going hungry
by
Douglas Messerli
Kōgo
Noda and Yasujirō Ozu (screenplay), Yasujirō Ozu
(director) (早春 Sōshun) Early Spring / 1956
Yasujirō
Ozu’s longest film to survive, Early
Spring, might almost be described as a melodrama, a bit in the manner of
the works of American directors Nicholas Ray and Douglas Sirk—except while the
American films were generally about women who were unfaithful and doubting. In
Ozu’s great film it is the husband, Shoji Sugiyama (Ryō Ikebe) who cheats on
his wife, Masako
(Chikage Awashima).
Working in an office that is just as impersonal,
although far more crowded, as Billy Wilder’s terrifying vistas in The Apartment, Sugiyama is unhappy in
his daily routine, which Ozu indicates from the very first scene of his film
with the sound of his alarm clock and his character’s trudge, along with
hundreds of other workers, to central Tokyo, where they are locked into small
rooms for accounting, typing, and fact-checking, with an occasional invite out
by the higher-ups. The best such a common worker can hope for is to gradually
move up in the corporate structure over many years, but like his fellow worker who
dies during the movie, Sugiyama has little hope for advancement. For reasons
unknown, his and Masako’s only son has himself died—one suspects of lack of nutrition,
since the family sometimes cannot even afford their daily intake of rice. Masako
is sometimes forced to take advantage of her tart-speaking mother, who runs a
local restaurant-bar, in order to simply bring enough food to their table.
Throughout this film, in fact, Sugiyama
often goes hungry, his lunch being interrupted by officials, his dinners replaced
by drunken nights with his friends with whom he plays mahjong. He is a man who
hungers; so is it any wonder when, invited by an wide-eyed office typist, Chiyo
Kaneko (Keiko Kishi), nicknamed because of her large eyes, “Goldfish,” that he is
quite literally seduced into joining the office hikers (a thematic in several
Japanese films), and even further implicated into her life after she suggests
they take the slackers way by catching a hitch on the back of a local truck passing
by. Indeed, their fellow would-be hikers are envious of their decision, begging
that they too might join them.
Ozu subtly makes this simple act into a
kind of transgression, as the two rides past their fellow workers in complete
enjoyment of their “rest,” while the rest must slowly slog on. You can almost
hear the gossip that follows roiling up among their fellow employees. And soon
after even Masako suspects that something is going on with her husband, while
his friends determine to celebrate a rice party wherein, since Sugiyama never
shows up, they castigate Kaneko for beginning an affair with their married
friend.
The bleakness of Sugiyama’s life gets
even darker when Masako leaves their home to return to her mother, admitting that
she has discovered a lip-stick stained handkerchief in his husband’s pocket,
while the confused worker is asked to relocate to a provincial city where the
company has interests—a move which might be seen either as a demotion or a possibility
of new potential—which, obviously, will also take him away from his only
current pleasure.
We can never know whether Sugiyama and
his wife’s lives will improve—Ozu never allows simple summaries of his
explorations of deep family life—but we can hope that this unhappy couple may somehow
again find their way through life. Ozu’s vision, with regard to the
vicissitudes of post-World War II Japanese family life, still believes in the
unions into which they originally committed themselves. If they fail, it is
also a product of the culture at large, not simply their personal inabilities.
One might even argue that for Ozu, family life is the only way to survive such
tragic circumstances. Alone, one can find no true solution for survival.
Los Angeles, December
30, 2018
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (December
2018).
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