The Portrait (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1948)

Chieko Higashiyama, Kuniko Miyake, and Ichiro Sugai in The Portrait

Midori: Kuniko Igawa
Kaneko: Eitaro Ozawa
Tamai: Kamatari Fujiwara
Nomura, the Artist: Ichiro Sugai
The Artist's Wife: Chieko Higashiyama
Kumiko, the Daughter-in-Law: Kuniko Miyake
Yoko, the Artist's Daughter: Yoko Katsuragi
Midori's Friend: Mitsuko Miura
Nakajima, Yoko's Boyfriend: Keiji Sada
Ichiro, the Artist's Son: Toru Abe

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Akira Kurosawa
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Production design: Motoji Kojima
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

Keisuke Kinoshita's The Portrait deserves to be a little better known, if only because its screenplay is by Akira Kurosawa. Not that it's a masterpiece, or even a particularly felicitous example of Kurosawa's screenwriting, but it's one of the better films of the enormously prolific and sometimes misguided Kinoshita. IMDb, oddly, gives only the names of the cast members, not indicating what roles they play, which can be something of a challenge to those of us who aren't completely familiar with Japanese actors. Fortunately, I was able to track down a cast list and a useful summary on French Wikipedia. At the core of the film is an old trope: the portrait that reveals the truth. In this case, it reminds Midori, the mistress of real-estate hustler Kaneko, of her innocent past, causing her to break off their relationship. Kaneko has entered into partnership with Tamai to buy a rather rundown and ill-planned house, make some renovations, and flip it for double the price. The problem is the tenants, an artist named Nomura and his family. Kaneko is reluctant to evict them outright -- this guy is in real estate? -- so he concocts a plan: He will move Midori, who has somewhat of a temper, into the upstairs room of the house, and she'll prove such a torment to Nomura and his family that they'll be glad to leave. But things start to go awry almost immediately: The family think that Midori is Kuneko's daughter instead of his mistress. Naturally, she's somewhat flattered by this misconception. She softens even more when Nomura wants to paint her portrait, and falls completely when the family downstairs prove to be kind and affectionate people. Watching Yoko, the daughter, dance with her boyfriend under a full moon, and then be joined by Nomura and his wife, Midori starts to turn against Kaneko. But then even Kaneko is softened by the tenants and abandons his scheme. This is typical movie sentimentality, a fault Kinoshita (and sometimes Kurosawa) was often guilty of, but there is a bittersweet touch to the ending when Midori, having seen her portrait on display at a museum, walks away into an unknown future.

The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice (Yasujiro Ozu, 1952)

Koji Tsuruta and Shin Saburi in The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice

Mokichi Satake: Shin Saburi
Taeko Satake: Michiyo Kogure
Noboru Okada: Koji Tsuruta
Setsuko Yamauchi: Keiko Tsushima
Aya Amamiya: Chikage Awashima
Sadao Hirayama: Chishu Ryu
Chizu Yamauchi: Kuniko Miyake
Naosuke Yamauchi: Eijiro Yanagi
Toichiro Amamiya: Hisao Toake

Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Screenplay: Kogo Noda, Yasujiro Ozu
Cinematography: Yuharu Atsuta
Art direction: Tatsuo Hamada
Music: Ichiro Saito

Yasujiro Ozu's The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice begins like a 1950s American TV sitcom in which Lucy and Ethel try to pull a fast one over Ricky. In this case, Lucy is Taeko Satake, who wants to get away for a day with Ethel, or Aya Amamiya, at a resort spa without letting Ricky, or Mokichi Satake, know what she's up to. So Taeko decides to tell Mokichi that her niece has fallen ill at a class reunion and she needs to go tend to her. But just as she's about to depart, the niece, Setsuko, drops by the Satake home, so Taeko has to swiftly come up with a Plan B. What we are in for, obviously, is a comedy of marital errors. The Satakes have no children and their marriage has grown stale, which provides an object lesson for Setsuko, whose parents are pressuring her into an arranged marriage and have set up a meeting with the potential groom. Seeing that not only do Taeko and Mokichi have no passion in their lives but Aya is also insouciant about the extramarital affairs of her husband, Toichiro, Setsuko is determined not to fall into their trap. Where Ozu excels is in the presentation of the texture of his characters' lives -- Taeko with her gossipy friends, Mokichi with his daily office grind followed by visits to bars and pachinko parlors, sometimes with his young friend Noboru, whom Mokichi is helping get a start in life after Noboru graduates from college. (There's a wonderful little moment when a slightly inebriated Noboru sings "Gaudeamus Igitur.") At one pachinko parlor, Mokichi discovers that the owner is an old army buddy, Sadao, played by Ozu regular Chishu Ryu, whose chief role in the film is to provide a note of nostalgia for the more adventurous days during the war. Escaping from the meeting with her prospective groom, Setsuko joins Mokichi at the parlor, where she also meets Noboru, and we see a potential relationship spark between the two young people. But when Taeko learns that Mokichi has met with Setsuko when she should have been at the matchmaking session, she's furious and refuses to speak to her husband. Eventually, the crisis is resolved in a lovely scene in which Taeko and Mokichi begin to resolve their marital problems while raiding the larder after the maid has gone to bed, though the film ends with Setsuko and Noboru having what looks like their first fight. Ozu's bittersweet little comedy is sometimes dismissed as a minor work by a master director, but the mastery is very much in evidence.

