A final iimage from Ozu's An Autumn Afternoon

Adding one note to yesterday's post on Ozu's An Autumn Afternoon: HOw could Ihave forgot to mention the final scenes in which the father and daughter prepare for her wedding ceremony and we see the father (Rya) buttoning himself into a "morning coat" - further evidence of the adoption of Western fashions especially for business and for formal occasions - and then the daughter makes her entry, in a traditional Japanese wedding dress, like someone stepping forward from the 18th century: a striking visual presentation of the clash of two cultures in postwar Japan, an attempt to hold onto traditional values and ideals against the tidal wave of Western ideas and commerce. The irony is that she is giving up the traditional role of daughter tending to aging father in order to pursue her own life as wife and mother - though of course she is doing so at the urging of her father. Her bridal attire is a way to say: See what you've sacrificed, see what you're giving up.

The power of Ozu's last movie

Ozu's final movie (1962), the enigmatically titled An Autumn Afternoon (many Ozu films are named for a season or part of a season, but this moniker seems particularly odd as the film is shot almost entirely as interiors - it hardly matters what the season might be - and takes place over several weeks or even months, although maybe the title refers to the autumnal years of the elderly central character and to the afternoon of the final scene?) touches on many of Ozu's key themes, especially father-daughter relationships and the obligations and expectations of families, especially the expectation that daughters forego or at least delay marriage in order to run the house for their father and brothers. In this movie the father - a successful business executive in some sort of vast factory in 1960s Japan, in an era when biz execs don't appear to work at a very fast pace and in which offices are run as strict hierarchies with the women in completely servile roles - wrestles with the idea that his daughter at 24 may be ready for marriage and over time comes to accept that she must begin her own life no matter what the cost to him (a similar theme in Ozu's Late Spring, with same lead actor, and a reverse on Ozu's masterpiece, Tokyo Story, in which the father, again same lead actor, and mother recognize that they are no longer central to their married daughter's life). Over the course of the movie we see a few scenes from several marriages, each exploring different aspects of or degrees of female independence: for ex., in one segment a young businessman tries to buy some expensive golf clubs and his wife forbids him to do so, an almost unheard of breech of protocol, at least of the older generation. We also see the business exec/father meet with some of his high-school buddies for evenings of serious drinking; they invite one of their former teachers - one whom they apparently did not care for - to one of their outings and get him severely intoxicated; they are a little surprised and dismayed, on helping him to get home, to see that his lives in poverty. A sub-theme is the changes in Japanese life and the self-image of the Japanese in postwar years: Not only such details as neon signs advertising "coffee" bars and the fascination w/ golf and w/ baseball but also a scene in which the business executive (Chishu Ryu, looked it up - a terrific actor) drinks with a man who served under him in the Japanese navy - a time of their lives when they were proud and hopeful; the defeat and partial destruction of Japan are never mentioned - history lives between the lines - but we sense that the younger men and women are changing to more Western, "modern" ways and the older men are ashamed of their past and drinking to blot out the bad memories and to blind themselves to the change on-going all around them.