Sanma no Aji (An Autumn Afternoon)
I blame “Tokyo Story”. When I watched that movie years ago, I was unable to finish it because the stiffness of the characters bothered me so much. Nevertheless, I still blogged about it (unlike today where I make a point about not blogging movies I have not finished). Luckily it rarely happens to me that I find a film unwatchable (“Agora” comes to mind immediately), but in the case of “Tokyo Story” I was so blinded by its high acclaim that I believed Ozu was just not for me. When I think of “Ugetsu Monogatari” or other ‘most acclaimed’ films by a single filmmaker, I typically like the less acclaimed ones more. Sure, “To be or not to be” is my favorite Lubitsch (and perhaps favorite movie of all times), but for most of the great filmmakers that is probably the case. I prefer “Dr. Strangelove” over “2001”, “One Two Three” over “Some like it hot”, “Manhattan” over “Annie Hall”, “The Magnificent Ambersons” over “Citizen Kane”, “Stalker” over “Andrei Rublev”, “Wild Strawberries” over “Persona” and “Jules et Jim” over “Les 400 Coups”.
It took me a long time (and Shii’s insistence) to pick up Ozu’s films again. Even though I liked “Floating Weeds”, which I saw even before “Tokyo Story”, I was convinced that Ozu’s films were all politeness-heavy family dramas with no relevance to life and relentless whining of old people against the new generation. I thought that “Floating Weeds” was a pleasant comedic exception to all of that, with artists instead of bourgeois families as protagonists. Oh how wrong I was. Great comedy seems to be in all of Ozu’s films, he is just not exactly famous for that. (That is also the case for Dostoevsky and Chekhov, both of whom have written great comedic things and have wonderful humor.) Perhaps this is Ozu growing old, but there is a certain serenity in “An Autumn Afternoon” which I thoroughly enjoyed.
Ironically I noticed aforementioned serenity first when I saw “35 Rums”, an Ozu-like piece in which I was pleasantly surprised by the subtle relationships between the characters. It really made me want to revisit the artist who has done the ‘father has a hard time letting his daughter go’ so many times. I think that “An Autumn Afternoon” is a great iteration of that. The father goes through his change of heart in a very believable way, Michiko is pleasantly cute and all the other characters contribute to the development with friendly support. It is nice that the protagonist has a circle of friends (and thus a social life outside of his family) who also provide comedic relief. In this film, I enjoyed the oh-so-Japanese way the character talk and act around each other, because it was not there to hide thinly veiled disrespect and hatred as it does in so many other films.
I now feel much more ready to see Ozu’s other films… Maybe the original version of “Floating Weeds” is next.