The Cinematheque

“Impeccably acted … Ozu’s magnificent Early Spring seems utterly fresh and contemporary. This modest classic also conveys the claustrophobia of office life better than any other film I’ve seen.”

Nora Sayre, The New York Times

Ozu’s first-rate follow-up to 1953’s Tokyo Story, his acknowledged masterpiece, finds the director returning to a favourite milieu of his earlier, silent work: the workaday world of salaried office men. A discontented young white-collar worker, bored with his wife and his job, has a brief affair with a flirtatious coworker and imperils his marriage. ​“I wanted to show the life of a man with such a job—his happiness over graduation and finally becoming a member of society, his hopes for the future gradually dissolving, his realizing that, even though he has worked for years, he has accomplished nothing … I wanted to bring out what you might call the pathos of such a life” (Ozu). The youth-focused picture, which eschews the generational discord found in much of the director’s late-period work, makes beguiling use of narrative ellipses and sparingly employed tracking shots. Its title is emblematic of budding adulthood.

In Japanese with English subtitles

“Both his longest film and his most comprehensive one … Ozu’s despairing view of postwar Japan looks as harshly at blind modernization as it does at decadent tradition.”

Richard Brody, The New Yorker