By contrast with the dynamic action of his better known contemporaries, Yasujiro Ozu sought to minimize the kinetic drama of his films. Ozu does not reach out and grab ahold of the viewer with startling compositions and frenetic movement; he holds his camera still and makes the viewer come to him.
Ozu's style is like haiku. His imagery, his characters and dialogue are stripped to their essence; performances are purged of nuance, of subtley and naturalism, reduced to precise movements. Endless takes where the director chiseled away at his actors' mannerisms might have resulted in stilted performances, but instead Ozu and his company produce pure, streamlined poetry. Like the decor and architecture surrounding them, the actors are spare and minimalist by design, and Ozu uses similarly spare and minimalist camerawork to film them, keeping his camera as still, as zen-like and as patient as he asks his actors and his audience to be.
The reticence of his characters and the austerity of his style may leave the impatient viewer a bit restless. The first 20 minutes or so of an Ozu film may seem both slow and confusing as characters are introduced almost in mid-conversation. Ozu doesn't insert clumsy expository introductions into his characters' mouths to help orient the viewer. Instead he thrusts us directly into the scene and allows relationships and connections to gradually become clear. On the surface it may appear that we are simply listening in on a series of polite conversations, broken up here and there by a few of Ozu's characterisitic transition shots — still life images of rooms, hallways, furniture, streets and buildings. But situation piles upon situation and character upon character until a full and rich world has been created, almost imperceptibly, and suddenly it dawns on us that not only do we know these characters, we care about them and have somehow become invested in them.
This is not the identification that comes from cheap pandering or directorial manipulation, from simpering, soft-focus close-ups or crescendos of tear-jerking orchestral notes; it is instead the measure of Ozu's artisanship, of his unique talent for rendering a film with the depth of a novel — his ability, as both a writer and director, to fully and eloquently express the thoughts, dreams, emotions and desires of his characters to the point that we cannot help but take an active interest in their welfare.
An Autumn Afternoon, Ozu's final film, reflects his late-career interest in the shift to post-war modernity. Japan's increasingly Americanized culture is a central issue in the director's later work, with new attitudes, priorities and interests widening the gap between old and young, between parents and their adult children. The nation's newfound prosperity simultaneously enriches, distracts and destroys the lives of the middle class; wealth purchases convenient appliances and luxury goods but opens the door to the creeping malaise of materialism and threatens to undermine the old social order.
An Autumn Afternoon dwells on a theme he had worked before, that of a parent facing the unwelcome decision to marry off a daughter and thus embrace a new life without her presence. Ozu's films often deal with such generational issues, of the young leaving behind the aged. It is one of several themes that he returned to in film after film throughout his career, using different characters and situations to more fully examine the complexity of the issues at hand. It is a common joke that Ozu's films are essentially interchangeable, in style, in theme, and in the similarity of their titles: Early Spring, Late Spring, Late Autumn, Autumn Afternoon, etc. And while there is some truth in that observation, once you immerse yourself in Ozu's world you see that though nearly all of his films share a certain aesthetic, they are remarkably distinct from one another, each as rich, as engaging, as distinct as the faces of the actors he photographed.
Criterion has released many of Ozu's films on DVD over the years, both in stand-alone editions and in the more recent line of Eclipse box sets. The "Silent Ozu" collection presented three of his early silent family comedies, and "Late Ozu" presented five of his late-career films. But Criterion did not include An Autumn Afternoon in that collection, opting instead to release it as a separate title. It was a good decision. While all of Ozu's later films are excellent, An Autumn Afternoon is essentially the culmination of a directorial style that evolved over several decades. The spaces Ozu leaves between scenes and between characters are deftly handled, wistful and open-ended; his compositions are as balanced and precise and idiosyncratic as ever; his use of color bold yet understated, with blacks and whites offset by strategic dashes of red; and his everyday themes as sincere, as universal, and as heartrending as the medium will allow.
An Autumn Afternoon (1962). 113 minutes. $29.95. Criterion Collecton. www.criterion.com.
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