You won't be disappointed!

Fantastic!

It's complicated... I really like the directing, acting and writing but, there are issues with the way it's shot that I just can't deny. As much as I love the storytelling and the fantastic performance but, there are also certain scenes that didn't need to exist.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

The first impression I had of this masterpiece of Ozu's production was a both nostalgic and familiar one. However, this is not a feeling of an old and ended passed time but the somehow sad premonition of the society we still live in.At the beginning Sugiyama couple wake up with an alarm and the wife starts her duties while the man is going to get the train bound for Tokyo. And the train itself, that opens this movie, gives us the idea of a time no more natural but subjugated to work and money. Another thing that suggests this mood is the job of the main character of this story, Mr. Sugiyama. He works in a busy and big office in Tokyo as salary man. He is nothing without a company that can provide him a sum of money to live. A salary. We can understand it when Sugiyama speaks to two of his former comrades that are artisans, that's to say people still making something tangible. More simple minded but also less stressed and unconscious of the future. The Japanese salary men, especially in this movie filmed soon after the WWII, seem young students without concerns. They eat near the imperial palace as in school trip and they organize a day-trip to sea, a noodle party and, this the main point of the movie, romance between them. The romance that so develops between Sugiyama and Kingyo, the young and single female secretary of the company the main character works in, is the symbol of a new generation. People far from house, without material skills and less practical and patient. As children of a new future. The one made by train, timetables, offices, papers and ties we, as well as Japan, nowadays live in. The betrayed wife of Sugiyama, after her discovery of the relation of the husband, decide to leave him in order to make him concern. However, after the solicitations by her mother and the old colleague of his husband decide to come back to him, transferred in Okayama for three years. This shows how the maybe old fashioned and domestic patience can resolve things in order "to not make them more difficult than they are" as the mother of Mrs Sugiyama says. Because as the colleague suggest "these are proofs that can enforce the couple and not make it end". At the end the couple decide to stay together after all happened in a town of offices and business but no patience and warmth. Not as in their final destination Okayama. A city below chimneys and so more practical but also more traditional and patient.Ozu seems to say us that the patience that helped Japanese people during war and natural disasters, the one which the foreigners still today admire the most, can be blown away if the practical and stoic spirit loses the strength in front of a crazy rush for money. The money itself the samurai of old Japan despised. This movie so can be read as the warning of an father in front of a son that is going to became adult and the leader of a new generation. We have a sort of Tokyo Story without the two old parents as main characters. However, also here, the wise and elder helps the younger. The gloomy smoker mother and the humble smiling colleague.Japan should have seen this movie more before the bubble era, the crazy consumer tendencies and today lack of identity among many of its people. That time was early spring but now we are already in full summer.

I consider Yasujiro Ozu one of the worlds most significant and distinctive directors, a man who eschews false dazzle in favor of examining the human condition, human relationships; most of his films are quietly incisive portraits of people coming to conclusions and making decisions which will permanently affect their lives. Ozu imparts subtlety to his characters, his sense of time and place are impeccable, and his respect for his characters unparalleled. All of that said, I think that Early Spring is one of his least effective--one easily sees the point he makes about corporate behavior and marital infidelity, but this one, rather than quietly contemplative, struck me as merely slow. The characters too often lack any redeeming qualities, and yet we are apparently supposed to care about them for more than two hours, difficult when there is so little to work with--Early Spring is certainly not a stinker, by any means, but for me, a lesser Ozu, and if you want to start with something more characteristic, begin with either version of Floating Weeds, or with his masterpiece, Tokyo Story.

Ozu's genius is to examine universal human dilemmas (tension with aging parents in Tokyo Story; mid-life crisis and boredom with the routines of job and marriage in Early Spring) in a way that is firmly rooted in a specific time and place--Japan in the post-war period. We learn much about Japanese life in the early years of the boom: the look of homes and offices, the way people commemorate the happy and sad events of their lives, how people eat in a noodle shop, a dying man's way of facing death, playing mah-jong, the switch from western to Japanese clothing for different moods and times of day. The camera moves hardly at all and records everything carefully and beautifully, almost like an ethnographic documentary, from its location near the level of a tatami mat. The vistas of office corridors and train lines are breathtaking, not boring. The plot is both moving and slow-moving, a lyrical and thoughtful Japanese version of The Seven Year Itch (married salary worker tempted by flirtatious fellow commuter). Ozu makes traditional values seem convincing and necessary--he doesn't hit us over the head with family loyalty but portrays it as an essential part of life that the protagonist ultimately embraces voluntarily and with full understanding of its meaning, though not without a sense of loss and resignation. Only a filmmaker of Ozu's stature could make me tearful with joy at the sight of a brickyard!

Early spring is a time to renew one's hopes, to believe once again that happiness is possible. Sometimes that hope takes the form of betrayal: an extra-marital affair may appear to be the answer to a life that is insufferably routinized and devoid of the thrill of adventure. The "salaryman" (in the US: "white-collar worker") is someone especially vulnerable: he enters the corporation filled with hope for his future, but, we are told, he soon discovers only disillusionment and "dissatisfaction" (a word that surfaces throughout the film). There are, of course, the blandishments of Japan's new consumer society: Note the presence of posters advertising foreign destinations throughout the film (Paris, Colombia, Finland); and note the reference to the withering of the plum trees (Japan's own) on a rich man's estate while bouganvilleas (a foreign import) thrive. But there's little to indicate that Ozu thinks these foreign bagatelles can bring happiness. Indeed, the film has a spareness about it, reflecting a world that has yet to become hopelessly cluttered with objects, which is, as we know too well, the other (the American) solution to dissatisfaction and disillusionment in human relationships and work. Each character tries to shape a life of work and relationships into something satisfying, but there's no simple formula to be found here for happiness in the modern world. There is only the dignity (or lack of dignity) of each individual in their attempt to find happiness. Ozu has brought to life characters who never gush in emotion, who don't even touch one another in the most intimate of reunions (the final husband and wife scene), and whose very restraint makes us feel all the more strongly about them. We feel honored to have shared a part of their lives.