An Autumn Afternoon
1962, directed by Yasujiro Ozu
Halfway through An Autumn Afternoon, Koichi winds a clock at his wife Akiko’s insistence to prevent it from stopping. Everything in the film hinges on this moment. Though the scene blends in seamlessly, it’s also set apart from the rest of the film, bracketed by the only two appearances of trains. In Ozu’s cinematic code trains and clocks are closely correlated, so that these trains reinforce the sense of forward-moving “clock time”.
Immediately after this central scene, cutting directly from the second train, the film returns to the smokestacks at Mr. Hirayama’s workplace where the film had begun. It’s almost as if the plot starts over again in its second half, because the scenes then progress through the same locations that followed the smokestacks before, in the same order – Hirayama’s office, the restaurant, Hirayama’s house, and Akiko and Koichi’s apartment. This sense of starting over fits the plot, as Mr. Hirayama will now reconsider his daughter Michiko’s situation and encourage her to get married.
To put it differently, this central scene between the trains resets the story, saving Michiko from the sad fate of the Gourd’s daughter who regretted becoming an old maid. Michiko’s new start on life is imperfect, however. Impelled into action by the Gourd’s counterexample and Mr. Kawai’s warnings, Mr. Hirayama urges Michiko to get married, but he’s already too late. The man Michiko cared for, Miura, is already spoken for, and she settles for an arranged match. To what degree she finds happiness or carries regret will be forever ambiguous, to us and possibly to the bride’s father as well. The film however does offer some concrete insights.
The two halves of An Autumn Afternoon present two lifelike alternatives – one echoing the Gourd’s unfortunate trajectory, the other with some room for hope. For all of its ambiguity, the second half at least ends on a legible emotional note, leaving Mr. Hirayama lonely and possibly unsure whether he had done right for his daughter. The first half ends without emotional weight as Koichi swings at golf balls on a rooftop driving range. In Ozu’s Equinox Flower, golf had been a metaphor for getting stuck in time (the ball invariably falling into a hazard or a hole), and if Michiko were on a path to undesired spinsterhood, then she too would be caught in time.
The driving range however does not have holes or water or sand to get stuck in. Instead it has three black and white targets, and Miura notes that Koichi is “on the mark every time.” From this point of view the contrast between this halfway “ending” and the real ending is the difference between winning and losing. At the end, Mr. Hirayama has lost his daughter, and when the bartender guesses he’s come from a funeral, he replies, “Something like that.” At this same bar he had once told Sakamoto it was good that Japan lost World War II, and now a couple other patrons echo that judgment. Just as Japan’s loss back then was more fitting for history, so too is Hirayama’s loss the most appropriate outcome for his family.
An Autumn Afternoon works well enough as a family drama, offering an instructive perspective on parenthood and other relationships, but the clock, trains, and other clues point to a higher ambition. As in Ozu’s other films, the real subject is time itself.
The opening shots of five smokestacks at Mr. Hirayama’s industrial plant are an aggressive image of modernity. A rhythmic hammering sound joins the images, and clouds of steam make ominous shadows in the corridor. Henceforth the film will be relentless in its depiction of modernism: baseball, golf, city lights, bars, offices, a globalized economy, emancipated women, and a surfeit of attention to electric appliances. In Ozu’s other films about fathers marrying off their daughters, there had always been an excursion to nature or to old temples, but any such relief from the modern world is missing from An Autumn Afternoon.
Until now, Ozu’s post-war films had always taken a nuanced view of modernity, embracing it as part of a never-ending cycle like the succession of generations in a family. Here, the opening shots and the diminished sense of resolution suggest that after many years of synthesizing tradition and modernity into a holistic perspective, Ozu is finally ready to critcize the modern world. The unceasing march of progress finds its anthem in the “Warship March” that plays twice at Kaoru’s bar, drawing the guests and hostess into a silly salute as they recall the wartime years. It’s not a very positive image of progress, and when Sakamoto marches to the music he ends up backtracking and turning around as much as he goes forward.
