Old Yorker

Sanma no aji

Yasujiro Ozu (1962)

An Autumn Afternoon centres on a widowed father and on the marriage of his daughter, who keeps house for him.   So do several other Yasujiro Ozu films, including the famous Late Spring (1949).    The programme note for the BFI screening of An Autumn Afternoon comprised an extract from Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema (1988) by David Bordwell, probably the best known Western writer on Japanese film.  Bordwell, who stresses the recurring themes and style of Ozu’s work, sees this, the director’s last film, as ‘another manifestation of an aesthetic system whose rigour, breadth of detail, and suppleness of variation give it a simplicity and richness unparalleled in the history of the cinema’.   The claim that Bordwell makes for Ozu’s work is huge but not eccentric:  he is widely revered as one of the greatest of all directors – and as a film-maker whose unchanging preoccupations and familiar technique are seen to enhance his standing.  The domestic and familial focus of Ozu’s films appeals to me (much more than the typical subjects of Akira Kurosawa) and An Autumn Afternoon is an interesting human drama – I preferred it to Tokyo Story, which is supposed to be Ozu’s masterpiece.  But I’m still puzzled as to why either of these films is so very highly rated.

Shuhei Hirayama (Chishu Ryu) is a city office worker (I assumed the story was set in Tokyo) and a father of three.  His daughter Michiko (Shima Iwashita), now twenty-four, is the middle child; her younger brother Kazuo (Shinichiro Mikami) also still lives at home.  The elder son Koichi (Keiji Sada) is married to Akiko (Mariko Okada) – a forthright young woman, not inclined to accept traditional female subservience in the home.  (She’s determined in her campaign for mod cons like a decent refrigerator and the so far childless couple practise birth control.)  The prospect of Michiko’s marriage sharpens her father’s awareness of losses he has already experienced.  A chance encounter with Sakamoto (Daisuke Kato), a younger man who served on the ship that he captained during World War II, takes Hirayama to a bar to which he later returns several times.  The name of the place is Tory’s Bar; labels on the bottles inside also bear English names and the woman (Kaiko Kishida) who runs the bar has a Westernised hairstyle and wardrobe; but she reminds Hirayama of his late wife and she’s happy to play for her customers a record of the patriotic ‘Battleship March’.  It’s Hirayama’s old school friend Shuzo Kawai (Nobuo Nakamura) who first advises him that Michiko should wed and suggests a suitable partner through an arranged marriage.  (I missed whether Kawai and his wife (Kuniko Miyaki) had female children and, if so, whether they were married.)  Hirayama isn’t at first inclined to agree but Kawai’s advice is given impetus through a school reunion, which includes not only Hirayama, Kawai and three other friends but also Sakuma (Eijiro Tono), their old Chinese classics teacher, nicknamed the Gourd, whom the other men haven’t seen since he taught them as teenagers.  Sakuma has too much to drink at the reunion dinner; when Hirayama and Kawai take him home, they discover that Sakuma now lives in a working-class area where, having fallen on hard times, he runs a noodle shop.  He shares his home with his spinster daughter Tomoko (Haruko Sugimura), who is now too old to be married.   Although the Gourd’s social decline may not, to a Western audience, be an obvious consequence of his failure to get his daughter married, a Japanese viewer may see (or have seen) this differently:  perhaps because Sakuma is left with no one but his single daughter he’s deprived himself of an extended family and closed off the possibilities of them providing him with material comforts in his old age.   (If not, I didn’t understand why Hirayama was so strongly affected by the Gourd’s situation.)

