CRITERION THE SETUP IS REASSURINGLY, almost lullingly familiar. In ...

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CRITERION

THE SETUP IS REASSURINGLY, almost lullingly familiar. In a tight-knit family, the youngest daughter is a convivial, good-natured homebody, a solid breadwinner with little interest in leaving the parental embrace. Her aging parents push her to marry, promoting various thoroughly unsuitable prospects. In the classical, Shakespearean definition, comedy ends with a wedding, so by this understanding, Yasujiro Ozu's Early Summer is a comedy. It is, however, a comedy tinged with the darkness that encroaches on all sides.

Ozu made a number of similar films in the course of his prolific and magisterial career on the subject of parents and children, and marriage, Late Spring and An Autumn Afternoon among them. Like a painter taking numerous stabs at the same theme in the hopes of reaching that Platonic ideal of perfection, Ozu returned to these characters and situations because they spoke to the rapidly changing Japanese family, and by extension, Japanese society as a whole. Early Summer opens with a placid morning scene of the Mamiya family breakfasting, an idyll soon interrupted by a cut to the clatter of a rushing commuter train. In this contrast, Ozu has pinpointed the crux of his film's conflict: tradition vs. modernity.

The maid at the center of this conundrum is Noriko, played by the incandescent Setsuko Hara. Noriko's shy, good-humored laugh and sensible nature belie a proto-feminist assertion of the rights of women to choose their own place in society. The clatter of trains is metonymic for the clatter of a postwar Japanese life that is in the throes of rapid and shocking change. Ozu's gentle comedy familiarizes us with the rhythms of family life in order to provide a fuller sense of the tragedy of its dissolution.

Noriko, ignoring the letter of her parents' demands while honoring their spirit, chooses a partner, sending the protons of their nuclear family into separate orbits. As Noriko prepares to make her way into her new life, the family gathers for one last time to take a photograph. Ozu's film too is a photographic record of a disappearing family, separated by the pace of modern life, and by love-a happy tragedy, if you will. The camera glides through the fields outside their town, looking at the scattered homes and the verdant hill behind it, as if to say, "Remember this."

Ozu's simplicity is deceptive, the familiar camera angles and plot setups hiding his fascination with documenting the familial and social dynamics of his country. In Early Summer, one character tells another, "Expensive dishes aren't necessarily good." This statement of culinary preferences can also be read as Ozu's statement of purpose, a declaration that his modest-looking dishes, so easily overlooked, contain remarkable nourishment.