Dernier caprice

This is classic Ozu, a small slice of life, a crucial turning point in the history of a family fighting the inevitable progress of time and change. In this case it is a family consisting of a widower, clearly someone with a racy past, and his four children - a somewhat dim son, two dutiful older daughters, and a sharp tongued younger daughter, outraged that her father is determined to age disgracefully. He (played by the impish Ganjiro Nakamura) is sneaking off from his duties at his struggling sake brewery to meet an old flame. His eldest daughter, in true later Ozu style is reluctant to accept the hand of an apparently decent suitor. His second daughter is torn between the 'good' match and her true love, an impoverished academic.

Ozu's penultimate film, and perhaps this is reading too much into it, but its hard not to see his vision of his own impending death in it, despite the great humour in it.

This is a meditation on a dying world - despite the vibrant photography, the film resonates with images of passing - constant visions of graveyards, an old dying Japan, the families roots in a dying form of business as they are overtaken by big, highly capitalised larger companies. The ending is sad and inevitable, but not tragic - life does go on, and a new generation wills step in, even if the old traditions are not maintained.

One striking thing about this film is the incredible photography. Have humble domestic interiors every looked so stunningly beautiful? The lighting is luminous, every scene is as perfectly composed as a Vermeer painting.

It is a bunch of baloney to say that END OF SUMMER is far behind Ozu's other efforts. I have seen most if not all of Ozu's most acclaimed works, and END OF SUMMER is the best one I've ever seen. It even surpasses TOKYO STORY, which many scholars claim is Ozu's best masterpiece, one of the greatest movies of all time. For my money, END OF SUMMER is one of the top five foreign movies of all time. The beautiful photography is sublime; the movie contains some of the funniest things in any Ozu movie; and the ending is one of the most heartbreaking, most superbly visualized endings ever put on celluloid! I just can't say enough good things about this movie. There may be another Ozu movie I haven't seen that surpasses this one, but I sincerely doubt there's more than one, if there's even one.

This beautiful, haunting film takes place at the end of a hot Japanese summer that, as one of the characters puts it, "refuses to end." The mournful sound of cicadas accompanies the series of tableaux about the scion of the Namakura family, a whimsical widower who continues to see the mistress who caused his late wife and currently cause his three daughters a lot of sorrow. The film is about the impracticality and unpredictability of love in opposition to a rigid social order. Two of Namakura's daughters share their father's ambivalence about marriage. The older daughter, herself a widow, hesitates to re-marry. Although she embraces traditional values, she treasures her life "as it is," and values the freedom she now has as a single woman. Another daughter prefers to marry for love, rather than go with the dull, practical man her family has chosen for her. Only one daughter has a traditional marriage, but she's the most angry and outspoken to her father about his mistress. The film is also about the contrasts between the old and, "New Japan," the English words written on a flashing neon sign glimpsed on an anonymous city street. Despite his eccentricities, Namakura was a good businessman who kept the family sake business afloat; he could straddle both the old and new worlds. This is a physically gorgeous film, filled with humble domestic scenes that radiate the light of Vermeer and Dutch genre paintings. Ozu shows tremendous respect for women and the humble work they do--washing, sewing, cooking. It's work that is usually unseen and under-appreciated, so it's a pleasure to see it honored here.

... from writer-director Yasujiro Ozu. An elderly sake company owner (Ganjiro Nakamura) worries his extended family when his health falters and his financial choices come into question.

Ozu returns to familiar territory, including marrying off unwed relatives, familial obligations balanced against personal fulfillment, and the simple pleasures of domestic life. It all looks nice, each shot meticulously composed, and with added attention to ambient sound effects, like the sound of crickets chirping in the afternoon. Ozu only directed one film after this, 1962's An Autumn Afternoon, before dying in 1963 at age 60. His frequent star, and a major Japanese film fixture of the post-war years, Setsuko Hara, would also only appear in one more film, 1962's Chushingura. She lived in retirement another 53 years, passing away in 2015 at the age of 95.

Western viewers want to find a stoical impulse in Ozu's world view, but I think a certain orientalism is at play in this. Surely this "genius from the east" must be telling us something... transcendental and wise! In fact, I think the two most constant themes in Ozu's films are the momentary joys of life, and the suffering that comes with the loss of loved ones, either to death, the demands of modernity, or some conspiracy between the two. Those two topics seem stripped particularly bare in this late work, a short one by the standards of the director. Ozu's longer films, particularly Tokyo Story, might literally be chamber dramas, but in their breadth of subject and number of characters they have an epic quality- a kaleidoscopic depiction of post-war Japanese society. This film, by comparison, truly is a chamber drama with a relatively tight focus on one central figure and those around him. The characters aren't meant to comment about anything but themselves, and their joys and sorrows are laid all the more bare.