An Autumn Afternoon (1962)
Directed by Yasujirô Ozu

Film Review

Change and decay in all around I see...  Yasujirô Ozu ended his remarkable filmmaking career on a suitably sombre note with a film of rare depth and emotional power.  In An Autumn Afternoon, Ozu's 54th and final film, the director collates the various themes that underpin most of his work and from these he fashions both an exquisitely moving statement on the trauma of growing old and a wry commentary on the modernising trends that were reshaping Japanese culture and society at the start of the 1960s.  For a director whose work has an almost unparalleled artistry and resonance it is hard to judge one film in relation to another, but this final masterful flourish must surely rate as one of his finest achievements - the perfect conclusion to his uniquely perceptive oeuvre.

An Autumn Afternoon may look like a flawless piece of cinema but it was not an easy film to make.  When he began working on the film, Ozu's health was rapidly deteriorating, his physical decline hastened by his uncontrollable addiction to alcohol and nicotine.   He was only part way through the script when he suffered an immense personal blow - the mother he had lived with almost all his life and to whom he was devotedly attached died at the age of 86.  To add to these personal difficulties, Japanese cinema was in massive decline, losing ground to the latest form of mass entertainment, television, leading to a huge shake-up in the country's biggest film studios.  Just over a year after the film's release, Ozu would be dead, struck down by cancer on his 60th birthday.  Ozu did not intend that this would be his final film, indeed he had already begun work on another film in the months preceding his death, but when you watch it you feel he must have known, instinctively, this was the end.  He seems to pour just about everything he had left into it, his final gift to humanity before he shuffled off to that great Ginza bar in the sky.

The film's Japanese title, Sanma no aji, translates as 'The Taste of Mackerel Pike', a mackerel pike being a fish most often eaten by ordinary people and which is best enjoyed in the autumn.  This title is both an affirmation of Ozu's interest in the everyday lives of ordinary people and an assertion that some of life's bitter experiences are most acutely felt in the autumn of middle-age.  The shomin-geki or 'home drama' was the mainstay of Ozu's body of work, a popular genre that allowed him to explore his favourite themes and thereby develop a deeper understanding of the human psyche, which seemed to be his main goal in life.  The family, with its inter-generational conflicts and contrasts in behaviour between young and old, was the ideal setting for this purpose. 

In An Autumn Afternoon, Ozu once again uses the plot device of a daughter being manoeuvred into marrying against her will, torn from the widowed parent to whom she is devoted.  The plot may resemble that of Ozu's previous films Late Spring (1949) and Late Autumn (1960), but the approach and viewpoint are very different.  Here, Ozu's focus is on the ageing father, Hirayama, played to perfection by his most treasured actor Chishû Ryû.  Ryû appeared in all but a few of Ozu's films, most often in modest supporting roles.  In An Autumn Afternoon he plays the patriarch, the role Ozu had previously given him in There Was a Father (1942), Late Spring, Early Summer (1951) and Tokyo Story (1953).  It is interesting to see how Ryû's portrayal of the head of the household gently develops across this span of films, reflecting changes in Japanese society in the decades following WWII.  Before the war, the patriarch was someone whose authority could never be challenged and who expected (and got) unquestioning obedience from his wife and children.  In his later films, Ozu depicts the patriarch almost as a figure of fun, dominated by his wife, ignored by his children, dividing his time between the drudgery of office work and recurring bouts of alcohol-assisted nostalgia.

The patriarch of An Autumn Afternoon may not be the object of ridicule that we see in previous Ozu films but he is a pathetic sort, bossed about by his daughter, mocked by his sons and yet fearing the day when his children will leave him so that he must end his days in abject solitude.  It is tempting to read Ryû's poignant portrayal as a self-portrait of the director, particularly as Ozu himself was, at the time, coming to terms with the prospect of a lonely future without a life companion after the death of his mother.  The main character Hirayama seems increasingly out of place in this modern world and he is often seen retreating into the past, replaying memories of his youth - in the company of old school chums, with the odd war-time comrade-in-arms he may run into, or by himself.  The future offers him nothing - just an empty house inhabited only by shadows and fading recollections of the past.

The gulf between the generations grows progressively from one Ozu film to the next, and here it is at its widest.  Hirayama and his children are so far apart they might as well be complete strangers.  The oldest son Koichi and his wife Akiko (enjoyably portrayed by Keiji Sada and Mariko Okada) are unmistakably children of the consumer revolution.  They have thrown off the shackles of parental control but still depend on money from their father to pay for all the goodies which they cannot do without, necessities such as refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, golf clubs and expensive designer handbags.  Hirayama's daughter Michiko is just as independently minded, dressing in modern clothes and refusing to cook for her father or younger brother if they dare to come home late. 

Hirayama is a stranger in his own home, yet he accepts all the changes that come his way with a Zen-like serenity - a child without deference is better than no child at all.  When Hirayama finally finds himself alone after his daughter's wedding, the pain he projects is almost unbearable.  The film's vibrant colour photography and jaunty score (which appears to have been lifted from a Fellini comedy) are diametrically opposed to the intense feelings of melancholia and loss that we feel as we watch the film.  The forced mood of jollity merely aggravates the terrible poignancy of that final moment when the father ends up at the place he most fears to be, separated both physically and emotionally from the one who is dearest to him.   The fact that we do not see the wedding (one of Ozu's customary ellipses) lends further tragedy to this unavoidable outcome.  We see the preparation - the father consoling his daughter - and the aftermath - the father drowning his sorrows in alcohol - but the wedding is kept from us, as if it were a tedious formality of no real interest.  The film ends where it must, with an ageing father contemplating a lonely future, and it is here that the tears are unstoppable.  "We are alone in life," Ozu quietly observes.  "Always alone..."  Fade to black.

Film Synopsis

Shuhei Hirayama is a comfortably off widower in his late fifties who lives in the suburbs of Tokyo with his grown up son Kazuo and daughter Michiko.  His older son Koichi has left home and lives in a modest apartment with his young wife Akiko.  Hirayama's main pleasure in life is his frequent drinking reunions with his former school friends, Kawai, Horie and Sugai.  To one such reunion the friends invite an old schoolmaster, Sakuma, who, they soon discover, now runs a down-at-heel restaurant in a poor district of town with his daughter.  When Hirayama sees Sakuma's daughter, an embittered old maid who has devoted her life to her father, he becomes anxious for his own daughter and decides that she must marry before it is too late.  It so happens that Michiko has developed an interest in one of Koichi's colleagues, Miura.  Unfortunately, believing that Michiko is not the marrying kind, Miura has become engaged to another young woman.  Hirayama persuades his daughter to agree to an arranged marriage and his friend Kawai provides a suitable husband for her.  After the wedding, Hirayama finds himself bitterly alone...