"late spring", in wood's view, "is about the sacrifice of noriko’s happiness in the interest of maintaining and continuing 'tradition,' [which sacrifice] takes the form of her marriage, and everyone in the film—including the father and finally the defeated noriko herself—is complicit in it." he asserts that, in contradiction to the view of many critics, the film "is not about a young woman trying nobly to sacrifice herself and her own happiness in order dutifully to serve her widowed father in his lonely old age," because her life as a single young woman is one she clearly prefers: "with her father, noriko has a freedom that she will never again regain." he points out that there is an unusual (for ozu) degree of camera movement in the first half of the film, as opposed to the "stasis" of the second half, and that this corresponds to noriko’s freedom in the first half and the "trap" of her impending marriage in the second. rather than perceiving the noriko films as a "cycle", wood asserts that the trilogy is "unified by its underlying progressive movement, a progression from the unqualified tragedy of "late spring" through the ambiguous 'happy ending' of "early summer" to the authentic and fully earned note of bleak and tentative hope at the end of "tokyo story"."