hecker

Amateur essayist, anime & manga fan

Resident of Howard County, Maryland, systems engineer, and amateur essayist and data scientist. Author of the book That Type of Girl: Notes on Takako Shimura's Sweet Blue Flowers. Staff writer for Okazu.


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Happy New Year! Today’s topic is perhaps my favorite film by perhaps my favorite director, Early Summer, directed by Yasujirō Ozu. (I’ve seen all but one of the over thirty Ozu films that have survived to this day.)

I'm an old straight white cisgender man, so I wouldn’t know about these things, but Early Summer has always struck me as a pretty gosh-darned queer film. I've seen other people make remarks to this effect (one of which I’ll address in due time), but have never seen a complete case laid out. This is my own attempt; you may judge for yourself to what extent it is successful.

(This is the first in a series of 5 posts, continued in part 2, part 3, part 4, and part 5.)


A bit about Ozu: Today he’s a critic’s darling, renowned for the formalist perfection of his films and often spoken of in reverent terms. (Adam Mars-Jones skewers some of the most overly-pretentious examples of such criticism in his book Noriko Smiling, which does for Ozu’s 1949 film Late Spring what I’ll attempt in a much smaller way to do for Early Summer.)

But from his own point of view Ozu was not making arthouse films; he was making “home dramas,” movies pitched at the growing post-war Japanese middle class, with an audience composed predominantly of women. His films are about topics of concern to that middle-class audience, for example, families growing apart in an increasingly urbanized Japan (Tokyo Story, 1953), or children rejecting arranged marriages for love marriages (Equinox Flower, 1955).

Early Summer (1951) is yet another home drama. It’s the middle film in Ozu’s “Noriko trilogy” — so called because all three films feature main characters named “Noriko” — and is relatively neglected compared to the other two. Late Spring, the film that preceded it, is seen as the first great work of Ozu’s mature period; it’s ranked number 21 on the latest Sight and Sound critics’ list of the greatest films of all time, and number 62 on the accompanying directors’ list. Tokyo Story, Ozu’s next film after Early Summer, is almost universally regarded as his masterpiece, and is ranked at number 4 on both of the Sight and Sound lists.

Early Summer does not appear on either of these lists. However, it’s probably my favorite of all Ozu’s films, in part because its melancholy is accompanied by a humor — and even a measure of optimism — that is largely missing in Late Spring and Tokyo Story, and in part because it’s interesting to look at it through the lens of queerness in cinema — as I hope to do in this series of posts.

On the surface Early Summer tells the story of 28-year-old unmarried Noriko (played by the great Setsuko Hara) and her family’s and her employer’s attempts to arrange a marriage for her.

Going one level down, Early Summer is about the difference between the married and the unmarried, how the married try to persuade or (worse) coerce the unmarried into getting married, and how maybe that isn’t always such a good idea. This theme is explicitly called out more than once in the film.

Early Summer further implies that there may be a good reason why some unmarried people, including Noriko (but not just Noriko), don't want to marry: they may be “that type of person,” as the young lesbian Fumi described herself in Takako Shimura's manga Aoi hana. This subtext rises briefly to the level of text at least once before being ambiguously dismissed.

Both Ozu and Hara remained unmarried until their deaths, and to my knowledge neither were ever credibly reported as having a romantic relationship with anyone. Per Donald Richie’s commentary on the Criterion release (referenced in the next post), Ozu was reported to become angry at any talk of his marrying. Meanwhile Hara, though termed “the eternal virgin” by a film producer for her film image, in real life had close friendships with many women, including a hair and makeup artist whose friendship with Hara began early on and continued after Hara retired into obscurity at the height of her career.

In modern terms we could therefore hypothesize Early Summer as a queer film subtly but firmly protesting compulsory heterosexuality, made by a (possibly) queer director and starring a (possibly) queer actor. What exact flavor of “queer” this might be we can leave undefined for now.

Does the film itself support this hypothesis? I’ll discuss this in more detail beginning in my next post, as I walk through the various scenes and plot points of the film. However it’s generally agreed that very little in an Ozu film is accidental: interiors were constructed to his exact specifications, and actors’ gestures were meticulously rehearsed and multiple takes shot until he was satisfied. If something seems “queer” in Early Summer, there’s a good chance that Ozu intended it thus.


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