The great director, Yasujiro Ozu made An Autumn Afternoon around the time that his mother died. Ozu was a bachelor and lived with his elderly mother until her death in 1962. He survived her by two years. An Autumn Afternoon is Ozu's last film. It is conceived as a gentle family comedy and very eloquently directed -- the film is also almost unbearably sad. In the ouevre of any lesser director, An Autumn Afternoon would be a masterpiece; it is, for Ozu, a lesser work, a bit repetitious and slow even by the film-maker's standards. I think it is also an intensely personal film and worth studying on that basis, as well as on its own merits.
In an important way, An Autumn Afternoon is about drinking, and, probably, alcoholism. (Ozu was apparently a working alcoholic). The film features no fewer than nine symposia -- that is, drinking parties among men, most notably the protagonist Mr. Hirayama (Chishu Ryu) and his two close friends, Horei, who has just married a much younger woman, and another businessman, Kawai. After these parties, Mr. Hirayama comes home drunk and is, invariably, reprimanded by his grown daughter. The film ends with Hirayama very intoxicated, singing to himself a tune called the "Warship March", a patriotic ditty from the Second World War. His lasts words are "Alone,eh?" The film is frank by American standards of the time. Horei is abused by his compatriots as "clean during the day, but filthy at night" as a result of his young wife and he's teased for taking potency pills. Hirayama desires grandchildren and there's a candid discussion between the older man and his son about contraception. The film conspicuously detaches love from sex and, even, seems to consider sex and marriage as possibly incommensurate -- there is an intense,lyrical realism about the proceedings that the movie chronicles.
In simplest terms -- and Ozu's films are always fantastically complex and starkly simple -- a man on the threshold of old age, a widower, lives with his daughter, Michiko, and his son, Kazu. Michiko is 24 and unmarried. Hirayama is some kind of high-ranking official in a power company -- his job seems to be scrutinizing documents and putting his official seal on them. Hirayama is content and complacent until his "middle school" buddies host a drinking party for an elderly teacher, nicknamed "the Gourd". This old man has fallen on hard times and runs of third-rate noodle shop with his embittered middle-aged daughter. The Gourd gets drunk and sentimental, blaming himself for blighting his daughter's life due to his own selfishness -- he's kept his daughter at his side to take care of him as he ages. Hirayama recognizes a similar dynamic in his life and fears that his selfishness is destroying his daughter's opportunities for marriage. In Japanese society at the time, middle-aged men seem to act as go-betweens and marriage-brokers -- I think, in An Autumn Afternoon, this is due to the fact that Hirayama is a widower and Michiko has no mother to broker her marriage. At first blush, the young women in the film seem obedient to these middle-aged men, but we come to understand that they have agency in their own right and are skilled at letting their elders believe that they are in control of the situation when this is not necessarily true. The assumption is that when a woman marries, she will quit her job and we see this paradigm on display in several parallel situations involving secretaries and administrative assistants in the workplace resigning when they are married. Ozu operates in a leisurely manner and the film is expansive - it has a number of sub-themes, including an interesting perspective on World War II (not generally a subject with which Ozu is comfortable); at the one-hour mark, the film's loose narrative coalesces around Hirayama's efforts to secure a husband for Michiko. He is successful and, on the titular "autumn afternoon," Michiko is married. The film is about Hirayama and ends with several short scenes dramatizing the old man's loneliness now that his daughter has left the home. One of Ozu's consistent themes is that individuals must sacrifice their own happiness for the benefit of others -- and this seems to be what Hirayama has done, although it is also apparent that if he keeps his daughter with him as a sort of quasi-wife, he will ruin both her life and his own as well. This is moral taught by the melancholy fate of "the Gourd." The notion of the younger woman acting as aide to an aging man is reflected in Horei's marriage to a woman said to be "three years older than (his) daughter." The film is circumspect but suggests that this match will turn out to be unfortunate.
Ozu shot this film is color and he uses reds to highlight his scenes. One way to view the film is an odyssey of scarlet colors, beginning with red bands girdling the smokestacks at the powerplant where Hirayama works though the red fire extinguishers and commercial packaging visible in the backgrounds of some of the scenes and, finally, highlighted in the scarlet sash that the bride wears to her wedding. (The red is not symbolic -- it is a graphic device that Ozu uses to tie together his shots and scenes.) Ozu's decoupage is strangely elaborate -- he often cuts between shots using indirection, that is, misleading intermediary footage. For instance, the rather dour Mr. Kawai has come to Yokohama to see a baseball game. Ozu cuts from a shot of the men drinking in a private room in a restaurant to the brilliant lights of a baseball stadium; after several shots of those lights, we hear a broadcast play-by-play and see a TV screen showing the baseball game that Mr. Kawai has apparently decided not to attend in favor of a banquet that the aging school chums have scheduled for "the Gourd"-- a teacher that none of them really ever liked (he was a tyrant who taught Chinese literature.) The TV showing the baseball game is not even in the room where the banquet is underway. In fact, it's in the adjacent bar shown, as is typical for Ozu, in a formulaic establishing shot filmed down a corridor to where customers are drinking. Ozu uses similar techniques for a number of transitions. There's another oddity: Hirayama frequents a bar called "The Tory" presumably for "Suntory" whiskey served at the place. However, the film never cuts directly to the bar. Rather, we see a shot of the alley-like streets in the Yokohama pleasure district, then, a shot of a red marquee for a place called Bar Ace (the "A" is "Bar" is at the top of the word "Ace"). We see this sign repeatedly, always before the establishing shot of the sign for the Tory Bar -- but Bar Ace plays no role in the script and no one ever goes into the place. Again, it's an odd indirection, a little baroque flourish intended, I think, to insert a shot of a glowing red icon into the film. (Another notable example deserves mention: before the scenes preparatory for Michiko's wedding, the camera shows us a rather grim-looking elementary school -- we hear children's voices singing about the autumn, a sound-cue that plays under the scenes involving Michiko and her father getting ready for the ceremony. But we don't enter the school, don't see the children, and the place is introduced only to motivate the singing on the soundtrack.)