The critique of modernism in An Autumn Afternoon is real, but it’s not at all simplistic. Ozu attacks the modern world not as a cranky traditionalist, but from a progressive point of view, showing where modernity has gone off course and how it might do better. The main plot can be read as stemming from the last line of Ozu’s preceding film The End of Summer, where Akiko (Setsuko Hara) had urged her much younger sister Noriko to quicken her steps on the long causeway: “Let’s catch up. We shouldn’t be too late.” There’s an irony in the traditional sister saying this to the modern sister, and that’s the point… the old way of life does not need to hold back the new. An Autumn Afternoon is precisely about what happens when the older generation holds back the younger. Mr. Hirayama lets go of Michiko too late for her to enjoy a love match, and his friends’ trick on him toward the end stresses the point, letting him believe he’s too late for the arranged match as well.
Unlike the essentially traditional Akiko in The End of Summer, however, and despite his age, Mr. Hirayama is a full-fledged citizen of the modern world. He works in a shiny executive office at a factory, he has a wicked sense of humor, he enjoys modern nightlife, and he’s happy to let his children go their own ways. In this film it’s not the grip of tradition that holds people back, but rather the relentless quality of modernism itself. There’s no unwillingness binding the 24-year-old Michiko to her father, but mainly a kind of inertia that both parties and also her brother Koichi are guilty of.
It’s on this point that the winding of the clock at the center of the movie speaks with particular force. Koichi is lying on the floor when his wife asks him to wind it, and she repeats her request before he sluggishly gets up to do it. If the clock had been allowed to stop, then – at least symbolically – the film would have contained a “bubble in time” like the one that Ozu’s The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice had built up to. In that extraordinary scene, besides the unusual circumstances that created the bubble, there were two clocks chiming midnight fifty-eight seconds apart, leaving the identity of the day itself momentarily ambiguous. The point of that film was that such “bubbles” or “wrinkles” in time are essential to life, allowing us to reset stagnant relationships or ways of thinking. When Koichi winds the clock, the newer film denies its characters this critical opportunity for renewal. As it happens, Michiko meets Miura in that same scene. If only the clock had stopped, the suspension of time might have created the occasion for them to come together while it was still possible.
Among all of Ozu’s films, The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice and An Autumn Afternoon are the least varied in their modes of time. Apart from the key “bubble of time” scene in the former, both are thoroughly forward-driven. Here there are no schoolchildren or grandparents to remind us of the cycles of life; nature and tradition are kept to a minimum; and the only water (Ozu’s usual marker for eternal time) is the steam at the factory. Eternity here is nothing but a word, quoted when the Gourd wallows in drunken shame:
“Make hay while the sun shines. Waste not your thoughts on eternity. Drain your glass ere life is gone.”
These lines express a common spirit of the modern world, an idea that time is always on the march, and that we must therefore seize it with a kind of desperation. By placing the words in the mouth of the Gourd, An Autumn Afternoon argues against them. It’s precisely because of this urgent rush to seize time, this disregard for the perspective that eternity gives us, this lack of variation in the flow of time, that we miss the most important opportunities.
CONNECTIONS:
Late Spring – Description of someone’s lower half of the face looking like someone else; likening of a wedding to a funeral; daughter agrees to an arranged marriage; bridegroom never seen
The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice – Focus on linear time to the exclusion of cyclical and eternal time
Rear Window – Hidden significance in a man winding a clock in a New York or Tokyo apartment while music wafts through the window
Good Morning – Prospective couple on the verge of boarding a train together
Late Autumn – Two appearances of trains; men in a restaurant teasing Toyo Takahashi about a husband with a beautiful wife dying early
The End of Summer – Idea of modernity being “late”; smoke rising near the end at a moment of loss
Red Desert – Smokestacks in opening shots; portrait of the modern world and its difficulties