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[April 30, 2006]

Newsday, Melville, N.Y., Movies On Dvd column: Ozu's 'Spring' blooms fresh

(Newsday (Melville, NY) (KRT) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) Apr. 30--Something odd took place in the middle of an old Japanese movie I was watching the other night: A character rose from her seat at a dining table and stumbled, then confessed that her leg had fallen asleep.


That's it: an ordinary, everyday occurrence, but one that I couldn't recall having ever seen in a movie. It neither furthered the plot, nor registered any deeper meaning, nor punctuated a joke. It merely happened. By the same token, it was also clear that the moment was not improvised, but quite deliberate: a scripted grace note of human behavior.

If I make such a fuss and bother, it is because little in American movies merely happens, in the observational sense that it did here. Every action and detail in a Hollywood film is there to get us where we are going, a destination that invariably fulfills our expectation.

The film in question was "Late Spring," and its director, Yasujiro Ozu, thrived on foiling expectations and observing simple gestures. From the silent era to such plangent family dramas as "Tokyo Story" (1953) and "An Autumn Afternoon" (which he made a year before his death in 1963), Ozu refined a unique brand of minimalist storytelling as meticulous as it is moving. Using a static, low-lying camera, he teased at story developments that often never followed through, introduced central characters that never appeared onscreen, and leapt entirely over pivotal events.

"Late Spring" is quintessential Ozu in all of these respects. Made in 1949, barely a year after Japan enacted a constitution drafted by its American occupier (as Richard Pena points out in his authoritative commentary), it heaves a typical Ozu sigh for the ebb of the old Japanese way and the onslaught of modern life.

Its 27-year-old heroine Noriko zestfully embodies the Japanese moga (modern girl), at once sensual and bursting with playful innocence. As played by the radiant Setsuko Hara, Noriko positively bubbles over with happiness and good fortune at her lot in life.

The chief source of her joy is her father, Somiya (Chishu Ryu), a college professor who is realizing he has kept his daughter too close to the nest for her own good. Noriko's heart belongs to daddy, in the purest, familial sense, and she blithely shrugs off pressure from her aunt and her divorced friend to find a husband, insisting she is content to care for her father.

Ozu presents Somiya and Noriko in the benign tableaux of a settled married couple, and we lament with Noriko the possibility that such domestic perfection might be shattered. What makes Noriko's reluctant march to marriage so poignant, however, is the particular presence (and glaring absence) of other men in her life.

Ozu sets us up to imagine Noriko has a perfect suitor in Somiya's handsome assistant Hattori, who accompanies Noriko on frolicsome bike outings that are never as romantic as we are first led to suspect. And what are we to make of Somiya's colleague, who dotes on Noriko but would appear to be happily settled into a second marriage?

Missing from Noriko's home sweet home, besides a mother, is a brother figure, underscoring (as Pena points out) a generation of young men recently killed in the war. When Noriko eventually gets engaged, her fiance is never so much as glimpsed. We're told he looks like Gary Cooper, but it makes little difference; what matters, Ozu communicates so eloquently by the fellow's nonappearance, is that he will never be Noriko's beloved father.

As if to hit home the point, Ozu skips over the wedding entirely, leaving us instead with haunting echoes of Noriko, resigned to her fate as she awaits the wedding in her traditional bridal dress, and her father, peeling an apple at home after the ceremony - the first of many tasks he will now have to do alone for the remainder of his days.

The piercing truthfulness and economy of Ozu's style is honored by a next-generation German director in "Tokyo-ga," the eye-popping documentary by Wim Wenders that accompanies "Late Spring" on a second disc.

The director of "Wings of Desire" journeys to Tokyo with the intention of interviewing former Ozu associates and getting in touch with a passing way of life commemorated in Ozu's films. Sucker for kitsch that he is, Wenders is distracted by the mechanized clamor and night-owl honky-tonk of modern Tokyo.

What Wenders comes up with is a kaleidoscopic, color-saturated ode to urban Japanese obsessions, a la 1984: baseball, golf, arcade games, American pop culture. The most enthralling sequence takes us to a shop where they produce the eerily realistic wax food for restaurant window displays.

At one point, Wenders takes a train to the cemetery where Ozu is buried to see, perhaps, if the director is turning in his grave at the fate of his beloved Tokyo. At the gravesite, Wenders finds a simple stone, marked only with a Chinese character that means "nothingness."

Another worthy release

THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE (Fox). Just in time for the remake. This two-disc edition includes 10 features and optional babble from director Ronald Neame

and co-stars Stella Stevens, Pamela Sue Martin and Carol Lynley. Tuesday

LATE SPRING and TOKYO-GA. (Criterion) Available on two discs May 9.

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