The film posits that men construct substitutes for their families -- these are the drinking symposia, that the women dislike but tolerate: when Horei brings his young wife to one of these drinking parties, there's an almost palpable sense that he is violating a very fundamental premise upon which this society is based. Men retain relationships with their school buddies as witness the elaborate banquet staged for the "Gourd". And Ozu in this film acknowledges that military service has created a sort of bond between men that persists and has family-like implications. Hirayama frequents a tavern where the bar-maid looks a bit like his deceased wife --she's not really similar but Hirayama insists that she there's a slight resemblance. At this tavern, the juke box offers the song "The Warship March", a jaunty patriotic tune that celebrates the power of the "floating fortresses" of the battleships. In an astonishing scene, Hirayama, who is revealed to have been a captain on one of these ships, meets a sailor who served under him, Yamamoto. The two men get drunk together and speculate as to what would have happened if the Japanese had won the war -- there would be samisen players in New York as well as pachinko parlors and the men would probably be drinking in a tavern in that city with blue-eyed Yankees, but, after a little discussion, everyone agrees that it was for the best that the war was lost. Then, the bar-maid plays the "the Warship March" and Yamamoto who is very drunk struts around, marching in time to the music while saluting the bar maid and Hirayama, who both return the salute. The scene has an indescribable aura of sadness, nostalgia, and comedy -- I recall that when I saw the picture twenty years ago this was really the only scene that persisted in my memory. The men's fond recollections of the lost war also establishes a forbidden, quasi-familial bond between them -- after all, the war represented the "best years of their lives."
Ozu is clear-eyed about aging. Viewed in a certain light, the picture is very dark. Michiko, in fact, likes a young man, Miura, who is a friend of her brother and who works with him. Michiko's older brother, Koichi, acts as go-between and tries to broker a marriage between his sister and the young salary-man. But he is already taken, engaged to another woman although he also would much prefer a match with Michiko. The scene in which Hirayama tells his daughter that she can't marry Miura is very unsettling -- the young woman is obviously terribly hurt, but she takes the news stoically. You can't always get what you want. She is later "married off" (to use the film's diction) to another man. He is never shown in the movie and we have no idea whether she likes or dislikes him, or merely tolerates the match. Marriages are shown as unhappy -- Koichi's marriage is troubled. His wife obviously wants a baby, but Koichi is used to being treated as a baby himself and would resent being replaced by a real infant. (In one scene, Koichi's angry wife eats cherries and spits out the pits aggressively). There's a nasty sub-plot about some golf clubs that Koichi wants to buy with money that his father has given him for a refrigerator -- his wife has to borrow cold foods from neighbors. Koichi ends up with his golf clubs, only after much whining and sulking (he lies on his futon disconsolately smoking cigarettes) but his wife has negotiated for half of the money to be applied for an expensive leather handbag for her. Koichi and his wife bicker incessantly and there's no sign that they've ever been happy. Horei's young wife is predicted to be ruinous for the older man. We don't have any idea who Michiko has married at the end of the movie. There's no warrant that she will be happy -- in fact, the film subtly suggests that her marriage will be troubled like that of her older brother -- she is certainly too spirited to be an obedient traditional Japanese wife. But we know for certain that old Hirayama is now alone and that his remaining years will be solitary and, probably, passed in a state of drunkenness. "In the end, we spend our lives alone," Mr. Hirayama muses. Ozu, of course, provides both radiant light and terrifying shadow. Late in the film, we see Hirayama in a frock with black tails. He enters his daughter's room where she is being dressed for her wedding. The framing cuts off the bride -- we can see only part of her. But, when the camera angle changes to show the young woman, she is not facing the camera frontally -- rather, and this is unusual for Ozu, a sort of exclamation point, we see her in profile. When she turns to face the camera, she is probably the most beautiful bride in the history of film. Later, Mr. Hirayama is shot in profile as well, a mise-en-scene that suggests his loneliness, rhyming with the shot of the bride before she turns to face the camera. Ozu's poetic realism suffuses the film with tender lyrical episodes. At his office, Mr. Hirayama is filmed against a backdrop of a series of ventilator shaft from which steam oozes. The little grove of ventilators looks like the cemetery at the end of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai -- it's a melancholy reminder that death is always at our side.
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