coming to terms with life
by Douglas Messerli
Kogo
Noda and Yasujirō Ozu (screenplay),
Yasujirō Ozu 秋刀魚の味 Sanma no aji (The Taste of Pike,
later translated as An Autumn Afternoon)
/ 1962, USA 1964
The
plot of Yasujirō Ozu’s last film, An
Autumn Afternoon, although essential, is not what really matters, and can
be summed up in a simple few paragraphs. The elderly factory manager, widower,
Shūhei Hirayama (the regular Ozu actor, Chishū Ryū), has relied on his obedient
and caring daughter, Michiko (Shima Iwashita) to keep the house for him and his
younger son, Kazuo (Shin'ichirō Mikami) far too long, and at 24 she is
beginning to move away from marrying age. His close business friends attempt to
explain to him the situation, and even seek out appropriate young men for her.
But neither he, nor his daughters, seems interested her leaving the house—after
all, how will he and slightly irresponsible son survive without her?
A reunion his former schoolmates with
their elderly professor, nicknamed “The Gourd” by his students (Eijirō Tōno) begins to make him
realize the error of his ways, for the now alcoholic professor
relies on his long-unmarried daughter, now a
quite bitter old maid, to run his small noodle shop. And meeting her, he begins
to realize that this may ultimately be his and his daughter’s own future if he
does not quickly change his ways.
Although Michiko is almost offended at
his suggestion that she should be married, she has, quite secretly, been
attracted to one of her elder brother’s co-workers, Yutako Miura (Teruo
Yoshida), and the older, slightly unhappily married Kōichi (Keiji Sada) is
enlisted to discover whether or not Miura is interested. He might have been, in
turns out, but since Kōichi himself has suggested his sister is not interested,
he has found another woman to whom he is engaged.
Now, since Michiko has finally given
into her father’s demands, she is even more hurt by the news, and is forced to
meet with the stranger whom Hirayama’s
friends have suggested.
As I earlier mentioned, however, that
it is only Ozu’s basic plot, it is not truly what the movie is about. As in all
of this director’s films, family life is at the center of this film, but the
way he reveals it is never as a merely tranquil world of Norman Rockwell-like joy.
Given Ozu’s analysis of the post-War
Japanese society, very much at the center of this film (and surely another of character’s
recognition of an “autumn” of their cultural lives), as each must learn to give
up their former war-time fascist pretensions and come to live within more
meager and even sometimes desperate conditions.
Those men (and women) who have not quite
been able to adapt to the new Japan despair in their conditions, quietly crying
to themselves—all of which makes this film a quietly painful work.
They drink out of long friendship and
nostalgia, as a small society of what is left of a past world. The sudden
meeting of a former sailor who served under Hirayama in World War II seems to
become a reunion almost as important as Hirayama and his friends’ discovery of
their former professor on a subway.
Yet, in his quiet unstated
presentations, Ozu makes it clear that, except for the westernized young, these
older folks will not and cannot be part of the current fabric of their own
society. They are the lost generation—lost and forgotten even more than the men
and women of Hemingway’s post World War I. Although some have jobs and are
financially surviving, their own daughters and sons are still suffering the
problems of a growing new economy, which hasn’t, in the 1962 period of this
movie, quite caught up to Japan’s later economic miracles.
So many of Ozu’s families, throughout
his filmmaking career, have been broken in half, with wives and husbands
missing, the survivors having to go on without them. Some, like Hirayama’s good
friend, Shin Horie (Ryūji Kita) have found love in the younger generation and
feel, in the process, rejuvenated—even though Hirayama and others of his
friends mock that resuscitation of life. But for most of the elderly Ozu men
and women, their only hopes lie in the future for their children, as they,
themselves, realize their must abandon their own dependence upon family
ties—and cultural attachments—to the past.
Yet Ozu makes us realize this is not
just a Japanese conundrum. As he stresses throughout this film, this is a human
condition: we all live alone. We all seek whatever happiness we might
find. We all get on each day the best as we
can. If his characters endlessly drink, it is for good reason. They are lonely.
They miss something or someone else in their lives. They know they must abandon
the love of their own children. Even the great French pataphysician, the ever
playful Georges Perc, admits to have cried during his viewing of Ozu’s late
masterpiece, particularly when the former shy and seemingly unmarriageable
Michiko suddenly appears near the end of this movie as a stunningly beautiful
bride. She, at last, has agreed to move into the new world she has inherited. And
her father has finally come to terms with his age and death itself.
If her father, Hirayama, has a hard night
of it after the wedding, he will wake up, return to work, and with his now more
helpful younger son, Kazuo, survive, one hopes, into old age. Isn’t that all of
us can ever imagine for ourselves?
Los Angeles,
November 12, 2016
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