An Autumn Afternoon: Last Call

We, or they, have canonized Yasujiro Ozu. If you’re 15 and tentatively adopting the moniker “cinephile,” he’s on the list, and you must watch his work, at least Tokyo Story (1952). The trouble is that his films are for adults. They are slow and ponderous. The camera rarely moves. He conveys dialogue through straight-on shot-reverse-shots. His themes are family dysfunction, the passage of time, death, the modernization of Japan, and the relationships among parents and their children. At 15 (or a little later), I watched, and I forgot.

I set out to remedy this state of affairs, because I am no longer a teenager, and I find myself more and more concerned by the passage of time. This blog post could just as easily be about Late Spring (1948) or Tokyo Story. But today I’d like to write a little about Ozu’s final film, An Autumn Afternoon (1962).

All the mainstays are here. A father who drinks too much, a daughter he fears to marry off who seems ambivalent about the prospect herself, ungrateful children and strange feelings about losing the war. Chishu Ryu plays Shuhei Hirayama, an aging businessman whose partner tells him it’s time he marry off his 24-year-old daughter Michiko (Shima Iwashita). He demurs, fearing the loneliness and unmasked incompetence for housework that will ensue. Shuhei drinks with his friends, meets up with a hard-drinking old teacher, now running a noodle shop with his spinster daughter, and he begins to reconsider.

I told you his films are simple. But that’s just it: Ozu manages an experience I rarely feel while or after watching movies. His creep. The parts are so simple, little conversations of minimal significance, jokes about the Japanese navy and pranks played over sake. Nothing happens, not in any typical sense. They are charged with the formality of everyday Japanese life. Characters talk very little and, at least during viewing, seem not to reveal much.

But then the films end. The shots linger. You get to thinking, ruminating on what it is you’ve just witnessed. Why did you tear up at the end, when Shuhei, framed by his shadowed hallway and molested by his younger son’s pleas that he go to bed, poured tea?

They linger. His movies have this odd habit of seeming to show nothing and yet reveal everything—about aging, mortality, and the ways we treat one another. No one is evil or even typically all that petty or wrongheaded. The characters—like the shots—float for a second and disappear. They could be anyone. They could be you. Moments hover like a specter before a bed at night, inviting the troubling thoughts that seem to plague us before sleep.

I wasn’t ready for this as a teenager. I’m not even sure I’m ready now, that I ever will be. But I felt something after I closed my eyes an hour after taking in An Autumn Afternoon. The title comes from a poem Ozu wrote for his mother, with whom he lived all his life, after whom he died shortly, and with whom he’s buried. I got the sense that Ozu understood something, captured the ephemerality of it all. Dust unto dust. Moment to moment.