Early Summer

Three generations of the Mamiya family share a home in Kamakura, where 28-year-old Noriko (Setsuko Hara) is happily unmarried, working in Tokyo and enjoying the company of friends. When her family begins searching for a suitable husband, Noriko makes an unexpected choice of her own – a decision that sets in motion the gradual dispersal of a seemingly settled household.

Early Summer marked Shōhei Imamura’s first film as an assistant director, made shortly after he joined Shochiku’s Ofuna studio. Imamura remembered Ozu, his ‘first master’, as an intimidating presence who controlled even the smallest movement within the frame, while the young assistant was already drawn towards a very different kind of cinema. Yet he came to recognise in Ozu a fellow observer of human behaviour: watching Tokyo Story two years later, Imamura realised that while he thought he too had been ‘looking at human beings’, Ozu was ‘looking at them from somewhere entirely different.’ Early Summer marks the beginning of this brief but formative apprenticeship, before Imamura would turn Ozu’s lessons towards a cinema unmistakably his own.

Early Summer (麥秋), dir. Yasujirō Ozu, Japan 1951, Japanese with English subtitles, 124 min.