In the clip above, I discuss Yasujiro Ozu’s “An Autumn Afternoon,” from 1962. With an intense tenderness for his characters and an exquisite sensitivity to their slightest emotional tremors, Ozu (who died in 1963, on his sixtieth birthday) is one of the most humane of filmmakers. (Anthony Lane writes in the magazine this week about his 1932 silent comedy “I Was Born, But …”) It’s strange to think of Ozu as a political artist—indeed, I generally think of him as an unusually impulsive and spontaneous filmmaker, who plays freely with cinematic grammar in choosing and composing shots that respond to his feelings about events. Nonetheless, the personal problems that his characters face are explicitly shadowed by social issues that give rise to them or that present obstacles to their resolution. He is fundamentally concerned with the question of tradition versus modernity, and examines the conventional decorum and formal behavior that in Japan hinder emotional self-expression and inhibit sincere action and plain thought.
“An Autumn Afternoon,” Ozu’s last film, dramatizes an aging widower’s gradual acceptance of the need to make a match for his twenty-four-year-old daughter. Reluctant to lose her help around the house, he gets unsolicited advice from a lifelong friend, who, despite coming off as a sort of cynical and poorly socialized loose cannon, is the movie’s catalytic conscience. The widower is also swayed by the happiness of another old friend, also an aging widower, who is newly remarried to a much younger woman, with whom, he freely admits, he enjoys a vigorous sex life.
Yet the movie is haunted by death and loss, focussing on men who live in stifled grief and reconcile themselves to solitude—a personal desolation that is doubled by Japan’s collective mourning for those who were lost to the country’s catastrophic war. The casting off of inhibitions by men of Ozu’s own age and generation reveals his scathingly critical political agenda. In one scene, the protagonist, a naval officer during the war, bumps into a sailor who served under him. As they get a few drinks under their belt, the sailor brings up old times and wonders why Japan lost the war and how things would have been different had it won. But the protagonist, defying his own rictus of sociability, disabuses his underling of enduring illusions. There follows a dance of gaudy melancholy, a masque of hearty and falsely cheerful military nostalgia that reveals the implicit horrors of patriotic gore as forthrightly as archival battlefield footage—and does so with the fierce, ongoing implication of Ozu's contemporaries in the immoral, conventional attitudes that resulted in those horrors.