Late Spring (Yasujiro Ozu, 1949)

Hohi Aoki and Setsuko Hara in Late Spring

Shukichi Somiya: Chishu Ryu 
Noriko Somiya: Setsuko Hara 
Aya Kitagawa: Yumeji Tsukioka 
Masa Taguchi: Haruko Sugimura 
Katsuyoshi: Hohi Aoki 
Shoichi Hattori: Jun Usami 
Aiko Miwa:  Kuniko Miyake
Jo Onodera: Masao Mishima 
Kiku Onodera: Yoshiko Tsubouchi 
Misako: Yoko Katsuragi 
Shige: Toyo Takahashi
Seizo Hayashi: Jun Tanizaki

Director: Yasujiro Ozu 
Screenplay: Kogo Noda, Yasujiro Ozu
Based on a novel by Kazuo Hirotsu
Cinematography: Yuharu Atsuta 
Art direction: Tatsuo Hamada 
Film editing: Yoshiyasu Hamamura 
Music: Senji Ito 

The opening of Yasujiro Ozu's Late Spring is deceptively calm: the usual establishing shots of landscape and buildings and trains, the kind of images with which Ozu typically punctuates his narratives, and a group of women gathering for a tea ceremony. One of the women is Noriko, whose brilliant smile is also deceptive. This is the first film in Ozu's so-called "Noriko trilogy," to be followed by Early Summer (1951) and Tokyo Story (1953), in each of which Setsuko Hara plays a woman named Noriko. The three Norikos have nothing in common except that they are all unmarried. (In Tokyo Story she is a widow.)  The Noriko of Late Spring lives with her father, Shukichi, who is played by Ozu regular Chishu Ryu. (In Early Summer, Ryu plays Hara's brother, and in Tokyo Story her father-in-law.) The deceptions of what might be called the "get-acquainted" section of Ozu's film, which establishes for us the relationships among the characters, lie in the apparent happiness and contentment of father and daughter and the untroubled world in which they live. But Late Spring was filmed only four years after the end of the war that devastated Japan, which was still under occupation by American forces. The wounds and pain of the country and its people are invisible in the film, partly because of occupation censorship, but they provide a kind of tension in the viewer who knows what the characters must have suffered. There is only a brief mention of this in Late Spring: Noriko has been to the doctor and reports that her health has improved. Another character's reference to "forced work during the war" sheds some light on what may have caused her illness. Later, Noriko and her father visit Kyoto, and he remarks how much nicer it is than "dusty" Tokyo, obliquely referencing wartime destruction. The central deception, however, lies in Noriko's apparent contentment with her unmarried state: She feels it is her duty to spend her life caring for her widowed father, and brushes off any suggestions that at 27 she should really be thinking about getting married -- or worse, that her father might choose to remarry. She calls the second marriage of one of her father's friends "filthy." We who have seen this situation before, however, realize that the deception Noriko is perpetrating is on herself. Perhaps because she has lived through so much change and upheaval, Noriko is trying to persuade herself that her current happiness serving her father can be made permanent. And so she suffers a shock when her father displays interest in a beautiful widow, and another when he suggests that she might meet the young man her Aunt Masa thinks would be a suitable husband for Noriko. What Ozu and his frequent collaborator Kogo Noda establish here, working from a novel called Father and Daughter by Kazuo Hirotsu, is worthy of Henry James or Jane Austen -- I think particularly of Austen's Emma Woodhouse and her self-deluding attachment to her father. Eventually, Noriko is persuaded into marriage -- in a masterstroke of direction we never even see the groom -- by her father's lie: He claims that he has been planning to remarry, thereby eliminating any objection Noriko could have to seeking her own path to fulfillment. The film ends with a melancholy image of Shukichi alone, peeling an apple -- a kind of Jamesian twist on an Austenian situation. This magisterial example of Ozu's late style -- low camera angles, absence of pans and dissolves, emphasis on the somewhat claustrophobic interiors of the Japanese home -- is reinforced by Tatsuo Hamada's art direction and Yuharu Atsuta's cinematography, but most of all by the superb performances of Hara and Ryu.

