Fin d'automne

In many ways a retread of his earlier masterpiece Late Spring, which dealt with the relationship between a widowed father and his marry-able daughter, Ozu returned to familiar territory as he often did late in his career for a look at the flip-side. Here, the mother is widowed and desires to see her daughter married and happy. Three friends determine to intervene, leaving a trail of misunderstandings and hurt feelings in their attempt to appease all involved.

While this is certainly a familiar story for Ozu to tell, he somehow manages to inject new life into it every time out. Through a beautiful color palette and his famous visual style, Ozu explores a world of postwar Japan that finally appears to be picking itself up fifteen years after World War II. Western dress and behavior continues to seep into Japanese culture and Ozu seems to be picking up on the rapid evolution of change within his country throughout these late career works. His lack of interest in plot and storytelling leaves the viewer more time to focus on the atmosphere, the context in which the story is set. The result is a very pensive and serene feeling as one realizes that no matter what time or place, humans will always desire certain things. Companionship, love and happiness will never go out of style, even for widowed women.

Yasujiro Ozu's 1960 semi-sequel to his Late Spring (from 1949). Casting the same actress from his earlier effort, Setsuko Hara, where she played a woman whose father's machinations to marry her off become a nuisance since all she wants is to stay by his side, here she plays a widow w/a willful daughter whose friends of her late husband feel she's ready for marriage. As they gather one evening to preside over memorial rites for Hara's hubby, the businessmen suddenly decide her daughter is ripe for matrimony but the moment she hears this (especially when one of the tycoon's ambushes her w/one of his underlings who she just brushes off), she in no terms tells Hara for them to mind their business. As things keep getting prickly between the combatants, one of the men suggests one of their own court Hara (since he's a widower) in order to force the daughter to make a decision which backfires badly as the daughter's friend/co-worker gets fed up & tells her in no uncertain terms to grow up & pick a mate (or don't!) even though her prior brush off w/the underling comes around on his own. Finally exploding at Hara for all the romantic shenanigans, her daughter decides to leave the nest which doesn't last long as the film comes to an end & things work out for the best. Even when the daughter devolves into a shouting match at Hara, Hara is implacable, keeping whatever turmoil & anguish under lock & key, letting her innate decency rule the day. Not being very Ozu literate (this may be my fourth feature I've seen of his), it's refreshing to see how decent & low key his traits are even when decent people get caught up in their own forthrightness & w/simple straight forward compositions (the dialogue sequences are edited like the gentlest of tennis matches usually w/the speaker addressing the camera head on), the narratives tend to be easygoing & calming.

Well, it was bound to happen eventually: The more films I viewed from noted Japanese auteur Yasujiro Ozu, there was going to come a time when my well of interest ran dry. I have now seen ten of his films, and Ozu seems unique among filmmakers, even the most praised, by being essentially the anti-Billy Wilder. Where Wilder's mind was so brilliantly scattered that he did pictures in nearly every conceivable genre, and did them well, Ozu was always more interested in mining different stories out of the same cloth, hopping from patch to patch on a quilt of nuanced familial drama. Where Wilder branched out, Ozu dug his roots in deep. He had an exclusive stable of actors, comprising some of the most talented and, like their helmsman, subtly versatile actors in the business, including the transcendent Chishu Ryu and the great Sestuko Hara, appearing here as the mother to the always-adorable Yoko Tsukasa, essaying the role that Hara herself brought to life in Late Spring. Ryu has the remarkable ability to present to us a man of any age with very little in the way of physical alterations (in the span of five years, he played father, brother and grandfather to Hara and was utterly convincing in all). Hara has the exact opposite gift: That of an ageless wonder. Early on in Late Autumn, a comment is made that Hara and her daughter Tsukasa look more like sisters than mother-daughter, and it's absolutely true. In the eleven-year span from Spring to Autumn, Hara has swapped roles but kept the same face, and she brings her A-game yet again, looking more weary and fatigued than ever before.

