Il gusto del sakè

This was one of the first Ozu films I saw, and is one of my favorites. Ozu's themes - a family adjusts uneasily to the rapidly shifting traditions of life in middle-class, postwar Japan - are handled with great subtlety, and many dark ironies are to be found beneath the fragile quietude at this film's surface. This isn't just applicable to Japan, and this realization gives this film a sad sting that stuck with me long after the movie was over. Ozu's famous 'look' - no closeups, no crane shots, a still camera fixed at 3 1/2 feet off the floor or ground also gives this film an unforgettable grace and beauty. DVD please???

When I first saw this film it struck me as being a very unusual and odd little movie. The camera work was direct and straightforward, as if the director were composing a still life painting. With the passage of time I remembered this film not as a whole but as a series of vignettes, the sailor marching in the bar, the unrequited lovers waiting for a train on the platform, the father staring into his daughter's empty room. I have recently seen An Autumn Afternoon again, and was not disappointed. Each scene has an almost indescribable longing, an ephemeral quality that speaks to the beauty and sadness of everyday life. I love this film, it is a true work of art.

I have seen many visually beautiful and emotionally moving films, but not as many recently. An Autumn Afternoon is one of those primary examples. Meditative in its pacing it is, but it is never dull. How everything is made and written really makes an interesting and very rewarding experience indeed. It is incredibly well made to start off with, the camera is kept at low angles and is still, but for me this allowed me to explore and really admire the scenery and the framing which are very elegantly done. Kojan Siato's score is one of those soothing and unobtrusive scores that helps the audience to connect with An Autumn Afternoon's gentle mood. How An Autum Afternoon is written is also exceptional, as well as the gentle tone, the story has this great warmth, wisdom and humanity. As well as Ozu's meticulous as ever direction what is also great about An Autumn Afternoon is the lead performance, Chishu Ryu's performance is dignified and altogether very touching. In conclusion, not just one of the cinema's greatest swan-song but a masterpiece of a film also. 10/10 Bethany Cox

In the early 60's in Tokyo, the widower Hirayama (Chishû Ryû) is a former captain from the Japanese navy that works as a manager of a factory and lives with his twenty-four year-old daughter Michiko (Shima Iwashita) and his son Kazuo (Shin'ichirô Mikami) in his house. His older son Koichi (Keiji Sada) is married with Akiko (Mariko Okada) that are compulsive consumers and Akiko financially controls their expenses.

Hirayama frequently meets his old friends Kawai (Nobuo Nakamura) and Professor Horie (Ryûji Kita), who is married with a younger wife, to drink in a bar. When their school teacher Sakuma (Eijiro Tono) comes to a reunion of Hirayama with old school mates, they learn that the old man lives with his daughter that stayed single to take care of him. Michiko lives a happy life with her father and her brother, but Hirayama feels that it is time to let her go and tries to arrange a marriage for her.

"Sanma no aji" is the last movie of the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu about his favorite theme: family and human relationship. Actually he revisits in color thirteen years later, the theme of the wonderful "Banshun". Both story lines are about an old father that realizes that he can not hold his daughter with him anymore and she needs to get married with an arranged marriage as a natural order of life in the traditional Japan. The beautiful and touching story shows also the contrast between the traditional and the newer generation formed by consumers and is supported by awesome performances and the use of magnificent camera work, with symmetrically framed images. Last but not the least, it is impressive how the characters drink in this movie. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil):"A Rotina Tem Seu Encanto" ("The Routine Has its Charm")

As in Ozu's LATE SPRING, widower Chishu Ryu decides it is time for his youngest child, daughter Shima Iwashita, to marry. It comes on him suddenly in the midst of his comfortable routines -- the well paid executive position, the drinking bouts with his old friends, the nightcap at the inevitable bar around the corner -- that time is passing. She is 24. At first she resists. What will he and her younger brother do without her? He replies that they will manage.

Unlike the earlier movie, this one isn't about the daughter, but the father. Before the war Ozu had worked in many genres, with his largest influence seeming to be Leo McCarey. After the war he settled into a series of meditations of the Japanese family in a changing Japan, concentrating on first one member, then the other. As he grew older, so did the focus of the story.

Some people say Ozu's technique, which had favored ecstatic moving shots in the late 1920s, grew simpler. He set his camera on the floor, looking up at his subjects, and let the drama and comedy play out before it. I don't think so. I think that his interest in story grew less and his interest in character increased, and he found the tricks of camera movement, crane shots and structuring the background for composition, to be a distraction. And so, here, we come to know Chishu Ryu's character, even though he says little, orders nothing, yet clearly commands love and respect from all who know him.

Ozu's mother died, and he was trying to deal with cancer while he worked on his next movie when he died on his sixtieth birthday, December 12, 1963. For lovers of his films, there would be no WINTER. Instead, we may imagine the bar around the corner, the same family -- with Chishu Ryu perhaps now a great-grandfather - still caring about each other and coping in a constantly changing Japan.