Early Summer (Yasujiro Ozu, 1951)

Isao Shirasawa, Chishu Ryu, Chieko Higashiyama, Setsuko Hara, Ichiro Sugai, Kuniko Miyake, and Zen Murase in Early Summer

Noriko Mamiya: Setsuko Hara
Koichi Mamiya: Chishu Ryu
Aya Tamura: Chikage Awashima
Fumiko Mamiya: Kuniko Miyake
Shukichi Mamiya: Ichiro Sugai
Shige Mamiya: Chieko Higashiyama
Tami Yabe: Haruko Sugimura
Takako: Kuniko Igawa
Kenkichi Yabe: Hiroshi Nihon'yanagi
Sotaro Satake: Shuji Sano
Nobo Tamura: Toyo Takahashi
Nishiwaki: Seiji Miyaguchi

Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Screenplay: Kogo Noda, Yasujiro Ozu
Cinematography: Yuharu Atsuta
Art direction: Tatsuo Hamada
Film editing: Yoshiyasu Hamamura
Music: Senji Ito

Early Summer is the second of the "seasonal" films made by Yasujiro Ozu in what is now recognized as his peak postwar period. The first was Late Spring (1949), and they were followed by Early Spring (1956), Late Autumn (1960), The End of Summer (1961), and An Autumn Afternoon (1962). I mention this chiefly because the English-language titles confuse even Ozu's hard-core admirers, among whom I count myself. "Was that Early Summer or The End of Summer?" we find ourselves asking when we're talking about Ozu's films. The confusion is further compounded by the fact that four of them starred the marvelous Setsuko Hara. It also doesn't help that the name of her character in Early Summer is Noriko, which was the name of her characters in Late Spring and Tokyo Story (Ozu, 1953). So we have to remind ourselves that in Early Summer she is Noriko Mamiya, the unmarried 28-year-old daughter of Shukichi and Shige Mamiya. She lives with them as well as with her brother, Koichi, and sister-in-law, Fumiko, and their two bratty sons. She also has a well-paying clerical job and a group of old girlfriends from her schooldays. So why does everyone, even her boss, want her to get married? When her boss starts arranging things with an old business friend of his, her family encourages the connection, even though she's never met the man and he's in his early 40s. Noriko has a mind of her own, however, and eventually surprises everyone -- perhaps even herself -- with her decision. It's a comedy-drama in which nothing exciting happens -- even key events like the search for the bratty boys when they decide to run away from home take place mostly off-screen -- but Ozu holds everything in such delicate suspension, allowing us to meditate on the relationships at length, that we get caught up in the everyday lives of the film's huge cast. There are some wonderful scenes between Noriko and her girlfriends, who share the kind of in-jokes that old friends everywhere have. Some of these are lost in translation, but even that reminds us of real life, when we're left out of a group's established routines. And sometimes the subtitles wittily help us out, finding equivalents for the hick accents Noriko and her friend adopt when talking about the possibility of moving from Tokyo to the country. Ozu and co-screenwriter Kogo Noda bring the characters to life in their private moments, as when Shukichi and Shige talk wistfully about the son who remained MIA after the war, or when they see a balloon floating ahead and reflect on how sad the child who lost it must be. No filmmaker had a profounder sense of the inner lives of people in their ordinary routine.

Good Morning (Yasujiro Ozu, 1959)

Masahiko Shimazu and Koji Shitara in Good Morning

Good Morning is, maybe, lesser Ozu, but that's because the director himself set the standard so high -- and perhaps because in some ways it's a reworking of I Was Born, But... (1932) without the depth and clarity of the silent film's themes. We are deep into postwar Japan here, with modernization and the youth culture threatening some of the values and traditions of the country. The families in Good Morning live in a new suburb, but are struggling with problems that still afflict the middle class: unemployment, saving for retirement, keeping up with the Joneses, and so on. The two young sons of Keitaro (Chishu Ryu) and Tamiko Hayashi (Kuniko Miyake), Minoru (Koji Shitara) and Isamu (Masahiko Shimazu) have been sneaking out to watch TV at their neighbors, an unconventional young couple who are scorned by others in the community because "they wear pajamas in the middle of the day" and the woman is said to be a singer in a nightclub. When the parents forbid them from going there, the boys demand that Keitaro buy them a TV set, and throw a tantrum when he refuses. He tells them they talk too much, and Minoru, the older son, retorts that it's adults who talk too much, wasting their breath on meaningless exchanges like "good morning" and "good night" and on small talk. Banished to their room Minoru and Isamu take a vow that they won't speak to adults anymore -- even to their parents and teachers. The vow backfires on them when they're unable to relay the message that they're supposed to bring their lunch money to school, but it also causes trouble when the boys' failure to exchange greetings like "good morning" is interpreted as a reflection of their parents' attitude toward the neighbors. Ozu and co-scenarist Kogo Noda develop this premise into what is essentially a situation comedy, but one that illuminates both the essentials of small talk as a social lubricant and its limitations when it comes to deeper relationships: A shy young man and woman are obviously drawn to each other, but they can't find a way to verbalize their mutual attraction, and at the film's end are shown standing on the platform waiting for a train, both unable to get past talking about the weather. That Ozu manages to introduce layers of meaning into a comedy full of juvenile fart jokes is a tribute to his genius.