Early Spring

In Early Spring, Yasujiro Ozu returns to the office-worker milieu of his earlier films to “show the life of a man with such a job . . . his hopes for the future gradually dissolving, his realizing that . . . he has accomplished nothing. . . . [I hoped] that the audience would feel the sadness of this kind of life” (Ozu). The disaffected hero finds a pleasant diversion in a young woman nicknamed Goldfish, leading to marital complications, a split, and a renewal. “A great, unpleasant film with some of the most poetic and mysterious montages in Ozu’s career. The sequence of cuts showing commuters arriving at the station in the early morning, and the cut, later on, in the midst of dramatic crises to a neon sign at twilight are of a profoundness found nowhere else in cinema” (Nathaniel Dorsky).