Prisma #56

Toward the end of Late Spring, Noriko and her father are packing the night before their trip home from Kyoto the next day. Overjoyed to be in his company, Noriko begs her father to stop insisting she marry and allow her continue to live with him. He attempts to persuade her by promising a deeper happiness, referring to the natural order of human life and history. Noriko, sorrowfully listening to her father’s lessons, now somewhat convinced, hesitantly embraces her future happiness. Despite a short interval of tears, the two happily reconcile. This brilliant moment exemplifies the contradiction at the heart of Ozu’s work: the simultaneous longing for what exists and what cannot be; the love of things as they are, alongside a yearning for an improbable happiness. In his films, this contradiction often unfolds at night, in the moments before sleep. As many have observed, Ozu is a filmmaker of the present, with elements of the past or future relegated off-screen. Time seems absent in his films precisely due to its omnipresence, like the serene still life of the transition shots that evoke sadness, making utmost happiness resemble the utmost sorrow. This is Ozu’s melancholy, the hour when things linger, captured in one of the most recurring phrases: “That can’t be helped.” However, this predominant pattern of time is strikingly disrupted in the quiet, cosmic moments before sleep – moments of possibility and impossibility that are to the narrative what excessive drinking is to the characters. They enable the possibility by exhausting the narrative’s iterative trait and help endure the indifferent passage of time. Noriko wishes to cling to the past, while her father aspires to do so through the future. Ozu’s nocturnal contradictions evoke regret, hope and uncertainty, allowing the narrative’s impossible cycle of repetition to begin anew, balancing what is and what cannot be, as described by Simone Weil. The night undoes the day’s work, only for the day to take it up again.