A variant of the earlier Late Spring, which features the hallowed and iconic actress, Setsuko Hara, alongside the mainstay of its director, Chishû Ryû, An Autumn Afternoon still has its own unique claim to individuality, and it is no less moving than its predecessor. If I had to choose between them (a difficult choice since both are moving masterpieces) I would watch An Autumn Afternoon, saving Late Spring for a later date; the former is to me more contemplative than the latter, and dissipates more the headlong feeling of the daily rush of life, exemplifying the fine sensibility and artistry of Yasujirô Ozu.
This film reaches a pinnacle of the observed, poignant passing of time, watching all its characters, primary and secondary alike, with a peculiar fondness for their foibles and mistakes, and their conflicted groping toward that same ennobled resignation that wafts from all the films of this director like the scent of flowers in the morning, on a windy sunlit spring day. An Autumn Afternoon watches not only its father-daughter relationship (in which the father is featured more than the daughter, in contrast with Late Spring), but that of the son and his wife, working through a conflict over some golf clubs; the inside jokes of those friends with whom Shuhei eats his meals, drawn out over drinking bouts and world-weary laughter; the hopeless sorrow of an older daughter, a spinster-in-the-making, as she watches her father drunkenly splutter on a stool in their desolate noodle shop, devoid of all customers in the night; the brief moments on a station platform before the train comes in with its screaming pistons, its whistle sounding like an excitable animal.
These moments, as well as the so-called “pillow shots” common to the Ozu film, fill up An Autumn Afternoon with the indulgent observation of the passing of time, making it a supreme example of his art and his undeniable (if conservative) wisdom. These “pillow shots” are so-called, as I have realized, not because they are defective in themselves, but because that phrase is a misnomer, making it seem as though the exterior cutaways between scenes were the padding of the story; but they are not padding at all—they are integral to the entire aesthetic of the film, inseparable from the fond observation of the passing of time to which the characters, like the signs and symbols of industrialization contained in this film, are beholden as the small moving and beating hearts of an existence greater than they are. No one escapes, no one is saved, no one surmounts living itself. But couldn’t all this conservative fatalism have been nonetheless worthwhile?
