the end of the family
by
Douglas Messerli
Kōgo
Noda and Yasujirō Ozu (screenplay), Yasujirō Ozu (director) 小早川家の秋 Kohayagawa-ke no aki (The End of Summer) / 1961
Accordingly for the first third of this
film, we encounter these various figures without much truly happening. They
meet, go about their daily activities, and, most importantly—as in any Ozu
film—talk with one another, sometimes quite obliquely, but, on occasion, straightforwardly expressing their worries and
fears over tea, sake, and food. Indeed, one might describe the dining table,
bar stools, and restaurant booths as the major props of this and other Ozu
films, and accordingly, characters are mostly sitting throughout; even when
Noriko and Aikiko speak to one another it is in a position of what we might
describe as hunkering.
Yet for all the uneventfulness of The End of Summer, we learn a great deal
about family members through their gestures and acts; and we come to realize
that despite their fairly conservative upbringings, they appear to be coming to
terms with the modern world.
It is no accident surely that the eldest
of Manbei’s daughters is the most traditional, and the most angered by her
father’s sexual activities; yet even she, after she has vented her feelings,
can only laugh at his insistence that he is leaving the house to make a
business deal.
Aikiko, although dressing traditionally,
encourages Noriko to make up her own mind about love, and refuses to even
attend the dinner appointments with Yanosuke’s businessman friend. Yuriko, as I
have suggested, is already almost entirely Americanized.
By summer’s end the Kohayagawa clan must
merge their company with a rival, while Noriko leaves to join her young man in
Sapporo, forcing her close confidant, Aikiko, to fend for herself. Even as we
see the family, for the last time, in traditional procession to the crematorium
where the patriarch’s body has been burned, we perceive—as Noriko and Aikiko,
in conversation, trail far behind the others—that there may never again be such
a full gathering of this family, that with the death the father their deep
familial ties have come undone.
Los Angeles, May
12, 2016
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