A Slow Crawl to Nowhere: Late Spring (1949) Film Review

Some films ask for patience, promising that if you let the atmosphere soak in, you’ll be rewarded. Late Spring just asks you to drown in its sheer, agonizing nothingness. This isn’t a slow burn; it’s a glacial crawl, moving with the deliberate, agonizing pace of a blind snail. Honestly, it’s more boring than being trapped in cheesy small talk.

The premise is straightforward: a devoted daughter wishes to care for her aging father rather than marry. This is the logline. Unfortunately, the writer-director seems to have mistaken that premise for the entire plot. For the vast majority of the runtime, he just keeps nailing this same, single nail.

It’s the equivalent of making a movie titled “A Kid Who Doesn’t Want to Go to School,” and then 90% of the film is just… watching the kid say he doesn’t want to go to school. We get it. You can’t milk a concept when there was no milk to begin with. It’s a painfully simplistic idea, and when a movie lacks anything interesting, it is, by definition, bad. It’s utterly devoid of depth or a survivable density of information; in fact, I can edit the same footage that’s in the movie and come up with the exact same narrative without anything missing.

This superficiality infects the performances. The father, who just spits his lines, cycles through nosy questions, only to be met by the same “smiley happy answers.” His acting is arguably more boring than the film itself. Speaking about smiling! Our protagonist, spends the first 49 minutes in a state of constant, non-stop grinning. No human lives their life stretching their cheeks 24/7; it’s completely unrealistic.

The real tragedy? The dénouement is actually a little satisfying and provides decent closure. But the director completely missed the chance to exploit it. The one part that worked started and ended in moments, while the agonizingly overextended precedent part consumed the runtime.

This whole movie could have been crammed into a paragraph and sent via WhatsApp to a mothers’ group, who would say “awww” for two seconds before forwarding a badly designed “Good Morning” picture. Best case scenario? This would have made a compelling short film.

Oh, and a fun fact: The occupying American forces in Japan following World War II censored two specific lines regarding the main character’s health and the state of Tokyo. So much for spreading freedom, eh?

Rating: 2.14/10

If you’re interested in the ending of a very slow and peaceful film though, here is the criterion collection copy of it.

LoayTattan #cieloverse #cielocine #cielojapan