Late Autumn and the Great Yasujiro Ozu

Yasujiro Ozu might be cinema’s greatest practical humanist. The great Japanese director made a career out of shomin-geki films, a genre centered on the ordinary lives of ordinary people—and he did so with a complete vision of the power of human connection. For Ozu the man, that understanding likely never came from a romantic partner: he died a bachelor, living with his mother until her death (just two years before his own). With films that frequently concern the disintegration of love in marriage, the reconciliation of families post-affairs, and the bidding-war process of potential partners, it comes as a great surprise that the great director of marriage on film never married.

In Late Autumn, as in every other Ozu film I’ve seen, his approach to life is markedly humanist. The young and desired Ayako (Yoko Tsukasa) realizes that to marry is to leave her widowed mother, Akiko (Setsuko Hara). Three creepy and occasionally misogynistic men who knew her father scheme to marry her off the daughter (and eventually the mother) as Ayako begins to voice a new philosophy of love: what if it wasn’t one and the same with marriage?

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