Late Spring

The other film today is about a man being chased. This one is about a woman who will not move an inch.

Frost's Descent has just passed and the days are shortening fast. Ozu's rhythm suits the season: people sit in a room and talk, then they stand up, and the room is empty.

The link to the other film is the same situation — a performance already under way, and someone in the audience who suddenly recognises themselves in it. Hitchcock puts it under the spotlight of a music hall; Ozu puts it in the dark of a Noh theatre. On stage the play continues; the father smiles at the woman beside him; his daughter says nothing, and the camera stays on her face.

开场是一场茶会。

镰仓的一间屋子里，一位丧偶的大学教授和二十七岁的女儿住在一起。女儿管做饭、管洗衣、管父亲的一切，管了很多年，管得理所当然。

亲戚们开始催她出嫁。她不吵也不闹，只是每一次都把话题轻轻绕开。

父亲的老友从京都来，刚刚再婚。她当面说了一句很不客气的话——那句话说完，屋里安静了一下。

Late Spring is usually taken as the first film of Ozu's late period. It opened in Japan on 19 September 1949 to a largely enthusiastic press; the following year it topped the Kinema Junpo poll as the best Japanese film of 1949 — the fifth Ozu film to do so, and the first of his postwar ones. That year it also took four Mainichi Film Awards: best film, director, screenplay and actress.

In the 2012 Sight & Sound critics' poll it placed 15th. The BBC's 2018 poll of 209 critics from 43 countries put it 53rd among the greatest foreign-language films. Rotten Tomatoes: 100% from 26 reviews. Leonard Maltin gave it four stars, calling it a work that rivals Tokyo Story as the director's masterpiece. Akira Kurosawa included it in the personal top 100 he published in 1999.

And the remarkable thing is that not one scene in it is an argument.