Upstream: Spring and Summer Coming of Age Films
by Joe Miller
The differences between Late Spring (K) and Early Summer (FS) are subtle. The films were released back to back in 1949 and 1951, and they both star Setsuko Hara as a woman in her late 20s named Noriko who’s unmarried and still living at home. Both were directed by the Japanese auteur Yasujirō Ozu, whose singular style of filmmaking has been among the most influential in the history of cinema. His camera work is elegantly simple—no dolly shots, no zooms, rarely a pan from side to side. He sets up each shot from the vantage point one might have if they were sitting cross-legged on the floor, watching the characters come and go. And Ozu often lets the camera linger on a scene, to draw the beauty in the common, the gentle billow of clothes on a line, steam rising from a tea kettle, and his signature image, a train cutting across a landscape.
His stories are elegant, too—deceptively simple. Late Spring and Early Summer are both coming of age stories. In Late Spring, Noriko’s family urges her to find a man and get married. She doesn’t want to; she’s perfectly happy with taking care of her father. But in time she acquiesces, leaving her father all alone. In Early Summer, Noriko is more open to the idea of getting married, but she surprises her family by choosing a man of modest means from the country. At first glance, the plots seem thin, but they carry a complexities of tensions beneath the smiling politeness of mid-twentieth-century Japanese manners that reveal a full range of human emotion.
American Honey (A), on the other hand, is a late spring/early summer coming of age story in 21st-century America. Made by British director Andrea Arnold, whose style is the exact opposite of Ozu’s, it’s alive with shaky handheld shots, the camera always up in the characters’ faces. It’s the only way to properly tell the tale of Star, a girl in her late teens who escapes Oklahoma and a molesting stepfather by joining a van full of scruffy, dope-smoking ne’er-do-wells who travel the US, selling magazines door to door, fueled by cheap booze, energy drinks and full-throttle sex drive. Marriage is nowhere on Star’s horizon, nor does there seem to be much of a future among her new wandering tribe. But still we see her build, from one reckless adventure to the next, a semblance of a moral code that she can carry into adulthood.
And when it’s spring and summer in Japan and America, of course, it’s fall and winter in South America—the season and setting for Lucia Puenzo’s XXY. (NF) It’s about an intersex teen named Alex whose family has moved from Argentina to the coast of Uruguay, where they hope to find a more accepting culture. Alex has recently stopped taking medicine that has kept the male side of puberty at bay, which has allowed her to pass as a girl. The plot thickens as Alex’s hormone realign themselves, and as their parents fight over possible sex-assignment surgery, Alex wanders the village, finds a boy, and, as they say, comes of age.
K=Kanopy, FS=FilmStruck, A=Amazon, NF=Netflix