I’d Love To Turn You On At The Movies #168 - An Autumn Afternoon (1962, dir. Yasujirō Ozu)

A film by Yasujirō Ozu is not like a film by any other filmmaker. He has one of the most unique and easily identifiable stylistic signatures of any international director, noted for his unmoving camera, low angle shots simulating the view from a Japanese tatami mat, actors facing directly into the camera in dialogue, ellipses of plot leaving out seemingly important details, and visually intricate compositions. He’s been referred to as “the most Japanese director” of all, but in his specificity the universal can be found. He worked subtle variations on a handful of themes that interested him for his entire career (and in that is not unlike any major director spinning variations on their ideas in film after film): familial conflicts (usually between generations), the institution of arranged marriages, encroaching Westernization of Japan in his post-war films, financial woes of the middle class families that populate most of his films, and more. His films usually have many comic moments, but there’s almost always an undercurrent of melancholy to them as well.

Everything said above could apply to a few dozen of Ozu’s films, but they all apply in full force for what proved to be the final film of his life, An Autumn Afternoon. It’s a seemingly simple story of a widower, Shūhei Hirayama (played by Ozu regular Chishū Ryū), who lives with his son Kazuo and daughter Michiko, with his older son moved out and married, frequently squabbling with his wife about borrowing money to try to lend him the appearance of prosperity at work. Hirayama is chided repeatedly by his friends about arranging a marriage for his daughter before she becomes a spinster. Neither Hirayama nor his daughter have given much thought to the matter, perfectly content to live as they have been doing, but once he and his drinking buddies run into an old teacher of theirs, Sakuma (nicknamed “The Gourd”), and arrange an evening’s tribute to him, he begins to think more about it. There are many comic scenes of Hirayama and his friends drinking; old men reminiscing about war, women, school, old friends and so forth, but things begin to be tinged with a sadder tone when their tribute to The Gourd ends with the teacher too drunk and needing to be taken home where they see what’s become of his life.

The Gourd’s daughter has remained unmarried in circumstances very similar to what Hirayama has experienced, he’s now running a low-rent noodle shop, and his daughter complains that “he’s always doing this” when they bring him home drunk. Over the course of several episodes in the film, The Gourd blames his own selfishness for ruining her chances at a successful marriage, having kept her close to home because he doesn’t want to suffer the loss of another family member. The Gourd’s plight resonates with Hirayama, and he resolves to start pushing Michiko toward marriage. And though Hirayama is the central focus of the film, Michiko’s resistance to an arranged marriage and her own ideas about how her life should be lived of course come into play.

As is typical in his films, Ozu and his longtime screenwriting partner Kôgo Noda come to the conflict with a perfectly tuned ear for dialogue and an empathy and understanding for both sides – not only will the father be left lonely if his vibrant and loving daughter should move out of the house, but in arranging her marriage he’s also potentially taking away her happiness should he not choose a good partner for her, and if she remains unmarried, she runs the risk of becoming an embittered spinster. He wants to do what’s right for her even under increasing societal pressure and his concerns of ending up a sad, lonely drunk like The Gourd, spouting lines like “In the end we spend our lives alone.” It’s a similar scenario to Ozu’s 1949 masterpiece Late Spring, in which Ryu was again the widowed father living with his daughter (played by the exquisite and ebullient Setsuko Hara), but here the focus falls more on the father’s plight than on the daughter’s. Where Late Spring hinged on a single moment when Hara’s famous smile fell as she acquiesced to her father’s requests, this one hinges on Hirayama’s trip to take his teacher home, seeing a potential future where both father and daughter have ended up sad and lonely.

The film is not just a continuation of Ozu’s ideas, but another collaboration with many of his longtime partners – writer Kôgo Noda is credited alongside Ozu on his very first film, from 1927, while Chishū Ryū and cinematographer Yûharu Atsuta are both featured on his second film from the next year. With a regular cast and crew familiar with his working methods and style, it’s no wonder that the film is one of his subtlest and most beautiful triumphs. Atsuta’s cinematography, his fourth of Ozu’s six films in color, is spectacular, with both director and cinematographer having found a way to perfectly integrate color into the stunning framing and composition that Ozu is best known for. He’s one of the most masterful artists in cinema history, and any frame of one of his films is rich with details you can get lost in, with An Autumn Afternoon one of his very best creations, both in the plotted segments and the famous “pillow shots” of random areas and items (laundry hanging out to dry, factory smokestacks, and trains passing are some faves of his) that break up the narrative sections. It’s also a great entry point into one of the most stellar careers in cinema.

