Directed by Yazujirô Ozu. Written by Kôgo Nada and Yazujirô Ozu
Society asks a lot of us.
We have civic responsibilities, foundational and stern, whose laws we let hover over us like pieces of central infrastructure: invisible but comprehensive and pervasive. We also have cultural binds. They’re more nebulous, but also more keenly felt, their influence a hook behind the navel dragging us forward at times. Sometimes the hook isn’t enough, and our friends and family prod us in the back, marching us into new stages of life because that’s just what’s done.
Then there’s the inner sanctum of our emotional lives, our relationship to family. For most people, this is where you find undying love and loyalty, feelings innate and unalienable. When we care for our family, we don’t do it out of some sense of higher purpose, it is our purpose.
Ozu spent his life telling stories about this push-and-pull on our lives: how tradition could get trampled by the onrush of modernity, how tradition could trip up progress – all the ways society, culture, and family interlink and conflict to the frustration of the individual and the collective.
Late Autumn is no outlier for Ozu, coming in the final stage of his career, its end at this point only two years away. He’s looking back. Late Autumn is a reworking of Late Spring, in which a daughter, devoted to her father, is forced to marry and leave her father behind because that’s what society expects her to.
But in Late Autumn, there’s a gender switch. Setsuko Hara plays Akiko, who has just laid her husband to rest and now faces middle age and beyond as a widow. Yôko Tsukasa plays Akiko’s daughter Ayako, mid-20s and therefore expected to marry soonish. Whatever she may desire for herself, the prospect of leaving her mother, especially now, is abhorrent.
However, three long-time friends of Akiko’s husband think it’s a duty of theirs to find Ayako a husband, and so these bumbling patriarchs set to work trying to source a suitor among those a casual ponder can drum up. When Ayako is resistant, they dream up even more drastic schemes.
Along with the tweaks to the cast of characters, Late Autumn also sees a change in tone. Late Spring was an aching eulogy, but Autumn sees a mellowing. An airy score by Takanobu Saitô lightens things, and jokes cracked by the three old men, played by steady Ozu hands Nobuo Nakamure, Ryûji Kita, and Shin Saburi, as well as jokes cracked at their expense, belie the grievous situation under development.
The script written by Ozu and his stalwart collaborator Kôgo Nada still sparkles with its penetrating economy. Innately attuned to the long-standing power structures of Japan, it’s still a teasing depiction of a shifting dynamic in its portrayal of the elder men, still firmly in place at the top of the public sphere, but the butt of the joke pretty much everywhere else.
This lighthearted script hardens with a flick of Ozu’s wrist, however, expressing the concealed, but hard-felt feelings of grief, anxiety, and frustration that Akiko and Ayako endure, plain to all their female friends who understand their predicament. This is peak dramedy, long before that became part of the common cinematic lexicon.
As mild-mannered and affable as its characters, Late Autumn is a terrific movie about cruel circumstances made worse by good intentions. It penetrates life and gets at its hidden alcoves, telling us a story about ourselves with such grace and finesse we merrily join along for the ride, all of it building to an enigmatic ending that brands itself on your memory, forever remembered and cherished.
Mikkel Frederiksen 