Japanese film directors: who do you think of? Akira Kurosawa? Quite a good guess, but not today. Takashi Miike? Another good guess, and Audition is one of my favorite films, but…
We’ll need to go back, like 1960s back, to another phenomenal director. An Autumn Afternoon is the last film directed by Yasujiro Ozu.
Here’s a little backstory on Ozu. He spent his life making films beginning in the 1930s. While critics liked them, he was not successful enough to get a pass when the country went to war, and was then drafted into infantry. It is said that during WWII, he was asked to make propaganda films, and spent most of his time watching confiscated American flicks, holding a particular favoritism for Citizen Kane.
When the wars were resolved, he went back to making the kind of films that would define him: family centered narratives typically involving the relationship between parents and their children, often with the overcoming of an absence. An Autumn Afternoon is no exception, focusing on a widowed father planning his daughter’s wedding in 1960s Japan. Ozu died in 1963, only a year after this film’s completion.
An Autumn Afternoon was added to the Criterion Collection this year.
