Ozu's penchant for low angle, static camera shots and incisive depictions of intergenerational family drama are all here in abundance for the story of a Tokyo widower, Shūhei Hirayama (Chishū Ryū), who takes on the responsibility of finding a spouse for his unmarried daughter. The film comments directly on recent Japanese history, more than the usual Ozu film, including the use of Torys Bar as a place of remembrance and commemoration for those lost and usually direct pondering about what could have been if Japan had won World War II.
Part of Ozu's later period "New Salaryman" films, An Autumn Afternoon first ran internationally at festivals and in initial engagements as The Widower in February of 1963 and ultimately played major U.S. cities in June of 1964 alongside Akira Kurosawa's Scandal. It was later reissued in 1973 and became a staple of Ozu retrospectives, also shown in some markets as The Taste of Mackerel (the most literal translation of the Japanese title, Sanma no aji). In a press kit created to sell the film overseas, Ozu penned a brief statement about his own creative process and thoughts on his audience: "Three men are in this picture and one of them has a daughter of marrying age - as usual. I have always said that, just like the bean-curd maker, I concentrate on making bean-curd. No man can possibly make everything. And though all kinds of food are available at department store restaurants, one does not expect to get anything really good there. All my pictures may seem the same, but I try to create something new in every picture, just like the painter who paints the same rose over and over again, each time enriching his vision. What is more, there are too many films of late which can be enjoyed only by the young. Is it strange that I should feel that there is room for a film to be enjoyed by everyone? In this picture, you will not find any particularly new techniques aside from the fact that active 'acting' has been avoided. If laughing and crying are merely to be portrayed as they exist in filmed daily life, then monkeys in the zoo would make ideal performers. Actually, during joy or sorrow, there are always times when one keeps such emotions to oneself. If such is life, then in portraying it I would minimize such 'acting' in my films."
Immediate critical response noted how the film functioned as both a continuation of Ozu's style and a variation in terms of technique. For example, Newsweek noted, "In his earlier films, Ozu would cut away from his story to shots of the orderly Japanese countryside or the quiet, vast sea, placing his characters and their destiny within a larger and sustaining natural order. But, in this last film, those symbols of natural order have been supplanted by the squalid vistas of postwar Japan, corrupted by technology and Americanization. The women have shed their kimonos and docility in favor of a snappy shrewishness and an almost imperious demand for creature comforts; young couples hock their happiness to some installment plan in the first blush of mad consumerism; unmarried youth take on the loose-elbowed manners of their American counterparts. The new freedom of choice has produced chaos."
Subsequent scholarship has continued to draw lines between this film and Ozu's earlier work, particularly the marriage aspect including parallels between the daughter here versus in the earlier Late Spring (1949). "Generational conflict and resistance had always played a role in Ozu's films," writes Woojeong Joo in The Cinema of Yasujirô Ozu. "For example, Michiko in An Autumn Afternoon refuses an omiai offer just as Noriko in Late Spring did, but her reason is that she has her eye on someone else rather than her emotional attachment to her widower father... Marriage for the new generation is something 'natural' or even 'banal' that accords with one's desire but is barely related to the temporality of the parent generation." Likewise, David Bordwell noted Ozu's continuing experimentation with transitions, using segues (or lack thereof) more for emotional than narrative purposes, particularly the main Torys Bar sequence: "Through interpolated gags, parodies and misleading cues, a transition may deviate from that intrinsic norm of scene/transition/scene which forms a part of the viewer's assumptions in watching an Ozu film. There may be even sharper deviations when the transition challenges the spectator's ability to plot the scene's overall shape, or even to recognize the scene as distinct from the transitional passage."
In typical Ozu fashion, this film also closes with what has now been frequently termed an "empty coda," in this case that he not only scripted carefully but also storyboarded down to the finest camera placement. These unassuming but strangely evocative epilogues are not only a signature of his style but a summation of the thought that life goes on, something that certainly applies to the enduring nature of his films as well.
By Nathaniel Thompson
