ARKANSAS TIMES FILM SERIES: ‘LATE SPRING’
TUESDAY 5/21. Riverdale 10 VIP Cinema. 7 p.m. $12-$14.
In the Japanese drama “Late Spring” (1949), the 27-year-old Noriko (Setsuko Hara) happily shares a home with her father, Shukichi Somiya (Chishū Ryū), a professor and widower. They’ve found a sort of platonic ideal of a living arrangement with Noriko taking care of the house and seeing to her father’s needs — at least until Shukichi’s sister, Aunt Masa (Haruko Sugimura), exerts pressure on Noriko to get married before it’s too late and pushes Shukichi to let her go. Knowing that Noriko would never abandon him, Shukichi deceives his daughter by pretending to pursue a marriage of his own so that she will willingly move on with her life.
Subtle and devastating, Roger Ebert described “Late Spring” as a film about two people who are “undone by their tact, their concern for each other, and their need to make others comfortable by seeming to agree with them.” It’s also the first entry in Japanese filmmaker Yasujirō Ozu’s “Noriko Trilogy,” a thematically united but narratively unconnected series of films. Each movie features Hara in the role of Noriko, but every Noriko is a different person, aside from their shared identity as a single woman in postwar Japan. Get tickets here.