AN AUTUMN AFTERNOON Movie Review

Sanma No Aji

The final film by the great Yasujiro Ozu is a story about a widowed father who must come to terms with having to give up his only daughter to marriage. As in Ozu's Late Spring (1949), the father needs to convince the daughter that it's a part of life for her to get married and to leave her father to fend for himself. She's reluctant to do so, he's reluctant to lose her, and yet it's the duty of both of them to accept the flow of traditional life despite the accompanying sadness. It's a story Ozu had told many times before, but rarely with more power or grace than in this nearly sublime summation of the knowledge and insight of a career that spanned 53 features in 60 years. There's a unique joy in turning yourself over to Ozu; it's like having an eternally wise (and eternally living) father on call for the kind of therapy that is, in the end, simply the shared wisdom of a great soul, dispensed with patience, wit, compassion, and artistry. As usual, the amazing Chishu Ryu played the role of the father whose understanding usually advanced while downing a few sakés or Johnny Walkers (Red). It wasn't that different for Ozu himself, whose scripts were often completed in all-night writing marathons—aided by a few cocktails—together with his writing collaborator, Kogo Noda. The colors of the film are muted, and, as in all Ozu films, the camera remains still and most images are photographed from the vantage point of someone seated cross-legged on a tatami mat, eyes approximately three feet off the ground. If An Autumn Afternoon isn't, in the end, Ozu's masterpiece, it's only because of the existence of his Tokyo Story. Nevertheless, it's a great experience.

NEXT STOP … Late Spring, Tokyo Story, Babette's Feast

1962 112m/C JP Chishu Ryu, Shima Iwashita, Shin-Ichiro Mikami, Mariko Okada, Keiji Sada; D: Yasujiro Ozu; W: Yasujiro Ozu; C: Yushun Atsuta; M: Kojun Saito. VHS NYF