Late Autumn
1960, directed by Yasujiro Ozu
Late Autumn opens with two shots of Tokyo Tower. In the first, the structure is partly obscured by hanging tree branches. In the second, it rises behind some foliage. Under normal circumstances it would sound suspiciously overanalytical to read sexual content into these images, but there’s clear precedent in Ozu’s work. The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice (1952) inserts successive shots of a phallic water tower and a bushy tree to punctuate a married couple’s reconciliation at the moment when they would logically be united in bed. Ozu’s films are so thoroughly coded that it should not be a stretch to infer, from the trees and the tower, at least a contrast between feminine and masculine – which absolutely holds up in Late Autumn.
The plot of Late Autumn resembles Late Spring: a daughter in her late twenties who would rather stay with her widowed parent than get married; a conspiracy (abandoned upon its success) to soften her resolve by marrying off the parent; a sassy modern girlfriend who promises to visit the lonely parent from time to time; a formal ceremony in the opening scene; and a last parent-child trip right before the wedding. The emotional force of the parallels hits at the end, when Setsuko Hara’s character finds herself in almost exactly the same position she had left her father in at the end of Late Spring, meditatively facing the future in a newly childless home. The recurrence of such a similar destiny in successive generations is important, but so is the contrast between male and female. As is usual for a remake, the differences speak louder than the similarities.
Although the endings are too similar to be emotionally opposite, the differences in the acting and the closing shots reveal why Ozu must have felt it worthwhile to tell the same story again. As Chishu Ryu peels an apple at the end of Late Spring, his face tightens and his head droops. In Late Autumn, Setsuko Hara’s character Akiko smiles faintly in her last shot. She had already peeled an apple days earlier, a gift of hospitality for Mr. Taguchi. Her resilience and her selflessness suggest a superior ability to face a disappointing future, but the difference between the final shots says even more.
Late Spring ends with a twenty-five second shot of waves rolling onto a beach, presumably near Professor Somiya’s home in Kamakura. In Ozu’s cinematic code, images of nature – and water in particular – are connected with a sense of eternity, an all-encompassing perspective on time different from the linear time of clocks, calendars, or train schedules, and different from the cyclical turnover of generations, or from the perpetual interplay between tradition and modernity. The last shot of Late Spring connotes a reconciliation toward the omnipresent forces of change that must have been strongly felt in a war-ravaged nation entering a new era. The ocean is not visible from the professor’s home, but the shot is meant for the audience, the waves taking us beyond the limited human view of time.
How strange, then, for Late Autumn to cut away from Akiko to something so mundane as the hallway of her apartment building. Why would Ozu forgo the poetry of his earlier ending? The answer is in plain sight if we ask how a corridor fits into Ozu’s code. The director evidently loved to shoot corridors, often looking straight up the stem of a T-shaped passage, with people usually passing at the far end. These corridors almost always mark transitions between scenes, much like his famous “pillow shots” of outdoor details. It’s natural that a corridor would express transition, because that’s what it does in real life as well. People spend most of their indoor lives in rooms, using hallways only to get from one room to another. The insinuation here is that Akiko understands, better than the professor in Late Spring, that her situation is simply a transition to some other unknown state. Her faith in life shields her from the overbearing melancholy that Chishu Ryu’s character had displayed.
If Akiko represents a resilient feminine outlook, the masculine perspective is embodied in the trio of middle-aged men – Mamiya, Taguchi, and Hirayama – who scheme to get her and her daughter married. Like the Three Stooges they bungle almost everything. Although Ayako ends up marrying Mr. Mamiya’s employee Goto, she only dates the young man after a mutual friend re-introduces them. The film opens at the reception for Akiko’s husband’s memorial service, and the three men start off talking about steak. Soon, in counterpoint to their machismo, Chishu Ryu comes in playing Akiko’s brother-in-law, a mountain innkeeper who gives away pickled vegetables. After the service, the two women and three leading men gather for drinks. When the women leave, the conversation slips into locker room talk as the men rib the waitress with questions about her husband’s health, testing their theory that husbands of beautiful women die early. The exchange is almost identical to one at the same point in Ozu’s Equinox Flower, with the same cast of three men and Toyo Takahashi again playing the waitress.
