Late Autumn

In an era in which cinema, particularly in the United States, exemplifies what Susan Sontag once called a "combinatory and re-combinatory art," surviving on rehashed ideas, many filmmakers could learn a significant amount about cinema from a master like Yasujiro Ozu. His Late Autumn (1960) might not share the beautifully sustained and serene tone of his earlier masterpiece, Late Spring (1949), but it has the same essential story: a widowed parent, reliant on an only child, must ensure that the cycles of family and life continue by helping that child marry, even at the price of ensuing loneliness. The child feels a deep bond with the parent, fears change, and worries that a new relationship will entail the cruel abandonment of another. "That is how it is with parents and children," Akiko, played by the great Japanese actress Setsuko Hara, tells her daughter, Ayako (Yoko Tsukasa).

Using different source material, Ozu reworked the essential narrative of Late Spring by altering the relationship (mother and daughter, instead of father and daughter), changing the role the parent has in the daughter's marriage, and adding a trio of meddling, middle-aged businessmen whose machinations to find Ayako a suitor illustrate Japan's continuing patriarchal traditions, while their own eventual manipulation by one of Ayako's young friends suggests the very decline of those traditions ("we are no match for the girls these days," one of the men remarks). Like many of Ozu's family dramas, Late Autumn quietly delineates a single family's dilemmas and a national culture in flux; one of the men's daughters wears American clothes, attends baseball games, and adheres to the great post-war symbol of Americana, Elvis Presley. But Ozu's proficiency as a filmmaker ensures that each new survey of similar ideas is an achievement unto itself; here, Ozu's lighter tone and his occasional comic touches allow him to observe Japan's transitions without necessarily condemning or endorsing them.

Whatever differences Late Autumn might have with its predecessor, the similarities are more significant, particularly a quality that Michael Atkinson attributed to Late Spring that applies to the later film equally well: "Ozu's Zen-infused sensibility translates on film to something like the art form's nascent formal beauty: patiently watching little happen, and the meditative moments around the nonhappening, until it becomes crashingly apparent that lives are at stake and the whole world is struggling to be born." When the emotional drama between Akiko and Ayako finally, and fully, takes center stage, after the daughter has gradually developed a relationship with a young man, Late Autumn evolves into a richly beautiful, evocative film and narrows its focus to the changes experienced by mother and child. "If I find someone, what would you do?" Ayako asks. "Would you be lonely?" Akiko assures her that no price is too great for her child's happiness, but her daughter's omnipresence is not the only thing she'll miss; as Ozu carefully illustrates throughout the film, particularly on a vacation the the two take together, their freedom as single women will diminish as well.

Ozu renders these concerns and changes with characteristic visual skill. He traces the emotional boundaries of familial obligation, habit, expectation, and aspiration by occasionally lingering on his actors' faces, framing them in simple, centered compositions, and employing a relatively shallow depth-of-field. Moreover, at roughly an hour and twenty minutes into the film, comes a brilliant, touching moment. Mamiya (Shin Saburi), one of the meddling businessmen, tells Ayako that her mother has a chance to remarry and asks her how she feels about this. Realizing that her content, stable life with her mother will change abruptly, Ayako bows her head in sad contemplation. Ozu sustains the emotional note by showing a waitress arrive to deliver food and then cutting to a wider shot behind Ayako, as she continues to sit silently; her head remains lowered, while her presence in the center of the frame augments both her private emotional struggle and the general somberness of acknowledged, eventual separation.

This shot illustrates yet another method by which Ozu masterly observes and understands family dynamics, the complexity of transition, and people's emotional lives; he employs similar visual techniques later in the film, particularly when focusing on Akiko's seemingly tranquil but deeply felt reactions to the changes occurring around her, drawing out, as he did to moving effect in Late Spring and The End of Summer, themes of inevitable struggle and conflict. In Late Autumn, Akiko finds that life involves a struggle between freedom and sacrifice, between the independence and closeness these women shared as widow and single daughter, and Akiko's willingness to surrender their enjoyment of all that to the shifting, ensuing stages of her daughter's life.

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Michael Atkinson's statment about Late Spring taken from his essay "Home with Ozu", included with Criterion's edition of the film.

Comments

[Doug]

Another great Ozu write-up, Michael. I really like your point about their mounting loss of freedom as single women, which is surely a major yet very subtle theme throughout the entire film (and one that gives it a unique inflection that's missing in Late Spring). As happy as we might feel for the daughter when we see her dressed in a traditional wedding gown under the lights and camera, she also looks somewhat captive, eh?

[Michael]

Doug, thanks for your comments. Yeah, Ayako does look a bit captive, and one thought I had (which I decided not to include in the write-up because I hadn't quite fleshed it out enough) is that it's possible that, while Ozu isn't really condemning the traditions and transitions of contemporary Japanese society, he might be commenting on these women living in a society in which their happiness is still supposedly contingent on the type of man they marry.

Ozu definitely makes the loss of freedom a recurring point -- mother and daughter eat, shop, go to the movies, travel whenever, wherever they want, on their own volition, on their own terms. In many ways, this seems to conflict with the surrounding pressures and expectations for marriage; while, at the same time, marriage brings its own benefits. One of the many things I love about Ozu is how he appreciates these complexities, while maintaining that austere, simple approach to them.

[Pacze Moj]

Is the dark shape on the wall behind the characters the shadow of a light fixture?

Great post, love reading about Ozu.

[Michael]

You know, I hadn't noticed that until you mentioned it, but I think it is a shadow, and if you notice the angle of the shadow behind Shin Saburi, it looks as if the light source is falling across the room from top to bottom. I also like the out-of-focus table in the foreground -- Ozu always seems to foreground an object (a table, a tree, a wall, etc.) in many of his shots.