Late Spring (Yasujiro Ozu, 1949)

Feeling societal pressure to marry off Noriko, his 27-year-old live-in daughter, aging, widowed professor Shukichi lies and says he's found a potential spouse of his own so that Noriko won't feel bad about leaving him to care for himself. A local busybody sets her up with some dude whose mouth allegedly looks like Gary Cooper's and the wheels turn just as the town expects, but neither Noriko nor Shukichi's hearts are in it. 

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inertiacrept wrote this a couple years back:

Books are alone in their power to make me feel inadequate. If I read, say, "Pride and Prejudice", and come away flummoxed and unaffected, I feel like I failed to grasp the point - that there was a deep meaning, something about subtlety, and for me to let my lack of interest in the Old World obsession with marriageability color my perception of the book as a classic was crass and superficial. I'm a bad guy, or a dumby, because I didn't/couldn't get it. And this isn't just me beating up on myself... if you walk up to someone who knows books and tell them that Jane Austen sucks, they'll usually tell you that you just didn't get it.

Late Spring isn't a book, granted, but marriageability is a big deal in its world. That would be the world of early postwar Japan, where there were evidently two kinds of people: the old-school types with robes and stilty sandals and everything, or the youngsters, equally costumed, in full wholesome-Western-kid mufti, cardigans and side-parts on the men, long skirts and those restrictedly poofy hairstyles on the ladies. Nobody looks like they aren't wearing period outfits. And boy, do they care who's marrying who. 

This, I think, would be a pain-in-the-ass social environment to live in. Noriko's plight shows how tough it is for the ladies, especially those not in the mood for holy matrimony, but it's clearly no picnic for the dudes either. At one point, Shukichi's young assistant goes on a few jaunts with Noriko, riding bikes and such, only to reveal that he's already been set up — and not exactly of his own free will, the movie implies. Nevertheless, he invites her to the theater, and she, knowing that he's promised to another woman, chastely declines. But what do we see sitting in the seat next to him when he attents the show anyway? His betrothed? His hat. 

Nor is Shukichi himself perfectly pleased with the groupthink about marriage. Recalling his relationship with his own late wife in order to reassure Noriko that it's not all bad, he has the opposite effect. Sure, he admits, I'd come home and find her crying in the kitchen a lot, but after years and years things became pretty okay. I'm thinking that might not count as a ringing endorsement. And, odd as it sounds, the film starts out depicting the life Shukichi and Noriko have as a pretty happy one, an unconventional "marriage" of sorts. But the force of tradition, obligation, etc. gang up and force the latter into what we can only assume is a few years of weeping quietly in Cooper-mouth's kitchen and the former into sitting, alone, peeling an apple in silence. (That silent apple-peeling just kills me.) 

I'm more or less ambivalent toward the institution of marriage in this day and age — I'm not entirely comfortable actively inviting John Law into my relationships, though Sammo Law is welcome — and, if Late Spring is to be believed, it was positively terrifying in 1949 Japan. I breathe a sigh relief to live an a society that expects almost nothing of me. Marriage, children, hard work, widgets, supporting the elderly outside of a doomed creaky bureaucracy, producing social good of any kind: if I don't want to do it, I don't have to. That's the essence of freedom, I suppose.