An Autumn Afternoon (Samma no aji, 1962) was Yasujiro Ozu's last film, and from the start it very much adopts the wry, gently humorous tone of Ozu's final, colour films. The film is centred on the character played by Ozu's perennial actor alter ego Chishu Ryu, this time in the role of an aging widower, Hirayama, living with his adult son and daughter, the latter of whom both works and looks after the house. As part of Hirayama's family there's also a married son, childless, living with his wife in their own small apartment

Although An Autumn Afternoon, like many an Ozu film, concerns itself with relationships between parents and children, greater attention is given throughout the course of the film to Hirayama's relationship with two old friends, Kawai (Nobuo Nakamura) and Horie (Ryuji Kita). It's all treated with a great lightness of tone; much humour is milked out of the situation of Horie's recent remarriage to a considerably younger woman, barely older than his own daughter, and there's much banter on the sexual demands this must make on Horie, the need for medication or vitamins, and so forth.

Actually, this is one of the hints to a potential possible future that the film offers Hirayama, one that becomes feasible when he visits a cheap neighbourhood bar whose owner, around thirty years of age, reminds him of his dead wife. It's enough of a resemblance for him to take his married son Koichi (Keiji Sata) there on another occasion to get a look at her. It's also typical of Ozu and fellow scriptwriter Kogo Noda's sense of humour that Koichi sees no resemblance at all. Still, this is offered as a potential path for Hirayama's life to take, and even if nothing comes of it in the course of the film, it is significant that this bar is where Hirayama goes at the end of the film, when he is at his lowest after the marriage of his daughter Michiko (Shima Iwashita).

A more significant hint, and a shocking one for Hirayama, comes in the form of Sakuma (Eijiro Tono), a former teacher of Hirayama and his friends. Nicknamed the 'Gourd', he gets so drunk at a reunion the friends invite him to that Hirayama takes him home and is confronted with a twisted, mirror image of his own home situation. The widowed 'Gourd' had kept his daughter at home, initially a convenient situation for both him and her, until she was simply beyond the traditional age of marriage for Japanese women of the time. Appearing rather embittered, although still a sympathetic figure, it's significant that she's played by Haruko Sugimura, who rather specialises in playing shrewish, unsympathetic roles in Ozu's films, for example the elder daughter in Tokyo Story (Tokyo monogatari, 1953). (These negative qualities to Sugimura's persona can also be found in other film work - look at her role as the retired geisha in Mikio Naruse's Late Chrysanthemums [Bangiku, 1954]). At any rate, in Hirayama's eyes she is not a model for his daughter Michiko to emulate. So this drives Hirayama's decision to take up his friend Kawai's offer from the beginning of the film to act as a go-between via his wife for a potential husband for Michiko.

This is all done, as I've said, in a light, humorous tone. The style of gentle, underplayed humour is apparent in the transition from the first setting of the film, Hirayama's office, to the second, a restaurant. In his office, Hirayama is unable to convince Kawai to join his friends for dinner because of an important baseball game. This is followed by three static shots, at different angles, of banks of night-lights at the baseball stadium (keying, we presume, Kawai's presence there), followed by a lengthy shot of the baseball game on a TV set, two shots of four men at a bar watching the game, and then a private room in this bar/restaurant where Hirayama, Kawai and Horie are dining. Apart from the first line of dialogue, where Kawai reacts to the sounds from TV ("A homer?"), no reference is made to Kawai's absence from the baseball game; there's only a one-line complaint by Kawai near the end of the scene when Horie leaves. A quiet little joke has been played on the audience, but a subtle point is being made too about Kawai's character: just as he appears at this dinner after claiming a prior engagement (the baseball game), in this scene he refuses point-blank to attend their classmates' reunion if their old teacher the 'Gourd' is present, but of course when that scene occurs, Kawai is there.

In this vein of humour, there's also a small comic side-plot relating to the domestic tussles between Hirayama's son Koichi and the latter's wife Akiko (Mariko Okada) over Koichi's desire to buy a set of second-hand golf clubs. This humorous tone is very much set at the start of the film with the opening static shots characteristic of Ozu's cinema. The very first shot is of some kind of industrial complex, with in front of it a line of factory chimneys in cheerful, horizontal red-and-white stripes, the red echoed in three of the four metal drums in the lower left foreground, and - surely an Ozu joke? - a black chimney on the right shaped like one of the ubiquitous beer bottles from the many restaurant scenes seen in so many Ozu films. As is the customary pattern with Ozu's introductory static shots, the second one moves us further in to the approaching story, giving us a closer look, at a different angle and in a changed composition, of those cheerfully-striped chimneys; then a third shot shows us the same chimneys from inside, framed within an open window, the frames of the window themselves framed by the edges of the screen. The fourth shot further extends our exploration of the setting, giving us one of Ozu's customary office building interior shots down a corridor, a man crossing from right to left along the intersecting corridor at the back, with the bright red of the fire hose cover on the wall at the back (the only area of bright colour in the whole image) echoing the red from those chimneys. And then finally the next shot both establishes the connection of the story with this setting and starts to set the story in motion: a side view of Hirayama at his desk, with an open window behind him (on close inspection, not it seems the same open window but with the same drifting white factory steam we've seen in the first three shots) and another single patch of red in the image.