One of the strongest moments in An Autumn Afternoon occurs when, in Tory’s Bar, Sakamoto regrets the outcome of World War II and the Americanisation of Japanese society; he muses on how things would have been if Japan had won, imagines New Yorkers playing the samisen as they chew gum.   ‘Perhaps it’s as well we lost’, Hirayama drily replies.  (The moment is strong because it suggests that Hirayama’s regret for the past is more nuanced and self-aware than you’d realised.)  Although the story of An Autumn Afternoon might not easily translate to an American setting either, some of its themes could conceivably have been used by an American or European film-maker:  nostalgia for a youth that included a happy marriage and the purposefulness of military action; selfish determination to preserve domestic routine in the face of advancing age and otherwise irresistible change.  You know, however, that if an American drama of the early 1960s had addressed themes of this kind, it would likely have been considered obvious, however artfully the themes were realised, by some of the cinephiles who do homage to Ozu.   Why is this?  Perhaps it has something to do with the definite conventions of Japanese domestic and social life (or, at least, the impression of them that Western audiences get from Japanese cinema).  Perhaps the complex quality of these conventions persuades Westerners that Ozu’s dramatic exploration of them is correspondingly rich:  not only are the conventions fascinatingly different; their formality and salience, almost paradoxically, may help to convince a Western eye that the director’s treatment of them is not obvious.  And perhaps it’s not surprising that Ozu’s idiosyncratic camera style – the lack of movement, the ‘tatami’ level of the viewpoint – is considered great artistry:  it goes with the set patterns of the world that he typically describes.

Audible appreciation isn’t the only kind but the biggest laughs in NFT3 during An Autumn Afternon came when the Gourd keeled over drunk and when Hirayama and Kawai joked with their friend Horie (Ryuji Kita), who’s recently married a much younger woman (Michiyo Kan), about his taking tablets to keep up with her in bed.  I’m not sure I see the difference between finding things like this funny in Ozu and in a Carry On film.  Attempts to marry Michiko to Koichi’s work colleague Miura (Teruo Yoshida), whom Michiko finds attractive, fail when it turns out he’s already engaged; a little later, Hirayama himself is on the receiving end of ribbing by his friends as Kawai and Horie pretend that the next candidate – the one originally recommended by Kawai – is also now spoken for, thanks to Hirayama’s procrastination.   I wasn’t clear of the story’s timeframe but it didn’t seem to me that Hirayama, although he’s troubled by the prospect (and, eventually, by the fact) of his daughter’s marriage, kept trying to delay things.  Besides, Michiko herself has mixed feelings about leaving the family home.  I was unsure too how seriously the viewer was meant to take Hirayama’s fears of loneliness, particularly in view of the Gourd’s circumstances, which Hirayama appears to see as a fate worse than the loss of a daughter-housekeeper.  I suppose I took it that Hirayama’s apprehension of loneliness was, like his nostalgia, ambivalent.

In spite of occasional suggestions made by characters in the film that the Japan they think they remember is disappearing, Ozu doesn’t appear to share their concerns about Americanisation.  I had thought that Koichi’s desire for a set of golf clubs and Kawai’s plans to attend a baseball match implied otherwise but it turns out that both sports were well established in Japan long before the post-World War II period of American occupation.  The domestic appliances that Akiko envies in a neighbour’s apartment – the fridge, the vacuum cleaner, the television – are a broader comment on contemporary consumerism.   At one point, Akiko brings back hamburgers, to add to a supper that  her husband has started preparing, but Japanese cuisine dominates in a film that contains a good deal of eating and even more drinking.  The original title means ‘The Taste of Mackerel Pike’.  (I assume this is a reference to the fish that the Gourd particularly enjoys at the reunion with his ex-students although the subtitles on the film that I watched referred to ‘perch’.)   The fact that its English title links the film much more closely to earlier ones by Ozu – in chronological order of release: Late Spring, Early Summer, Early Spring, Late Autumn, The End of Summer – seems to suggest a desire in the West to take every opportunity to unify his oeuvre.

As Hirayama, the Ozu regular Chishu Ryu is a strong and very likeable presence who holds the film together.   At least, I found him so once I’d learned how to read his facial expressions – I never managed to put these expressions and Ryu’s reading of lines together and the same was true of virtually all the other members of the cast.  Although my knowledge of present day Japanese cinema hardly extends beyond the work of Hirokazu Kore-eda, I’ve now seen enough of the latter’s films to know that I can make sense of what the actors in them are doing.   This naturally prompts two questions.  Is the acting style in Ozu films outdated?  Is the playing in Kore-eda’s films an illustration of how another Japanese tradition has become Westernised?   If the answer to the second question is yes, I must admit to finding this the acceptable face – and voice – of cultural imperialism.

16 May 2014