Ozu's Early Spring, 1956: Life is ephemeral life

Jasujiro Ozu's Early Spring, 1956, mirrors at post-war industrialization, Western cultural influences, and the personal and universal oppression of the Japanese  "salary man".

Ozu's spectacularly stark black and white floating world tableau is multilayered with architectural elements, fabric folds, veiling, transparency, opacity, patterns, and natural forms. These accompany portraits of faces and domestic activities, rituals, pairings, and expressions. Dress is increasingly replaced and masked by the more Modern conventions of photographic mise en scene and even premonitory Burtinsky-esque views. Vertiginous perspectives betray shifts of Japanese cultural, physical, and political landscapes. Treeless gridded cities carved out by buses and tram lines, boisterous traffic, and vertical neon signs. Throngs of male-dominated workforce commute, descend upon, and invade asphalt roads, cement walkways and rectangular buildings of uniform minimalist aesthetics, pushing out old ways of living and being.

Modern structures encroach on a marginalized countryside marred and populated by by contamination, factory stacks, railway tracks carry workers donning paired-down tailored look of 1950's American white shirts and pleated trousers, or bell skirts below the knee to the granite beehive-office spaces. In the prefectures and outskirts of Tokyo, youth dominates, so animals, families, and children are now rare and invisible.

We experience a claustrophobic quality of life when in a narrow shaft of an common alley a woman exclaims, "the garbage man never comes". This alley and cry for a lack of order and care exposes these modern-day challenge of living in cramped spaces, piling human on human in a Modernist Tokyo where freedom, privacy, clean, land and air replaced by the social order of work, dress, and productivity hinder, delay, and smother life.

Brushing teeth, shaving, cleaning, ironing, folding clothes, dressing, undressing, packing, sleeping, eating, drinking, smoking, singing, walking, and talking are communal activities that bind humans. The Modern worker's activities replace communal ones with typing, talking, negotiating, telephoning, and commuting. The colorless, grey world reduces life to tonal values, darks and lights. Socializing becomes ritualized smoking, drinking, carousing, singing, and eating in bars and restaurants humanize the workers. These social activities bind and separate young twenty-thirty-forty-somethings who seek their fortune and self reflection in the telling mirror of society.

Clocks, file cabinets, typists typing, men working and smoking in their offices in sterile, unpatterned shirts. Rectangular windows render anonymous the beings and life inside, conceal their individuality, their lives. The geometric structures contain, protect, and foster only the goals of larger economic livelihood and well being disassociated from the values and desires of humanity.

Infrequently, a small Modernist painting may appear as the sole artistic creation that is not associated with mending, cooking, typing, or tidying. Creative acts must have production for a common good attached to them. In one scene, a small mirror sits high on a small piece of furniture and shows only shadows of movement. It is such a subtle moment, one that is easily lost, and symbolic of the minute details of humanity that may count for something of great proportion.

Ozu's use of flatness refers to many aspects of his inquiry into humanity, its lack of depth, diversity, the tyranny of surfaces, appearances, just as pattern becomes the micro and macro versions of the same thing. When viewed as the same, these lose their integrity. Everything seems perfect, untroubled, operational, working, and  fully functional. (In French, fonctionaire is a worker, state employee. Fonction means to function, act as. I imagine in Japanese there may be a similar word.)

 Ozu employs domestic objects, clothing, ambient sounds, and framing of spaces which become meta narratives and supporting actors. A torn pillow case, Western clothes suspended, costumes being put on or taken off or worn, books in stacks or books strewn, incense or cigarette smoke wafting and rising,  glasses of milk or beer sitting or being gulped have quirky qualities of disassembling, disorder, or chance. Objects in their stasis are active, continuing to speak about the characters, the actions, and the space in which we find them.

Activities also become meta narratives: the act of putting on make up and gossiping, the act of playing tiles and gossiping, the act of setting up or putting away bedding, packing or unpacking, the act of drinking and signing, the preparation of food, ironing, scrubbing a stain, combing one's hair, brushing one's teeth.

One's status and roles are multiple, playing out in different contexts and enhanced by objects, spaces, and ambient sounds. It is evident we suffer the complexity of the obligations that contradict themselves and spar with our desires, fears, values, or dreams as humans. A salary man, retired worker, father, mother, husband, wife, widow, old maid, married couple, dead child, unborn child, cook, cook, typist, invisible garbage man, secret lover are unfulfilled, experience loss, incompleteness, and separation. "Everyone' s dissatisfied." is a company director's words as he reflects upon the differences between one worker and an independent boss. Are either able to delay the mortality, loss, and suffering we all face at one time or another.