If I've spent time describing these opening shots in some detail, it's to act as a reminder that, for all the importance to us as viewers of the story and the characterisations, and the themes that arise from them, Ozu's cinema is a highly formalist one. The rhyming patterns of line and colour between shots, and the balance of composition within one shot, are to be found throughout An Autumn Afternoon (and, of course, throughout his work as a whole). But the formalism is still there to serve the narrative. In the case of these opening shots, it's to give us a setting and bring us into the story; and, also, as I've mentioned, there's a certain cheerfulness and lightness, aided by the soundtrack music, which sets the restrained tone of comedy that characterises the film.

So, the story begins; and it's a narrative of marriage familiar from other Ozu films, and in particular the situation in Late Spring (Banshun, 1949), Ozu and Noda's first post-war collaboration (they had last worked together on the now lost An Innocent Maid [Hakoiri musume, 1935]), of the widower father living with his adult daughter. That first scene of Hirayama in his office establishes, through a conversation with a secretary who enters his office, the theme of the need for a woman in her mid-twenties (or, more significantly, her family) to think seriously about pursuing her marriage prospects, in fact to treat the question with some urgency. Then, in the very next scene, still in Hirayama's office, his friend Kawai offers to make contact through his wife with a good prospect. Hirayama is reluctant, and in a later scene with Kawai, Michiko seems equally so, claiming to be quite contented with the situation, concerned about the problems the family home would have if she got married and declaring that she doesn't care whether she gets married or not; a very similar situation to that of the father and daughter in Late Spring.

But An Autumn Afternoon never really provides us with a view of a close emotional bond between father and daughter in the way that Late Spring does. There's no equivalent here of the severe psychological dependence that daughter Noriko (Setsuko Hara) has on her father Professor Somiya (Chishu Ryu) in the older film. Nor is there anything the equivalent of Late Spring's moving conversation between Noriko and her father when she tells him that she would rather stay with him even if he remarries, that any relationship with a husband would never mean as much as her relationship with him, and he replies that she must leave the family home to get married, for that's the way of the world.

For the focus of An Autumn Afternoon is firmly on the figure of the father and we are simply told much less about the daughter. There are indications of a strength and independence of character (more "modern" than the daughters and, later, mothers played by Setsuko Hara): she's not shy to mock her father and brother's lack of domestic skills (and when brother Kazuo [Shinichiro Mikami] asks where his pants are, she tells him to find the closet and look for them!); and in a later scene, when she visits her married brother's home, she's clearly manoeuvring herself to leave at the same time as her (male) work colleague Miura (Teruo Yoshida) - in fact, she's quite explicit about it, announcing to him "I'll go part of the way with you."

We're also shown the limitations to Hirayama's ability to "read" his daughter. The shock of Hirayama's encounter with the 'Gourd', reinforced by the experience of a second drunken dinner with him, leads him to suggest explicitly to Michiko that she get married. Michiko's first reaction is a mixture of "Don't be silly" and "You're drunk", showing that strength in her own character which is also revealed by her refusal to come to her father until she's finished her ironing. Then, she complains that the household, and in particular her younger brother Kazuo, couldn't function without her. Michiko doesn't rule out marriage entirely but says that she's happy with the way things are and tells her father not to bother about her, and when he insists that he's thought hard about it, she storms off after telling him not to talk nonsense.

But after Hirayama learns (off-screen) from Kazuo of Michiko's liking for Koichi's work colleague Miura, he has Koichi sound him out. "Why didn't you ask me sooner?" asks Miura, for, as Hirayama tells Michiko later, he had taken a fancy to her. In fact, following up a hint from Michiko, Miura had broached the subject with Koichi and there was told there was no interest, although Koichi seems not to remember this. In any case, Miura is now secretly engaged to someone at the office. Hirayama breaks the news to Michiko and is gratified that it doesn't affect her badly. At which point, younger son Kazuo comes him to ask him why Michiko has broken down in tears.

Ozu shows us the depth of Michiko's emotional response in a beautifully economic way. After Koichi and her father together break the news to her, we are shown her reaction, full-on to us: she briefly, but slowly and deliberately, lowers her face, then after a moment, raises it again to tell Hirayama with a smile that he can go ahead with whatever marriage arrangements he wants. And when Hirayama goes upstairs to comfort her, Michiko is shot from behind, with the bulk of her appropriately black sweater being her dominant feature. It's only when Hirayama leaves that we have a shot of her from the front, slowly, sadly, playing with a tape measure, a potent evocation of her feeling of loss.

This conversation between father and daughter, at a critical emotional moment, is the equivalent of the one in Late Spring that I referred to before. But here the conversation is brief, even perfunctory, and no sense is given of a deep, mutually dependent emotional bond like that between Professor Somiya and Noriko in the earlier film.

From this point, with Hirayama turning to Kawai's original offer, the marriage arrangements proceed apace. But we're never shown the bridegroom or the wedding ceremony itself, for both have no importance for Ozu's story. His concern is with the effects on Hirayama, and it is here at the end of the film that the depth of Hirayama's emotional connection with his daughter becomes clear.

