father with no one to take care of him. Or is that the story?

Before too long, people conspire to arrange the daughter's marriage and to try to find a wife for the father. The daughter balks at all of this, at every step along the way. One day, the daughter and father attend a performance of Noh theater, and the audience includes the woman who is rumored to become her future stepmother. In an intense, wordless scene, we see the daughter's face as she looks back and forth from her father to the woman. Her expressions are those that you might see on a baby who senses the danger of being abandoned but who doesn't have words to speak and is too overwhelmed to let out a cry: confusion, then fear, then fury.

As events progress, the fledgling is gently pushed out of the nest. The daughter agrees to marry, and greets her wedding day with sadness and reluctance. Just before her wedding ceremony, her father explains to her why it's time for her to go, and she obeys. The father returns to the empty house after the wedding. Has the shot of an empty room in a film ever been more heartbreaking? As we've come to figure out through the course of the movie, it's the father that's taken care of the daughter, not the other way around, and in the final scene he pares an apple with a knife and finally, but wordlessly, reveals the full weight of the sacrifice he's made. The story of Late Spring turns out to be the story of how we come into this world, and how we leave it. It's the most deeply affecting film I've ever seen.

I would like to see The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice again. I was a bit distracted during its first half-hour or so; I kept having to take my glasses off to mop my cheeks from the lingering effects of Late Spring. This movie looks at the marriage of a housewife and her husband. Her eyes are dead with unhappiness; if you ask her, her husband is dull and "thick-headed". The movie's tidy, happy ending might have been too facile but for the character of the husband, who's a revelation. He is exactly the opposite of how he is superficially perceived by his wife and her friends, and the opposite of how we might first be led to perceive him, as a salaryman bent over figures with his slide rule and account sheets late into the night. When I see this movie again, I'll want to figure out why it is that characters break into song in several scenes, and I'll look forward to seeing again the scene in which the wife and her friends are dressed in matching spa robes, white splotched with black, like the pampered and greedy koi in the pond whose glimmering light is reflected back onto the women's faces as they toss bread crumbs to the fish.

Comments

[M Stevens]

Criterion has a great double DVD release with "The Story of Floating Weeds" and Ozu's own remake "Floating Weeds". I can never decide which Ozu I like best, so I just watch them over and over. The one I tend to share most with non-Japanophiles is "Good Morning".

If you like Ozu, check out Koreeda. I think my favorite movie of all time is his "After Life" (which knocked "Wings of Desire" out of the top spot). But probably the film he will be more remembered for is "Maborosi" (Roger Ebert has a great review of it). I'm anxiously awaiting for an US release of his latest "Nobody Knows" which was nominated for a Golden Palm at Cannes, and won in the Best Actor category.

[Chan S.]

Thanks for the suggestions! I'm not familiar with Koreeda at all, so I look forward to seeing some of his work for the first time. And three cheers for the Criterion releases.