Against the sharp edges of crossword puzzle world of buildings, windows, newspapers, books, and tiles, our rounded tenderness is wounded, betrayed by emotional spills and cliche lipstick stains, both trappings and forensic evidence of our domestic systems and regulation, which fail to secure or guard personal or universal happiness.

"Goldfish" is a young woman-worker whose large eyes influence her predominately male colleagues' pet name. Her independent attitude and ability to stray from the norms gets her into trouble. She is and further estranges herself as she develops feelings and inhabits a more deeply intimate, emotional realms; she becomes a fish out of water, as her colleagues find her swimming in an opposite direction from the others.

She aligns herself with a married salary man, Sugi, who is married to Masako. Sugi finds something he lacks or misses in her company She provides him with an escape from the loss of his child,  the ordinary familiarity of his obedient, predictable, and dutiful wife, the overbearing nature of his vocal mother-in-law, and the tiny world at home that seems to e closing in on him. He has become dulled by the daily chore of routine, and finds Goldfish's exuberance refreshing, welcoming, and flattering. 

Sugi and Goldfish strike up a friendship; the warmth and affection they feel for one another leads to a single-night romance and echo into the home and work lives, public and private lives of both, and begin to consume the imaginations of those nearest them. Later, Goldfish is invited to a noodle party, where she is greeted by an interrogation by colleagues about rumors of infidelity with Sugi ("Gossip links you two."), she fights to preserve her secret, and fights to protect herself. They taunt her and demand that she: "Try some criticism." and she consider how she would feel if she were the wife. One male colleague says" She needs to be told off. It's humanism." As if humanism can be bundled, categorized, and presented easily, or turned into punishment. This comments on ideals of justice and how distorted justice becomes when it is glued or hinged to revenge. Often, one who strays from norms is ostracized, criticized, judged for stepping onto the edges of what is deemed proper, correct, and safe. Her independence is threatening to others.

Ozu examines conformity as it resides in the obligatory crisp, blank shirt and pressed trousers or skirt worn by Modern Japanese office workers. Within the white shirt-uniform, we locate contracts, marital vows, ladders and status. The promise of a clean, orderly, and comfortable life where clothes are cleaned, ironed, and hung, ready to wear, ready to define our identity as we perform them daily outside and inside, privately and publicly. The white shirt,  the most basic garments of Western dress since medieval times first appeared as a a chemise or undergarment, bears historical multiple identities combative and repressed.

The white shirt distinguishes the worker from a farmer, factory worker, laborer as someone who works in an office where dirt is eliminated and prevented. The office worker remains tidy, respected, and salaried, can move up a mobile ladder of economic incentives and benefits, supposedly. What resides behind the white shirt, and near the heart? What does the white shirt reveal and conceal at the same time? The white shirt cannot stave off or prevent a less painful demise cannot cloak or cover the ugliness and decay of our mortality. The white shirt is not immune to stains, tears, (note: tears and tears are the same), destruction, and are not enough armour to protect our hearts and souls from suffering, death, and loss. The white collar is as vulnerable to life as its wearer. Our clothes speak to our nakedness, transparency, truths.

Miuri, is a young friend of Sugi and others, who has been ill for over 100 days, and who eventually takes his own life with sleeping pills. We can only assume he finds his isolation from the world unbearable, as he begs Sugi to stay with him during a visit. In a way, Miuri symbolizes most profoundly the disillusionment and loneliness the film embodies, as he is scapegoated by his best friend, often alone with his mother to care for him, and incapacitated, so cannot participate in life in any way. But, perhaps, he participates in some other way, and becomes the beacon of light for his friends, a living conscience, a prisoner of conscience.  He dies young in a sense, becomes hero and a villain, for he leaves those behind with the mess of the world, and becomes removed from the burdens, or so it would seem. We cannot be and not be at the same time.

"Life is ephemeral." is the most beautiful line in the film, and speaks to the undeniable truth and flux there. It questions the stability or usefulness, ethics and meaning behind standards and rules, and asks can we conform a human self to some ideal of economic, patriotic, or even domestic picture we want to frame and hold onto for posterity. Or is it true, we will will age, wither, lose our mobility, and lose our lives; our clothes, our jobs, our relatives and loves will not keep us together, yet we are bound together as a humanity, a collective being that will continue to be regardless of rules, or values, or anything we impose upon it.