Hirayama's deep feeling of loss is made clear not only in the way he absents himself from the family after the wedding, to go off drinking alone in the bar run by the woman that in his mind so resembles his wife, but is reinforced by two series of static shots of inside his house, significantly all empty of people.

The first series occurs when Michiko leaves from her home for the wedding. In fact the very first shot is one that is held onto after Michiko and the family leave the frame. Three more shots of the empty house are then followed by two scene-setting static shots, leading into the change of locale to Kawai's house and a change of time, after the wedding. (Again, we are never shown anything of the wedding itself, for such scenes are simply not important to the thrust of the story).

It is the second series of empty static shots that are truly representative of Hirayama's emotions. From Kawai's house, he goes to the bar whose owner reminds him of his dead wife; the last shots here show Hirayama close to tears. Then he returns home drunk; Koichi and Akiko go home, and Kazuo goes to bed. This second series of static shots is framed first by Hirayama sitting on his own, murmuring "Now I'm all alone," and drunkenly singing an old military song; then, after these static shots, the final two shots of the film: Hirayama in mid-shot (shot characteristically Ozu-style slightly from below), swaying slightly, broken-hearted, in the dark, and then a long shot down the hall into the kitchen of Hirayama standing, pouring himself some tea, and then sitting, his back slightly turned to us. All of this evokes a potent sense of personal loss.

The second in these series of static shots, a lengthy shot of the empty staircase leading upstairs, is particularly significant. Firstly, these are the stairs (unseen at the time) that Hirayama went up to console his daughter after she learned that Miura was not available for marriage, leading to the film's one true, heartfelt conversation between father and daughter. Secondly, the shot of the stairs is important in the context of Ozu's cinema. In a fascinating book on Ozu published in 1983 and only available in the West in a 1998 French translation (although one section does appear in the Cambridge Film Handbook on Tokyo Story edited by David Desser), Shiguehiko Hasumi points out that staircases do not exist in late-period Ozu, that is, from Late Spring on. (The one exception is Floating Weeds [Ukikusa, 1959], atypical in other respects as well.) Of course, prior to Late Spring, a staircase that we are shown is the site of a rare and most striking act of violence in Ozu's cinema: in A Hen in the Wind (Kaza no naka no mendori, 1948) the wife (Kinuyo Tanaka) is knocked down the entire flight of stairs by her husband (Shuji Sano). But for the last film of this late period finally to include a shot of an empty staircase is resonant beyond the emotional connection it underlines between Hirayama and Michiko.

The story of An Autumn Afternoon is undeniably conservative, even by Ozu's standards. The quiet, almost passive acceptance of the roles traditional Japanese society had assigned individuals within the family on the basis of "life is like this", without any questioning of the underlying ideology, is something that can be hard for Western viewers to take, used, as they are, to a cinema premised on action and the primacy of the individual. And even in Japan, the subsequent generation of filmmakers like Oshima and Imamura very much worked in reaction, if not outright opposition, to Ozu's kind of cinema.

Why then do Ozu's films affect us so? Why does An Autumn Afternoon? In the first place, there is his humanism: within the confines of the limited range of relationships he depicts (one family, and friends) and the limited number of physical settings (a home, an office, a bar, a restaurant), Ozu offers a concentrated, warm, sympathetic gaze on these middle-class characters. Then, and of equal importance, is his formalism: the low camera position, the total absence of camera movement, the precision of composition within the frame, and the distinctive static-shot series that always open, punctuate and close his films. The concentrated gaze that is directed on his characters is equally directed on the objects, rooms, buildings that he depicts. We may be left with the feeling of resignation evinced by Chishu Ryu's characters in so many films, but through the aesthetic of his cinema Ozu also leaves us with a sensation of peace, resolution, quiet, purity.

Cinema cannot get much better than this.

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Availability of An Autumn Afternoon on DVD is not ideal as far as English-speakers are concerned. The Japanese studio Shochiku, for whom Ozu directed the bulk of his films, has issued all their extant Ozu films in four box sets; An Autumn Afternoon (R2 NTSC) is in the first box, but without English subtitles. Panorama, a Hong Kong company that has already issued a large number of old Shochiku titles and plans to release some 30 Ozu DVDs, has already put out a DVD of An Autumn Afternoon (R3 NTSC) with Chinese and English subtitles. However the English subtitles are appalling, often grossly inadequate where they're not misleading, and for some scenes non-existent. Arte in France will be releasing a box set of all the colour films plus I Was Born But… (1932) in R2 PAL but with only French subtitles. It's quite likely that an English-subtitled DVD will be released by Criterion in the US (the latter has already released Tokyo Story and in 2004 will put out Floating Weeds [1959], A Story of Floating Weeds [1934] and The Only Son [1936]) and possibly by Tartan in the UK, but nothing has been announced so far.

Books cited:

David Desser, ed. Ozu's Tokyo Story. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Shiguehiko Hasumi. Yasujiro Ozu. Paris: Editions de l'Etoile/Cahiers du Cinéma, 1998.

                                                                 © FILM JOURNAL 2002