-         Patrick Brown

An Autumn Afternoon by Yasujiro Ozu

Criterion has done a wonderful job representing the man who is one of Japan’s greatest directors – Yasujiro Ozu. To date, between their two Eclipse box sets of Ozu’s work and six individual releases (including the masterpieces Tokyo Story and Late Spring), they’ve done a lot to make his work as available in the West as his better-known contemporary Akira Kurosawa (who they’ve also represented copiously). Their latest offering is Ozu’s final film, An Autumn Afternoon.

Donald Richie, a renowned writer about Japanese cinema, once stated: “Yasujiro Ozu, the man whom his kinsmen consider the most Japanese for all film directors, had but one major subject, the Japanese family, and but one major theme, its dissolution.” There’s certainly no debating the second part of the statement – there is not a film of his that I’ve seen in which the nuclear family being depicted is not reeling from internal conflicts, usually between generations. The first part is misleading though, because it implies that there needs to be a working knowledge or appreciation of Japanese culture to understand the films, and nothing could be further from the truth. I’d say it’s more difficult to access the stylized acting of the Noh theater that Kurosawa employs in some of his films than to understand a conflict between parents and children over when and who their daughter is going to marry, or over a couple separating over marital infidelity. While there may be cultural touchstones or attitudes in Ozu’s films that an understanding of Japanese culture would deepen a viewer’s understanding of, it’s certainly not a prerequisite to watching, understanding, and enjoying them.

An Autumn Afternoon proved to be his final film and it’s no exception to Ozu’s rules of familial conflict that held sway from his films in the 1920’s on to this 1962 release – it bends them maybe, but they’re still intact. Here he is working in color, which only came into play in his final six films, and it’s spectacular. Where his first film in color, Equinox Flower, used a perfect placement of color throughout the frame, it felt like it sacrificed some of his compositional genius to achieve the effects. Not so here, where both color and composition are as brilliant as anything I’ve seen in any of his other films – and that’s saying a lot in a director known throughout his career for dazzling compositions. And if the conflict here is less pointed than other films – in some ways moving toward a new understanding between the generations – it’s still there, as Ozu regular Chishu Ryu plays a widowed father living with his 24-year old single daughter, while his friends’ daughters are marrying off into lives of their own. But unlike earlier incarnations of the traditional father, Ryu’s Shuhei Hirayama character doesn’t seem too pushy about either getting his daughter married off or enforcing an arranged marriage that will not suit his thoroughly modern offspring. He’d rather maintain a comfortable relationship with her by not forcing her hand. It’s only when his friends begin to pressure him to marry off his daughter before it’s too late that he starts pushing her in that direction – and predictably meeting resistance.

Meanwhile, Hirayama’s married son Koichi (Keiji Sada) helps illustrate another of Ozu’s favorite themes – financial stresses and encroaching Westernization impacting on the family. Koichi has a good job, but not a great one, and he and his wife have to borrow money from his father to purchase goods (a new refrigerator) to keep up with the Joneses (as the phrase goes). But the husband also wants to increase his status at work by taking up golf, thus causing an argument over whether a little spare money – that they’re already borrowing – should go toward a good set of golf clubs. Needless to say, this creates friction within the couple.

Does any of this sound “too Japanese” to you? Parents and children fighting over the child’s right of who to choose for their relationships? Couples arguing over money and status? Not really. Again, some of the subtler details of Japanese culture would deepen and understanding of specific responses, but it’s not necessary to dive in here. And again, compositionally, this one’s an absolute masterpiece, with some of the most beautiful combinations of framing, color, and design that he ever put together. The usual shots of trains, power lines, hanging clothes and hallways that populate his other films are rendered here again, strung around the film like his continual circling around the same themes. It’s a great one, for sure, and in Hirayama’s non-insistence of the older generation’s point of view, it seemed almost to be breaking new ground toward attitudes in which the younger and older generations could actually share a point of view instead of conflicting over it – an attitude that can be seen in nascent form back in Equinox Flower. A shame that Ozu didn’t get to develop it further.