In Equinox Flower, the men’s theory had to do with the relative strengths of wives and husbands, depending on whether they produced daughters or sons. Here the stakes are longevity instead of strength – in other words, how much time a man has left. Ozu’s films do not necessarily demand to be viewed as commentaries on time, but they always pay dividends when they’re framed that way. The contrast between feminine and masculine in Late Autumn is also a contrast between two ways of looking at time. The three men’s concern with longevity, and their intrusive rush to see Ayako married, describes a sort of commodification of time. The masculine view treats time as a quantity, the feminine as a process. Akiko is able to smile at the end because she’s thinking of the transition rather than her loss.
Trains – a key signifier of time in Ozu’s films – appear only twice in Late Autumn, in two nearly identical shots from the roof terrace of a Tokyo office. The first time Ayako and Yuriko watch intently, disappointed when their newlywed friend fails to wave a bouquet from the window as planned. “People grow apart over time,” Ayako says. “Then marriage is the worst,” Yuriko replies. “Are men like that too?” The second time Ayako watches alone, momentarily angry at both her mother and Yuriko. Her awareness of time’s power to separate close relationships is consistent with the more feminine view of time as a process. The same rooftop vantage point appears a third time when Yuriko tells Sugiyama how Ayako made up with her mother, and the two of them plan a second hiking trip. There’s no train visible this time, but the frequency of trains nearby has been established, so that the idea of time hovers in the background as we hear of its power to bridge relationships as well.
To call a broader perspective on time “feminine” is not to say that it’s unavailable to men. Ayako’s uncle Shukichi (Chishu Ryu) appears to be in tune with the more qualitative attitude toward time, as does her fiancé Goto. Right after the second train, Ayako meets Goto for lunch, and he tells her how he regrets his past quarrels with his dead mother. The passage is a reformulation of Ryu’s famous line in Tokyo Story: “If I had known it would come to this, I would have been kinder to her while she was alive,” and it facilitates Ayako’s reconciliation with her mother. The wisdom comes from a male character, but to be precise about it, he gained it from his mother.
While Late Autumn stands well enough on its own, the comparison to Late Spring can help us to define its particular argument about time. The prevailing contrast in the earlier film was between tradition and modernity, and Tokyo represented a modern, forward-looking world in contrast to Kamakura and Kyoto. Tokyo was introduced there with shots of the Wako clock tower, linking the city to advancing time. Here, Tokyo is a more dominant location, and modernity is taken for granted. No shots of clock towers are necessary, but the mother and daughter casually mention the Wako department store in their meeting plans. Instead of stressing the gap between old and new Japan, modernity here is contrasted with nature. The young generation goes hiking in the mountains to celebrate an upcoming wedding, and they plan a second hiking party for Ayako and Goto. Instead of traveling to historic Kyoto before her marriage like Noriko and her father in Late Spring, Ayako and her mother stay at her uncle’s mountain lodge. The day after Mr. Hirayama changes his mind about marrying Akiko, nature shows its power to penetrate the shell of masculine resolve when he speaks of an earthquake the previous night.
The earthquake, the corridors, the trains, and most signifiers of time in Late Autumn describe time in terms of flux, taking the more feminine point of view. Two formal ceremonies representing death and marriage bracket the film, each set off from the story by shots of a bridge – a sign of transition – each paired with a framed picture of another bridge in the restaurant. This idea of flux is not some insistent definition of time; rather it allows for variations in the experience of time itself, bending to make room for the various modes of time that humans experience. Images of clocks, trains, and modernity show linear time, and pairings between generations (including Akiko and Ayako, or the grandmother and small child on the temple steps) show cyclical time. Instead of leaving us with a restful picture of eternal time the way Late Spring does, Late Autumn inserts images of nature and water (a wave display at a restaurant, and a lake by the uncle’s inn) at moments of togetherness, weaving eternity into the flow of life.
CONNECTIONS:
Late Spring – Story of a daughter who finally agrees to be married; conspiracy to marry off the single parent; daughter’s outspoken girlfriend pays devotion to parent in the penultimate scene; valedictory excursion right before the wedding; opening at a formal ceremony; insertion or allusion to the Wako clock tower; peeling an apple; parent left sitting alone at home at the end
The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice – Juxtaposition of a tower and foliage, representing male and female
Tokyo Story – Expressed wish that a character had been kinder to a loved one while she was alive
Equinox Flower – Formal ceremony in the opening scene, followed by three middle-aged men ribbing a waitress (played by the same cast) about a superstition governing husbands and wives; story of a young woman getting married; scene at a golf course; multiple scenes of Shin Saburi at an almost identical office
Good Morning – Opening shot of a lattice tower, show only in part