Yasujiro Ozu might be cinema’s greatest practical humanist. The great Japanese director made a career out of shomin-geki films, a genre centered on the ordinary lives of ordinary people—and he did so with a complete vision of the power of human connection. For Ozu the man, that understanding likely never came from a romantic partner: he died a bachelor, living with his mother until her death (just two years before his own). With films that frequently concern the disintegration of love in marriage, the reconciliation of families post-affairs, and the bidding-war process of potential partners, it comes as a great surprise that the great director of marriage on film never married.
In Late Autumn, as in every other Ozu film I’ve seen, his approach to life is markedly humanist. The young and desired Ayako (Yoko Tsukasa) realizes that to marry is to leave her widowed mother, Akiko (Setsuko Hara). Three creepy and occasionally misogynistic men who knew her father scheme to marry her off the daughter (and eventually the mother) as Ayako begins to voice a new philosophy of love: what if it wasn’t one and the same with marriage?
It’s such a simple film—as Ozu films basically promise—and that’s because life is simple. The typicalness of his stories comes across in Ozu’s use of the 50mm lens, the film lens that closest replicates how human eyes see the world. Ultimately, we love a few things and a few people—and our lives, more or less, revolve around the expression of those loves. Ayako is learning to navigate that maze of loyalties.
That Ozu is interested in questions like this makes him stand out from the majority of the pantheon of canonized “auteurs,” a word that almost feels too loaded to be applied to Ozu. That he approaches his films hopefully and without gloom or doom (and not in a moment of tragedy, I should add) makes him singular amongst the other names in the depressive high-brow film canon. Ayako could be you or me—or maybe, god forbid, one day we could be the widowed and soon-to-be alone Akiko.
As I alluded earlier, there is something didactic or practical to his humanist and relational approach. As in many of his other films, especially The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice (which I saw at the HFA last month), Ozu ends with a reconciliation of love. In Green Tea, it’s a more literal reconciliation of spouses once bitter and disloyal to one another; in Late Autumn, a reconciliation may be the wrong word because Ayako makes sure never to sever the relationship with her mother in the first place. Nevertheless, by the film’s end, they reach a new stage in their mother-daughter relationship through Ayako’s self-navigation of the loyalties of love. If that sounds autobiographical, it might as well be.
The men of the film make the prospects of marriage with someone like them pretty distasteful, commenting about how attractive both daughters are or making misogynistic comments about other women in their presence. This is heightened by Ozu’s trademark style, including his use of shooting dialogue by having his characters look straight into the camera. When the misogyny, basic sexism, and rigid traditionalism feel directed at you as a viewer, it’s all that more disconsolate.
Late Autumn
1960
dir. Yasujiro Ozu
128 min.
Screens at the Harvard Film Archive on Monday 7/17 and Friday 7/28 at 7:00 pm in 35mm!
