…just try to enjoy the emotion Ozu is conveying through his work. You can watch a great movie time and again, so I wouldn’t make too much of these sorts of similarities. It is perhaps a bit of a cop out, but does that really change anything for the film? Plus his work was made over a long stretch of time, so you can consider it “revisionary perfectionism” if you like.
… yeah, I guess so… still one of my hear keeps on hearing the sound of Ozu’s ironic laugh at me…
ozu was a formalist obsessed with ritualized gestures and repetitive actions,you could compare him to cezanne who painted the same mountain view over and over again or monet with his water lilies.
As the original post says, “surgical precision.” The thing about Ozu is that his movies are similar the way humans, or families, are similar—so many repetitions, so many well-known stories, yet each one has its differences. Since Ozu’s family’s stand in for “Family”, it’s a subject he could redo over and over again and still, despite the same concerns for style and theme, are different in and of themselves, even his remakes of his own films. As well as reusing scenes, he’d reuse actors, characters, sets, locations….
—PolarisDiB
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I think even if the scenes are similar (even if they are the same… which they aren’t) the tone built by the two films are almost completely different. Late Spring is from Noriko’s perspective. She is the center of the film. An Autumn Afternoon is from Mr. Hirayama’s perspective. In Late Spring the father is seemingly always awaiting his daughter; always home while she is always out. In An Autumn Afternoon it’s again pretty much the opposite; for the most part throughout the film the father is always going out and his daughter seems to always be at home. In Late Spring the daughter is filial to the point of some suggesting an incestuous relationship. In An Autumn Afternoon the daughter is pretty independent; she scolds her father for drinking, for not getting up in the morning, for not letting her know if her father is not coming to dinner.
So, by the time we come to that ending we have a completely different feeling. An Autumn Afternoon is mainly about an absentee father; a father that believes material gifts will win his child’s affection, but his children pretty much remain as foreign and blank to us as they are to him (this is indeed why the emotions in the film are more muted than in Late Spring). In Late Spring there is a depth of understanding between father and daughter; the father knows exactly how his daughter will react to a prospect to her marriage and a prospect to his re-marriage and uses that knowledge to break each other apart. In its simplest An Autumn Afternoon is about a father that breaks his family apart in an effort to bring them all together (and the ending is the realization of that failure), and Late Spring is about a father and daughter that end their relationship to conform to societies whims. Ozu obviously understood this and used the same structure of the ending of Late Spring to emphasize the almost completely opposite emotions and meaning in An Autumn Afternoon.
But, even though the structure is the same the content of these scenes couldn’t be more different. Where does the father go in Late Spring after his daughter’s marriage? He goes to his daughter’s favourite bar in Ginza with her best friend. Where does he go in An Autumn Afternoon? He goes out drinking and ignores the rest of his family. Again, Late Spring is about the end of a deep connection, and An Autumn Afternoon is about that separation throughout. Chishu Ryu’s character in Late Spring is selfless; in An Autumn Afternoon he’s incredibly selfish. And the genius of Ozu is neither is ever shown to be better than the other.
If you consider "Good Morning’ a talkie-remake of “I Was Born,But…”, then you could also consider “An Autumn Afternoon” a colorized version of “Late Spring”.
I thought Late Spring and There Was a Father had very similar endings as well.
francesco
I recently dig myself into ‘50s & ’60s japanese “classics” (Ozu, Naruse, Mizoguchi, etc.). I have been watching any Ozu’s movies I could find in the last few days. I wouldn’t simply say that Ozu kept on making movies on the same subject (though the backbone of most Ozu’s movies is basically that: family): he was able to surgically analyse the differerent shades of relationships in families. That said, yesterday I watched “Late Spring”, just a few days after I had watched “An Autumn Afternoon”… well, i may say that in the latter Ozu copied himself for the last 15 mins… I mean, even the scenes are the same, even the details: for ex. the father who admires his daughter dressed like a bride, the mirror in the empty room, the father drinking in the bar after the daughter has left for honeymoon… just the few seconds at the end, where in “late spring” chishu ryu cuts the apple’s skin… I found that an even more excruciating end than the sadness shown in “an autumn afternoon”… what do you people think about this: should the movies endings be sooo similar? Why did he do so? Sure I am not saying he did out of laziness… anyway the two movies were shot at a distance of 13 years from each other…