But there's a problem. Where Ozu's style had always seemed evocative and direct, here is seems...stilted and awkward. The use of direct address in discussions seems disjointed and stiff. What felt emotionally confrontational in Late Spring comes off here as almost amateurish, merely content to blandly cut back and forth between one talking head and another. The fact that he's done that all his career perhaps says something about this film as an individual entity. Or perhaps it's just become all too familiar. When you're looking to derive a myriad of tales from the same few thematic points, there's always the danger of indifference; having the same actors play similar characters doing similar things in similar ways in movies with similar titles, it's a testament to his brilliance that he managed to make it more than one film, but here, it all just strikes of creative exhaustion: He's seemingly run out of stories to the point that he's now reworking the similar stories he's already done, as this is almost directly a remake of his 1949 masterpiece Late Spring, except mostly from the female perspective. While it appears to be a monumental shift for such a gradual director (I still remember first experiencing Tokyo Story and being so startled by its singular tracking shot that I was shaken to my core), actually far too little is new. Most of the motions and emotions we are presented with were all essentially inferred in Late Spring, and this seems if nothing else, an unnecessary diversion to a place we're already been.

Now this is not to say that the film is a complete dud. Everyone involved is so talented that they can't help but stumble into several moments of effective heartstrain, most notable the touching restraint of the final shot, but I just can't shake the feeling that with Late Autumn, instead of hopping to a new stitch on the quilt, he's stepping right back onto trampled-down, treaded ground. Where Late Spring presented this story and devastated me, going right to my heart and laying me out flat. To Late Autumn I'm a bit more...subdued. I never connected to the characters or the situation in any tangible or meaningful way, and my response to the film was less "Holy crap" and more "ho-hum".

{Grade: 6.5/10 (B-/C+) / #24 (of 34) of 1960}

(1960) Late Autumn (In Japanese with English subtitles) DRAMA

Yasujirô Ozu's remaking of "Late Spring", which is based on a novel written by Kôgo Noda called "Chichi to musume" and Ton Satomi about pressures to a 27 year old daughter to marry despite her being objectionable. In this case, the time is 1960, and the environment is more current except that the roles are now reversed, which in the 1949 original theatrical version, it was the daughter feeling pressure by her father, but in this version it's the mother who's played by Setsuko Hara who was also in the original, playing as the daughter felt pressured to marry by her father's associates. Anyways, in this scenario, it's starts off with the aftermath of a funeral, 27 year old Ayako Miwa and her mother Akiko Miwa (Setsuko Hara) have only each other now that that Akiko's husband of the family has been buried. And while there, some of her father's closest working associates see that Akiko's daughter is old enough to get married since she's 27 years old. They then try to accomplish this task by using deception, manipulation and lies to see to it that she settles down even though her mother would be lonely without her, and that the three grown men setting this up already have spouses and servants living with them. As much as I love to see Japanese icon actress Setsuko Hara in color instead of in black and white, this film still felt long since the film excuses the actions of it's working associates about marrying off a 27 or 28 year old woman who's not even related to any of them since theirs an adage in Japan that single girls will become 'old maids' which is only a myth. And instead of handling their own their own problems, why does it concern them to have her get married as quickly as possible which the film doesn't address this question as actress Hara was allowed to put in some of her two cents in, but only for so many scenes. Not as good as "Tokyo Story" since the situations feels much more forced and imposed upon than 1949 "Late Spring".

Ozu's common themes of ageing, filial ties and modernisation are as present here as in many other of his films. But in this film, as well as the melancholy and gentleness we are accustomed to, there are large doses of comedy which makes this film far more accessible for the uninitiated.

The story centres around a widow (Setsuko Hara) and her daughter (Yoko Tsukasa). The daughter doesn't want to get married because she wants to care for her mother, whereas the mother wants her daughter to marry even though she realises she'll be left alone. So far everything is extremely familiar. Except that in this case the dead husband's friends get involved, trying to find suitors for both mother and daughter, thus creating comical situations, causing family tensions, and finally necessitating for the daughter's friend to step in and sort out the mess.

All in all highly recommended for anyone who wishes to try out this highly prestigious director, and a strong reminder for fans of why we love him so much.