An Autumn Afternoon

An Autumn Afternoon

A pair of middle-aged students take their elderly professor out for a dinner, during which he becomes very drunk and very sad. We are alone in this life, he tells them. Always alone. He lives with his daughter who takes care of him, who has never married and will be left all alone when he dies. What he is saying to Hirayama, the hero of “An Autumn Afternoon,” is that he should marry his daughter now, before she gets too old.

“Ummm,” says Hirayama. No apparent emotion registers on his face. He lives at home with a son and daughter; she waits on both of them; another son is married; he thinks about what his teacher said, and through the window at his office sees a young woman of his daughter’s age about to get married. Maybe the old man was right after all. On the night of the dinner they take him home from the noodle shop to find that now she works there with her father who’s gotten himself drunk again, and is sitting blearily in front of her while she scolds him lovingly but also unhappily because she’s trapped.

The more one learns about Yasujiro Ozu (1903-1963), director of “An Autumn Afternoon” (1962), the deeper the water seems to lie beneath those serene surfaces until finally it becomes clear that this is not really a surface at all but more like a mirror into which we’re being asked to look down as deeply as we can bear to see ourselves or anything else.

Ozu was one of the very greatest artists ever to make a film; this was his last one; he never married; he lived for 60 years with his mother, and when she died, so did he within four months anyway and over and over again in almost all of his films turned to these same central themes: of loneliness, of family, of dependence, of marriage, of parents and children; he holds them up to the light and sees what kinds of different things they will cast back at him in their prismatic reflections through each new screenplay; all his films are made within the emotional space of his life itself, which is not melodramatic joy or tragedy but mono no aware the bittersweet transience of all things.

I sometimes come back to Ozu when I need calming down or restoring. He is a man who knows so much about human nature that he never needs to make any dramatic statements about it. We are here; we want to be happy; we try to do well; we are locked within our aloneness; life goes on. And this vision he embodies in a cinematic style so peculiarly his own that you can almost recognize an Ozu film from a single shot: mostly indoors, camera at eye level for person seated on tatami mat, camera never moves except for horizontal pans (no dollies or cranes), shots often beginning before anyone enters frame and ending after frame empty again (thus foreground framing from doors or walls or objects), meticulous attention to things within each shot (tables and chairs and cups and ashtrays).

Ozu meticulously arranged objects in a shot, which is recalled by his collaborators. A small teapot is seen film after film, as if it were the mark of the maker itself. The things do not matter as much as what they do compositionally; often, he composes on a lateral within the still frame that sends our eyes forward and back. “An Autumn Afternoon” is one of six color films Ozu made between 1958 and 1962, in which he used red most noticeably to draw our eyes deeper into the frame. Red or orange appears in almost every shot in foreground, middle distance and back.

These are not apparent; they may involve a stool, a sign on a wall, an item of clothing hanging from a hook, a vase full of flowers. They have no significance whatsoever but because red is such a dominant color — it was called “the last color left out” by one of his cinematographers they pull our eyes through his usually pastel compositions and keep us from reading a shot only in flat pane. They give his films depth of space that mocks pretension 3D.

If you love Ozu you don’t need to be told that “An Autumn Afternoon” stars Chishû Ryû (who appeared in nearly every film he ever made) as Hirayama; if you’ve seen enough Ozus then Hirayama already seems like an old friend even before you meet him here: tall and slender and always well-dressed; reserved, neat quiet; heavy drinker (like Ozu himself); more meditative than demonstrative but also capable great waves emotion rage panic desperation terror when pushed too far or denied something he wants needs deserves has earned fair square right get have keep own enjoy cherish savor etc ad absurdum ad infinitum ad nauseam etcetera ad nauseam etcetera ad nauseam etcetera ad nauseam etcetera ad nauseam etcetera ad nauseam etcetera ad nauseam etcetera.

But in “An Autumn Afternoon,” his Hirayama is a salaryman at some kind of company (it’s never specified), who lives with his daughter Michiko (Shima Iwashita) age 24, and son Kazuo (Shinichirô Mikami) little younger. An older son Koichi (Keiji Sada) is already married; while he has few scenes, we feel his presence throughout the movie; when he does appear late in the film, it’s such a surprise that we see him more as an apparition than a living being.

The same might be said of all Ozu characters who are introduced late in the film; they seem like ghosts from another world enter stage left to deliver fate or twist knife reveal secret dispose bodies end credits role cue music fade black roll camera cut print wrap pack ship off store sell out stock order reorder reorder reorder re-purchase repurchase repay refund deposit deduct calculate estimate evaluate appraise assess value rate rank weight measure gauge consider think judge conclude determine decide settle fix resolve discover realize deduce ascertain understand comprehend perceive know acknowledge admit agree accept concur confess respect honor obey submit adhere yield surrender bow acquiesce consent comply assent conform adhere yield surrender bow acquiesce consent comply assent conform adhere yield surrender bow acquiesce consent comply assent conform adhere yield surrender bow acquiesce consent comply assent conform adhere yield surrender bow acquiesce consent comply assent conform.

Hirayama spends time in his office and home and in bars and restaurants, and at his son’s home. Much drinking certain number scenes have echoes other films, most notably reunion with old teacher seen similar story “There Was Father” (1942), also starring neither young nor old Chishû Ryû character living home son.

Ozu had some things happen to him other than the military service he never showed in his movies: he went to school (where he smoked, drank, played hooky and got expelled), he worked, he never married, he drank a lot, he was lonely, he spent much of his time with colleagues who adored him. These are the building blocks of his stories.

Whether or not he felt trapped by his mother; whether or not he wanted to get married we can’t know. There were rumors of some troubles over a geisha in the 1930s, but no engagements or great romances. He worked almost always for the same studio, Shochiku, which worshiped him. The Japanese thought of him as their greatest director, but unlike Kurosawa was unknown in the West. Shochiku thought of him as “too Japanese” to travel well until the critic Donald Richie arranged for some of his work to be shown at the Venice Film Festival in the early 1970s.

On a Criterion DVD extra of “An Autumn Afternoon,” we see French critics Michel Ciment and Georges Perec from a TV show of that period trying to describe this great director who came into their view a decade after his death. They try to say what it is like when you are watching an Ozu film. Ciment: “It is Zen, the rapture of the present lived moment.” Perec: “C’est ce qui se passe quand il ne se passe rien.” Mono no aware.

Perec admits that twice during what must be called the emotional high point of the film on his daughter’s wedding day he cried. She turns around in her traditional bridal costume so her father can see her radiant face What are they thinking? She had argued that she should not get married because her father and brother could not manage without her; then she agreed with her father’s wishes. We haven’t even met the man she marries.

It isn’t who she’s going to that is the point, but who she’s leaving. Hirayama looks at her. “Ummm,” he says. Seeing, knowing, accepting. There’s no laughter in this movie. This scene of separation is as close as Ozu comes to violence. The father and the daughter had shown no intense love or need for each other But they had settled on a unison life, and marriage has ruptured it.

The soundtrack music by Kojun Saitô sounds Western (Italian, indeed), as it often does in an Ozu film; this is not an anachronism Western music was well-known in Japan. It’s winsome and nostalgic. Its cheerfulness is muted It says what nobody says in words: We go on We do our best We are within our destinies Things change In the last shot we see Hirayama alone at home, at the end of a long empty hallway in the kitchen He probably pours himself some tea from that ordinary yet unique looking little teapot that accompanied Ozu through his life’s work Maker’s mark.

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