Late Spring

"+ A great work of dramatic simplicity. It features a character who, after WWII, is healing from an unspecified sickness and looking after her widowed father. She is also confronted by the cultural importance of being married, and her own personal desire to stay with her father and take care of him. This movie is as far from Hollywood romance as one can be, both in the late forties when it was made, and even today. In your standard love story you would follow the young woman as she meets a suitor and then spend the rest of the movie watching a romantic cat and mouse game while the quirky parents encourage the woman to settle down (or in other cases disapprove of the man). In this movie the main character is pressured to get married by those around her, and there is indeed a romantic prospect, but we never see his face. There is talk about her meeting him, but we aren't there when she meets him and only hear secondhand accounts by her and other people who she speaks to. The real love story turns out to be a deeper one between a daughter and her father and the sacrifices they make for one another. It's a movie that doesn't look at sadness as undesirable and challenges us to sit with these characters as they learn to find the balance between honoring tradition and being true to oneself. This is not something to watch if you are looking for happily-ever-after romance. The story isn't told in flashy contrived ways. It's direct, slow, and powerful. It will stick with you long after it has ended. - Certain techniques can be thought of as dated. I sometimes had the sense that the role of the father didn't always feel as deep as it could have, but I suspect that it is because of the time it was made. I sometimes expected something more akin to the character Ikiru in the movie of the same name by Kurosawa. But movies evolve, and that doesn't hurt this movie's heartbreaking greatness. NOTE: My first Ozu movie, but hopefully not my last. A great work of cinema."