Reviews of An Autumn Afternoon
Displaying all 4 reviews
McNulty
25Aug09
Every now and then I pop in an Ozu Criterion so I can reflect on my own life and relationship with my parents/siblings. I wonder what I’ll be talking about with my friends when we are in our 60s reminiscing about the good old days. This cinematic gem is poetic, heartfelt, and even funny.
Only OZU can have characters who can talk about having sex with a younger woman while you are an old man because you take Viagra and still keep the dialogue G rated!
Favorite scene:
The brother who’s obsessed with buying his golf clubs. I can see myself in him. I don’t play Golf, but sometimes we’re just little spoiled boys with our toys who sulk when we don’t get what we want…whether it’s a set of clubs or a video game or Criterion collection DVD!
I give this a solid 8.5 out of 10
- Currently 5.0/5 Stars.
Teddy Cheong
25Apr09
Ozu’s long career saw an evolution spanning silent film, sound, and a reluctant use of color. Paradoxically, his visual style became more and more essential with each passing work. An Autumn Afternoon is constructed almost overwhelmingly with his signature tatami shots; I imagine, had he gone on to make more films, they would’ve been made exclusively with tatami shots. His usual themes also reach a kind of pinnacle or resolution by arranging a marriage between tradition and modern. Although I doubt Ozu ever intended this to be his final film, it serves as an unintended capstone to one of cinema’s most original bodies of work. The only vital element missing here is Setsuko Hara. Casting her would’ve made this definitive.
- Currently 5.0/5 Stars.
dope fiend willy
19Feb09
spoilers ahead
(1962) An Autumn Afternoon
Yasujiro Ozu, or Ozu Yasujiro is a great filmmaker. Nobody else could get away with what he gets away with, but mainly because no other filmmaker would have the confidence in their style to stick to it as he does, and that is why he succeeds at it. He doesn’t do it half the time, he does it all the time, and he does it with complete conviction. His style, as unconventional an d unorthadox as it is, is flawless in and of itself. This is why he succeeds in his filmmaking, because he has created a style and a genre unique to himself, and he has perfected it.
Ozu’s last film is another marriage picture, with more or less the whole gang playing in it, though he more or less has the whole gang in every movie so this is really no different. I won’t be able to see “End of Summer” until the Eclipse box set “Late Ozu” is released in a month or so; but I do like the return to outdoor segueis, which Ozu did not really use in “Late Autumn”. The whole film in a way felt like a culmination of everything that Ozu has done so well in the past. The story takes a little longer to develope than in some of his other marriage pictures, and features some really strong female characters, and some rather weak male characters. Some humour and some sadness as in all of Ozu’s marriage pictures, with the additional sadness of the reality of growing old. A classic Ozu picture. Not his best, but a wonderful way to say goodbye.
- Currently 3.0/5 Stars.
Rodney Welch
21Dec08
The Ozu films I’ve seen are kind of the same: a comfortable family, usually led by Chishu Ryu, finds itself faced with the sad inevitability of change, which they try to accept with a certain Zen-like stoicism. I don’t understand a word of Japanese, but in film for film you always see these conversations where Ryu says “Ahhhhh….” — which can mean anything from “I see” to “Oh yes” to, generally, “Well, I guess that’s just the way life goes.”
“An Autumn Afternoon” takes all of Ozu’s familiar variations on the change theme — aging parents, the onset of marriage, the lingering pain of losing the war and consequent post-war industrialization — and rolls them into one beautiful film. The basic story involves Ryu, as an elderly widower, coming to the realization (as he did in “Late Spring”) that he must marry off the single daughter who lives with him. The story is strongly accentuated by other subplots involving his children or friends. His son, for example, has married, but he’s not quite the success his old man was; he can’t handle money, his wife hen-pecks him, and the two of them often turn to Ryu for help. Another story involves Ryu’s reunions with his old high-school friends: one has married a much younger woman, another is a poor, pathetic old fool who lives with his daughter and runs a lousy noodle shop. Between the two, Ryu seems to forge his own fate: he doesn’t want to ruin his daughter’s life by having her live with him, and he entertains the idea of remarrying a young woman he meets at a local bar.
All this takes place against the backdrop of a 1960s Japan that is rebuilding itself from the ashes of the war. In one superb scene, Ryu, whom we discover was a former high-ranking officer, meets ones of his soldiers in a bar, and the two discuss what it might have been like if Japan won the war: maybe the kids in New York would be trying to look like kids in Japan instead of the other way around. But then, maybe it’s good we lost the war, the soldier says; now we’re not pushed around by the militarists. Nonetheless, the two love to recall the old days, and they happily parade around the bar as a waitress plays a military march on the soundtrack. It’s an incredible scene, if only because it seems so revealing of the torn feelings of Japanese identity as expressed by average people.
Telling the same basic story over and over again might seem like a flaw in some artists — but look at the novels of Jane Austen or the comedies of Shakespeare. They repeatedly followed the same basic formula, but with each effort there was something new. Ozu, likewise, keeps seeing something new in the same story, or another way to tell it, or another observation to make. Some painters never tire of the same subject, and just better and better at it.
I watched this film last night and I’ve been thinking about it all day, thinking about how it approaches the subject of time and family from several angles and as a result delivers a work of art that, like his other films, is compelling and beautiful and rich in its own way.
- Currently 5.0/5 Stars.