LEAD:
Yoji Yamada's ''Where Spring Comes Late'' is an epic about one
man's family's journey to discover the new Japan. They are Seiichi
Kazami, a young, out-of-work coal miner; Tamiko, his wife; their two
small children, and Genzo, Seiichi's old father.
Yoji Yamada's ''Where Spring Comes Late'' is an epic about one man's
family's journey to discover the new Japan. They are Seiichi Kazami, a
young, out-of-work coal miner; Tamiko, his wife; their two small
children, and Genzo, Seiichi's old father.
With high hopes and borrowed funds, the Kazamis set out from their
village in southern Japan to become dairy-farming pioneers on the
northern island of Hokkaido. In 1970, when the film was made, Hokkaido,
to most Japanese, was still a chilly, unknown land, an underpopulated
frontier territory.
''Where Spring Comes Late'' opens today at the Public Theater as part of
the current retrospective devoted to the films of Shochiku Studios.
At first, everything is splendidly new and promising to the Kazamis.
They pass through bustling Nagasaki, the largest city any of them have
ever seen, and move on to Fukuyama, on the Inland Sea, where they expect
to leave old Genzo with Seiichi's brother. In the course of one edgy
night with the brother's family, during which everyone is crowded into a
tiny house filled with tense adults and noisy children, Seiichi and
Tamiko realize that they'll have to take Grandpa with them.
They continue, changing trains at Osaka where they spend a few
marvelous, exhausting hours at Osaka's Expo 70, before proceeding to
Tokyo. It is there that events turn grim and the scheme of the movie
begins to show. In a movie of this sort, one death is acceptable and two
suggest a plague.
In its first half, ''Where Spring Comes Late'' has a lot of the grit,
pathos and humor of an Italian neo-realist comedy of the late 1950's.
Even the ample soundtrack music sounds Italian, though with a Japanese
intonation. After Tokyo, as the Kazamis journey farther and farther
north, the movie seems to melt into upbeat sentimentality.
Mr. Yamada, who wrote and directed ''Where Spring Comes Late,'' was
considered one of Japan's most promising new directors in the late
1960's, but then became sidetracked, to his own immense financial gain,
by the hugely popular series of ''Tora-san'' comedies.
His talent is certainly evident in ''Where Spring Comes Late.'' The film
is handsomely shot in Cinemascope (called ''Shochiku Grandscope'' in my
credits), which Japanese film makers used with a poetic authority not
matched by directors anywhere else in the world. The large cast,
including Chishu Ryu as Genzo, performs with reticent skill.
As long as it is attending to the commonplace details of family life,
''Where Spring Comes Late'' has real power. As soon as it begins to
attend to its epic concerns, the film itself becomes commonplace.
Thursday, April 19, 2012
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