Tales of springtime

It’s officially spring. Even if SA winters don’t compare to the bitter cold of their northern counterparts, it’s always good to feel the warmth of the sun on our cheeks, smell the blossoms of new flowers and, for those of us prone to pollen allergies, reach for the nasal sprays, antihistamines and tissues as we pray for rain to alleviate our sorrows.

Here in celebration of the change of season and the end of winter are three films that pay homage to the gentle (and sometimes not) pleasures of movies’ least celebrated season.

The Arthouse Essential

Late Spring – YouTube

Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu was a great observer of small details in personal relationships and the natural environment. This classic from 1949 perfectly blends both of those strengths.

It’s no surprise that this timeless bitter-sweet drama about the end of a codependent relationship between a father and his daughter was one of Ozu’s personal favourites. It stars regular collaborators Chishu Ryu and Sesuko Hara as a widowed professor and his adult daughter, who after years of living together in relative domestic bliss, must face the necessity of their separation after it’s decided that the daughter should marry.

Slowly but surely and with an expert sense of emotional timing, Ozu’s slight but moving domestic drama unspools towards its heartbreaking but also hopeful conclusion as father and daughter go about setting up her match; and come to terms with what it will mean for their own relationship.

Ozu returned to very similar territory for his final film, the colour drama An Autumn Afternoon in 1962. Here in his distinctive black-and-white, told through his legendary low-level camera, is his finest examinations of the big emotional drama that characterise so much of our small, ordinary lives.

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The Stone-cold Classic

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off — YouTube

It’s spring and rebellious smart aleck teen Ferris Bueller (Matthew Broderick) has better things to do than go to school in John Hughes’ timeless and endlessly quotable 1986 classic.

Love him or hate him and plenty of people do both over the course of this eventful day, it’s hard not to agree that Ferris knows how to have a good time. At this time of year, that’s an infectious feeling that quickly spreads around him, his girlfriend (Mia Sara) and beleaguered best friend Cameron (Alan Ruck) as they wreak havoc through the streets of Chicago.

A feel-good kind of film, Hughes’ classic madcap teen-centred adventure is crammed full of memorable lines and set pieces reminding the youth in all of us that “life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

Like other seminal teen comedies that Hughes made in the 1980s, it’s a reminder of the chasm of understanding that exists between most teens and their parents as much as it is an exuberant, fulfilled fantasy that celebrates being young and having fun.

Most of us have lived our lives without a Ferris day-off but the film still exists to remind us of the possibilities of what may happen if we decided to follow in his footsteps for just one day. Whether the consequences of that are good or terrible depends on whether you ask Ferris or Cameron.

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The Diamond in the Rough

Spring in a Small Town – YouTube

Many cinephiles are familiar with the 1990s golden era of Chinese cinema but perhaps fewer know about China’s first great cinematic wave and the work of one of its great legends, the director Fei Mu.

This 1949 melodrama is considered Mu’s finest work and has become a celebrated classic in China, where it enjoyed an excellent remake in 2002 as Springtime in a Small Town, directed by Tian Zhuangzhaung.

Mu’s original is set in the moody uncertainty of the post-World War 2 period in a small country town where the physical and emotional effects of the war are felt.

A doctor who left the town a decade before has returned for a visit to friends — a married couple who though they try their best to make ends meet are visibly suffering under the psychological strains of their efforts. The husband is on the verge of suicide and his wife, who was once a lover of the visiting doctor, is not doing much better. Once she begins to rekindle her romance with the visiting doctor, with little regard of her fully aware husband, things seem headed for disaster.

In this bleak, battle-scarred environment, no-one is surprised or seems to care until they are finally forced to make a decision as a means to maintain order in the face of the tragedy that lingers around them. 

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