Composition—the word that most immediately comes to mind when contemplating the work of Yasujirō Ozu. The composition on the screen, yes—of camera placement, of atmosphere and object(s)—but also of bodies and their moods, of characters forming, de-forming, and forming again in response to excitation and/or sorrow and/or slight, contained within the strictures of social decency. One thinks of Setsuko Hara, too, and that winning smile; and one thinks of that moment with the apple peel in Late Spring, with Chishū Ryū, where there is no smiling, and all the world seems to converge upon his slow and magnified severance.

Late Spring is certainly one of the saddest films ever made, and not because of any deliberate tearjerking on Ozu’s part (though the viewer is free to weep with the father, at film’s end), but because the director, in fact, attempts the very opposite: His characters deflect from sadness, from what might be seen as hysteria or selfishness, at every turn, providing every practical reason to accept what Late Spring’s principal characters feel they cannot accept, and would not, but for the risk of communal disapproval.

Those characters are Shukichi Somiya, an elderly professor, and his twenty-seven-year-old daughter Noriko (played by Chishū Ryū and Setsuko Hara, respectively). His sister, Aunt Masa (Haruko Sugimura) and the rest of their small community, in a town just outside Tokyo, are pressuring him to marry off Noriko, for she is nearing the end of her marriageable “prime.” It is clear that Shukichi is not particularly enthused about the decision, but he goes along with the steadily developing plans, unwilling to set himself as the obstacle for Noriko’s potential prospects. […]