Pier Giorgio Girasole 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.

chaos-rampant Okay, so we expect a certain clarity from cinema about the conundrums of life. In Ozu this appears in a combination of things. The spatiotemporal eye is empty, grounded, it's a dispassionate awareness that sets the room for life to play out. It's more than realism, it's a way of creating realization about the point things are more sensibly viewed from.Narrative then is a matter of having something to view. Here several things blend. Officework for the salaryman in the audience. War reminiscence. A marriage grown distant to illustrate the tension in the home. So each of these threads poses an aspect of life, the idea is that life also extends a bit in this or that direction. This is the opportunity to create that realization that in the first place informs the passage of time. It's not that things were better in the old days, this is never the point in his films. Viewers who miss this are stuck with a sentimental uncle. It's that things are not different, that slightly changed the same conundrums repeat: salarymen are not more distinguished than the old craftsmen, husbands will stray as before and so on. In the same swoop it creates both melancholy and a certain kind of relief.Ozu is quaint then in this sense of being content by the way life envelops and figures itself out, letting the drama peter out as a way of saying it was never worth being caught in. This was most elegantly seen in Early Summer in the girl's spontaneous decision one night to marry. Here the wife in the end makes her choice to follow her husband in his transfer, not because anything has been solved, but because it is now seen to not matter.But he removes the self from the camera only to put it back in the characters. This is a great and difficult balance that to my mind he only accomplished once or twice, how little to show and say. There's no precise answer, just different brushstrokes to try. Push with a little more force and it becomes a moral smudge, push less and maybe there won't be an intelligible trace.Ozu traces faintly the turmoil but too hard the worldly lesson, it seems every minor character is encountered to offer advice at some point. It defeats the whole point of a world that is not yet figured.

museumofdave 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.

eldino33 Seeing this film is more like looking at a photo album than watching a movie. Characters seem to walk in and out of set scenes, speaking while in the set, and then it is on to the next photo. Some concession need be made for a black and white film from 1956 and for the style of Yasujiro Ozo, yet this approach to film making seems to destroy the continuity of the film. For example, one jumps from tones of Japanese industrial society (340,000 office workers in one city) to hiking on a highway to sitting and drinking tea. This may in fact be the thread of industrial postWWII Japan, but it seems not the fabric. The result appears to be a lack of a coherent Japanese identity, for costumes and jobs appear not to be enough to transcend the disruptive nature of the editing. Ozu is the master of the set scene, but the editing appears disjointed rather than cohesive. There also seems to be a dependence on American stage production rather than Japanese movie making. One cannot help be see a relation between this film and the stage plays of Tennessee Williams and of Arthur Miller. I seem to get the feeling I am watching a Japanese docu-melodrama in Italian neo-realism. I half expect to see Burt Lancaster leap into one of the scenes. The Left Elbow Index considers seven variables of film--acting, film continuity, character development, dialogue, production sets, and plot. The acting is average since there seems to be little more to do than sit and talk. The film continuity is also rated as average, despite the what seems to be disjointed action and time. The character development and plot need help. There is little verbo-robots can become, and the plot of infidelity in marriage seems always to follow the same course, with minor personal variations. The production sets are rated average since in black and white most sets are simply degrees of gray. Average is the rating given to the dialogue. It is functional but appears to lack insight. The best line is "Babies come quicker than raises." The artistry rates average, again color would help, as it does in Ozu's THE END OF SUMMER. The overall LEI average is 3.83, raised to 4 in tribute to Ozu's reputation, which equates to a 6 on the IMDb scale. I recommend the film, it is worth watching as an integral part of film history, keeping in mind that the best of Japanese films have not yet arrived in 1956.