An Autumn Afternoon (1962)

I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much

Good start, but then it gets ruined

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

An aging widower arranges a marriage for his only daughter.This was the final film of Ozu, who had been making great cinema for decades. His 1930s silent crime dramas are excellent, and everything after is worth a watch. For his final film, it gets a bit more modern. We have a young woman who really is not all that interested in getting married. How can it be that finding a suitable husband is not the first thing on hr mind? The framing and colors are excellent, and very much evoke the best of the 1960s. How Japan was different from other places at the time I do not know, but in some ways the worlds do not seem far apart. This could take place at an American office in the 50s or 60s. Well, without the bowing, anyway.

The success of this blend of the high and the low owes almost all to the marvelous screenplays Ozu scripted with his co-writer, Kogo Noda. The cinematography by Yuharu Atsuta is unobtrusive as ever, in the ozu style. And equally backgrounded are the musical interludes of Kojun Saito. The DVD is soon to be released by The Criterion Collection, and while it is comparatively light on extra features- vis-à-vis other Criterion releases, as well as others of Ozu by Criterion, there is a good deal of quality in the extras. There is the requisite theatrical trailer, and booklet essays by film critic Geoff Andrew and ubiquitous Japanese film scholar Donald Ritchie. I would have expected Ritchie to provide the audio film commentary track, but, instead, that task is assigned to another Japanese film scholar, David Bordwell. Bordwell has always been hit and miss as a film critic, and his few audio commentaries reflect that fact. But, this time he's pretty good, albeit not as natural as Ritchie- a veteran DVD commenter- is. Bordwell is solid, not too didactic, specific to scenes, but a little stiff. He never conveys that he's stuck to his script, but he never really loosens up and gives the percipient the sense that he really is into the total film experience, either. As stated, good, but not great. Perhaps the best point he makes- and it is one I echo, is that Ozu is not a director concerned with character motivations. He is, in essence, the Method Actor's nightmare. Instead, Ozu is a maven of Behaviorist Cinema. What his characters do is more important than what they think or voice. This is why we often get deliberate shots of his characters (In this and other films) from behind. Ozu wants the viewer to imagine what they are feeling, from the situation presented, not from how many tears they shed, nor how wide their smile. Finally, there are selections from Yasujiro Ozu And The Taste of Sake, a 1978 French television show looking examining Ozu's career, and featuring French film critics Michel Ciment and Georges Perec. On the negative side is the fact that Criterions bland, white subtitles are often lost on screen, in brighter scenes- a problem that is not as bad as in black and white films, but when will Criterion get a clue- colored subtitles, and ones with borders, are a must; especially sans an English language dubbed track. The film is shown in a 1.33:1 aspect ratio.An Autumn Afternoon is a great film, but it is not a great film that is garish in its depth and breadth. It does not tackle grand themes, nor does it blow the viewer away with magnificent vistas. Instead, it is a small, perfect gem of a film that distills the human essence into less than two hours of experience that moves one to laugh and inhale deeply. And if one does not think that such a feat as that is something, and something great, then one simply does not understand art.

This Japanese film featured in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die,I didn't know anything about it other than that fact, and seeing that many films in the book have turned out great choices I was looking forward to it. Basically ageing widower Shuhei Hirayama (Chishû Ryû) with married thirty two year old son Koichi (Keiji Sada), and two unmarried daughters, twenty four year old Michiko (Shima Iwashita) and twenty one year old Kazuo (Shin'ichirô Mikami). Hirayama has regular reunions, filled with reminiscing of old times and banter, with his five middle-school classmates, Shuzo Kawai (Nobuo Nakamura), Shin Horie (Ryûji Kita), Dousousei Sugai (Tsûsai Sugawara), Dousousei Watanabe (Masao Oda) and Nakanishi at the Wakamatsu (Young Pine) restaurant. One of their reunions they are also joined by their old Chinese classics teacher Sakuma, nicknamed the 'Gourd' (Eijirô Tôno), who ends up very drunk, and needing Hirayama and Kawai to take him home, he has been living with problems, and they get to meet his middle aged daughter Tomoko (Haruko Sugimura) who missed an opportunity to marry. The teacher's former pupils give him some money to help him, and next we see Hirayama being recognised and taken to the favourite bar of small local car-repair shop owner Yoshitaro Sakamoto (Daisuke Kato), the owner there Kaoru (Kyoko Kishida) resembles his dead wife. In the bar the patriotic military song 'The Battleship March' is played for Sakamoto, and when Hirayama comes back to the bar it is played again, and after he gives 50,000 yen to his son. Koichi says he is planning to buy a new refrigerator, and the extra money he buys himself some second hand golf clubs, which his wife Akiko (Mariko Okada) isn't best happy with, him indulging on himself and not treating her. Hirayama recognises his selfishness keeping daughter Michiko home to look after him, after seeing the life of the Gourd, so he arranges a marriage for her, and he is keen for Yutaka Miura (Teruo Yoshida), who is keen on, to be the groom, but he is already taken. After having her moment of sadness, she agrees to attend a matchmaking session, but time passes and there has been a wedding, but we never see the ceremony or the man Michiko married, only father Hirayama coming home from a drinking night with his friends, and contemplating that he will be alone. Also starring Kuniko Miyake as Nobuko Kawai. Ryû gives a fond performance as the old father who tries to carry on with life despite losing his wife, there is no plot as such, it is simply seeing life through the experiences of the widow and his family, but has clever things in it, such as low camera angles, so you can explore the scenarios the characters are in, it is a nice gentle story of natural humanity, a most watchable drama. Very good!

This was one of the first Ozu films I saw, and is one of my favorites. Ozu's themes - a family adjusts uneasily to the rapidly shifting traditions of life in middle-class, postwar Japan - are handled with great subtlety, and many dark ironies are to be found beneath the fragile quietude at this film's surface. This isn't just applicable to Japan, and this realization gives this film a sad sting that stuck with me long after the movie was over. Ozu's famous 'look' - no closeups, no crane shots, a still camera fixed at 3 1/2 feet off the floor or ground also gives this film an unforgettable grace and beauty. DVD please???