(In what follows I’m not saying anything that’s not well-known to film buffs, but, as always on this blog, I’m writing to get my thoughts clear for my own sake.)
So: If Vertigo isn’t the greatest movie ever made, what is? Citizen Kane, as widely believed for so many decades? Maybe. I would not protest the restoration of Kane to the top spot. But if I am allowed to cheat a little, I will select three oddly but closely related movies, what I call the Noriko Triptych.
Between 1949 and 1953 Yasujirō Ozu made three movies that are connected to one another in elliptical and complex ways. (He also made two other movies in that period but we’ll set them aside.) Each of the three — Late Spring (1949), Early Summer (1951), and Tokyo Story (1953) — deserves to be ranked among the greatest films ever made; taken together, as I think they should be, they constitute an unparalleled filmmaking achievement.
In these three films Ozu began his working relationship with the incomparable Setsuko Hara, and in each she plays a young woman named Noriko. In one sense these are three quite different characters, but in another sense they aren’t: you could say that one Noriko finds herself in three different families — three different situations, each of which reflects something about the transformations that her society was undergoing in the years after World War II — three parallel universes. Except in one key scene in one of the movies, she always wears modern Western clothing in public; she always has a job. She is the Modern Japanese Woman, and some of her friends are too, but she also has complex if cordial relations with older women of a more traditional bent.
(Every now and then we even see a woman — for instance, the sister-in-law in Early Summer — who wears modern dress sometimes and traditional dress at other times. I wish I understood the nuances of what these variations in costume communicated to a Japanese audience at the time the movies were released.)
In one universe Noriko is a widow, while in the other two she’s moving towards marriage, though the man she is to marry is either invisible to us or barely seen. The absence of young men — largely of course through death in the recent war — is a constant theme, a kind of vacuole in all the films. We see this not only through the circumstances of young women like Noriko, but also through the older generation, who have lost their sons in war and now must face losing their daughters to marriage. And as the film scholar Donald Richie notes in his excellent commentary on the Criterion edition of Early Summer, in that culture to have a daughter marry is almost always a real loss: one character says, casually but confidently, that no real man would ever live with his wife’s family.
Each film is an ensemble piece; Noriko is never in the strictest sense the protagonist. Indeed, in Tokyo Story her role is formally secondary to the elderly couple whose struggles to find a place in a bustling postwar world are, for most of the movie, our central interest.
But at some point in each film, and at most points in the other two films, Noriko becomes the point of focus, the nexus, the character in which we can feel the vibrating tensions that strain Japanese society — and especially the Japanese family. Even in Tokyo Story the most profoundly moving scene centers on Noriko, but is about the forces that destroy families. The family photograph that’s the essential image of Early Summer is no joyous occasion — though everyone tries to put on a brave face — but rather a tacit acknowledgement that the members of the family are about go their separate ways, split into three parts, and that there will probably be no future opportunity to get them all into one frame.
Notice the mixture of traditional Japanese and modern Western clothing in that shot.
But as great as these movies are simply as x-rays of a society in traumatic and profound transition, they are greater simply as presentations of the most universal and powerful human emotions — love and loss and grief and resignation and despair and hope. And at the heart of these presentations, always, is Setsuko Hara, whose ability to capture in a single moment extreme vulnerability and extreme resilience is simply … well, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen another actor do what she does. She and Ozu were, cinematically speaking, made for each other, and it’s fitting, if sad, that upon his death she retired from acting and lived the rest of her long life out of the public eye.
(That’s Hara with Chishū Ryū, another Ozu stalwart, who in these three movies plays her older brother, her father, and her father-in-law.)
If indeed we can treat these three movies as a triptych, a single work in three parts, then in my view that triptych is the greatest achievement in film to date.
