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.
This post is the last in a series discussing Yasujirō Ozu’s Early Summer (1951) as a hypothesized example of “a queer film subtly but firmly protesting compulsory heterosexuality, made by a (possibly) queer director and starring a (possibly) queer actor.” See also my introduction in part 1, and my detailed breakdown of the film’s scenes in part 2, part 3, and part 4.
Here I provide my final thoughts on the film and my thesis.
NOTE: This post contains spoilers for Early Summer.
I originally hypothesized that Yasujirō Ozu’s 1951 film Early Summer could be seen as “a queer film subtly but firmly protesting compulsory heterosexuality, made by a (possibly) queer director and starring a (possibly) queer actor.” My second post looked for evidence in favor of this thesis, as did my third post. In this post I discuss the final section of the film.
NOTE: This post contains spoilers for Early Summer.
In my first post I hypothesized that Yasujirō Ozu’s 1951 film Early Summer could be hypothesized as “a queer film subtly but firmly protesting compulsory heterosexuality, made by a (possibly) queer director and starring a (possibly) queer actor.” In my second post I presented some evidence to that effect, covering the first half of the film. In this post I continue trying to find evidence for my hypothesis, starting with the first part of the second half of the film.
NOTE: This post contains spoilers for Early Summer.
In part 1 of this series of five posts I speculated that Yasujiro Ozū’s 1951 film Early Summer was at least partly about the experience of being queer in post-war Japan, and how that interacted with expectations of marriage and family. In this and subsequent posts I marshall evidence in support of that hypothesis.
First, a note on sources: Since I don’t speak Japanese, I’m relying almost completely on the subtitles in the two English releases of Early Summer. The first is a Criterion release from 2004, currently available for streaming in the US on the Criterion Channel and HBO Max. There is also a British Film Institute release from 2010, currently available for streaming in the UK on the BFI Player. (Those without access to these are free to try to hunt the film down on other sites devoted to hosting videos or archiving Internet content.)
In general I’ll be quoting the Criterion subtitles; as I discuss later, there are at least a couple of places where the BFI translation is substantially different, and another place where the Criterion subtitles contain a major error.
NOTE: This post contains spoilers for Early Summer.