One Last Trip Together: Ozu's Late Autumn

October 25, 2007

Late Autumn is a late film for Ozu. It was released in 1960 (his third from final film) and bears close resemblance to two of his previous films. The chief visual debt is to Equinox Flower (1958). Late Autumn returns to many of the same sets and employs pretty much the same cast as that slightly earlier work. I was uncomfortable with the amount of set borrowing; I kept getting the feeling I was in the earlier film. The debt to Late Spring (1949) is more in terms of plot than visual appearance. In that earlier film a daughter is devoted to her father and tries to avoid getting married. The father and daughter take a final trip together and he urges her to get married even though he himself will stay single. This is almost exactly the plot of Late Autumn except for the fact that this time we are dealing with a mother and daughter. The two take a final trip and the daughter learns that her mother will not be getting re-married.

This notion of a final trip is an important scene-type in Ozu. There is a pervasive sense in his films that the pattern of life is always shifting and thus life is filled with last trips. After such a trip people die (Tokyo Story) or get married (Late Spring) or move on to another city (Floating Weeds). Late Autumn comes with a particularly affecting depiction of a last trip. It is set in some kind of hostel that is crammed with school age girls:

This setting will get woven onto the mother-daughter conversation that closes the drama of the film. The joy associated with a passing and ephemeral school experience is likened to the mother-daughter relationship as a whole.

It is at this point that we learn the mother will not be getting re-married. She will remain true to her dead husband, who she feels was enough for her. The position taken by the mother is reminiscent of "The Altar of the Dead" by Henry James.. the past is a presence that will not allow her to embrace a new love.

This brief, and for the daughter disappointing, conversation ends the night. Ozu then gives us a bright morning scene with the school children. The group photograph is an oddly moving film device (it also gets used to good effect in Early Spring). The image of a moment in time captured by a photographer brings to mind the transient nature of life. We know.. even if those schoolgirls do not.. that this is a moment they will never quite have again.

The morning finds the mother (the wonderful Setsuko Hara) recalling the time they spent together as a family in this spot during the war. The father was then alive.. and the mother emphasizes what a good father he was. This opens for us yet another spot of time. We already have a parallel between the school children at camp and the mother-daughter trip.. but now we have a third experience mixed in.. this one a memory of another time.

This memory inevitably strengthens our sense that life is always passing.. that it is filled with last trips. Soon the voices of the mother and daughter grow silent and the chorus of school kids drifts in the window:

Autumn leaves in every hue of yellow and red
float down the stream woven like brocade.

And that could well be a description of time as understood by Ozu. His films are a parade of partings. Life takes a shape only to break apart a little later. His "last trips" of various kinds are perhaps the scene type that is most representative of his work.