These are Ozu? I want to add to this thread, but I haven’t seen these films yet! I just got Tokyo Story and I can’t wait to watch it.
These are my two favorite Ozu’s and I have seen the majority of them. I too was put in the same situation thinking they were the same actors. I never looked into though. Intresting to know they are not though. I have really enjoyed his technicolor films more than his black and white ones for some reason. I can’t decide if thats why I like one more than the other though.
I thought that Late Autumn was much more like Late Spring, in that you have a young adult who prefers to stay on with their elderly parent than get married, while everyone else in the film is trying to get that person to marry someone.
This is what I wrote about the films when I watched them. More a summary of events than a true review.
(1958) Equinox Flower
Ozu’s first color film. Beautiful. Another one of Ozu’s ‘marriage’ pictures, but this one is really more about the father than anything. For me, this film is fuller than the other Ozu pictures that I have seen, perhaps because of the smaller canvas than some of his previous films, even great films like “Late Spring”, but I feel there is more attention to all of the people from all walks of life. We see the janitor mopping the hallway, and I wonder who is he marrying? What about the men at the train-station in the beggining? Its funny watching Kondo act so nervous when he go’s out with his boss. Everything in this film is so true to life, and universal. When an innkeeper and friend of the family visits the Hirayama’s house and has to go to the bathroom, she notices a broom leaning against the wall in the hallway, and puts it back in its place. Its sounds silly, but its the little things that happen in Ozu’s films that set them apart.
The story itself, is one of Ozu’s better plots, and full of playful coniving, and a battle between youth and parental authority, and a woman’s right to choose who she marries, and being forced to do so more or less in secret. Setsuko’s father lets tells her that its ok to have boyfriends, but when she decides that she wants to marry a boyfriend, he is automatically opposed. Her mother will call the father on his inconsistencies, but it only makes him more angry. It will take time before he realises that he was wrong, and that Setsuko’s judgement was as good as he had raised her and she was capable of being responsible for her choices, and she was able at making good decisions. All of the characters have more than one side to them, and all of them grow. Hirayama gathers with some classmates at a reunion, and though they grow old, they recognise that in their children, they carry their dreams of youth with them forever.
One of the reasons that I liked this film so much is because of the different levels that it works on. ITs about the changing ideas of parental authority and young people’s rights to choose whom they should marry. Its also about marriage between the classes, as well as marrying for love. And the film has other subtext’s as well. Kiyoko is one of the strongest wives in all of Ozu(without being dominating like the wife in “Flavor of Green Tea over Rice”), while not disrepectful, she stands up to Hirayama in showing him when he is wrong. Ozu gives us so much here, and the ending, in some ways resolved, almost like Shakespeare, inderectly, though, but a happy ending-which is a little out of the norm for Ozu who usually has the more contemplative endings. Sometimes its good to have a happy ending every once in a while, just as sometimes in life, there are happy endings.
(1960) Late Autumn
Another ‘marriage picture’ by Ozu, and this time it is three old men coniving to marry off the daughter of an old friend. But, the girl’s mother is a widow and she doesn’t want to leave her mother alone, and has convinced herself that she prefers life with her mom to any kind of future life with a husband and children. We’ve seen this before in Ozu’s Late Spring, a much more potent film. This film is a little less heavy, and a little more humorous with a touch of ‘A comedy of errors’ thrown in. In the end this is a good film, typical Ozu, but there is nothing in it that makes it truly stand out for me above any of his other films. One that I will watch again someday, but not any time soon, this film is a little bit forgetable. Ps. I would like to make special mention of the colors in this filllm, which were just sumptuous, and the beautiful and sublime score.
Equinox Flower is probably my favorite Ozu film. As you can tell by how much I wrote about it, compared to Late Autumn which doesn’t make my top ten.
my top ten, although I still need to see some of his silents, I think “A Story of Floating Weeds” is the only silent I’ve seen so far.
Equinox Flower
Late Spring
Record of a Tenement Gentleman
Early Spring
Early Summer
The brothers and sisters of the Toda Family
Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice
The only son
Floating Weeds
Tokyo Twilight
Just to pipe in here — no, I haven’t seen the two movies under discussion. I got the Eclipse set for Christmas and I’m taking them slow. I’ve only seen two so far. I liked “Early Spring” so much I watched it twice. After the first viewing, I thought “Hey, this is a major work!” Second time, I thought “Eh, maybe not.” I thought Ozu was off his game in “Tokyo Twilight,” like maybe he’d watched a little too much Douglas Sirk and thought “I can do that.” He’s not the melodramatic type though, really, so I didn’t think it worked as well as his others.
Recently watched “Early Summer” and “Late Spring” again, both absolutely superb — masterpieces that just get better and better.
I also watched Wim Wenders’ “Tokyo-Ga,” which is quite interesting in parts. Wenders, quite the Ozu devotee — as anyone who has seen “In the Counrse of Time” can attest — visits Tokyo in honor of Ozu and to see if anything of Ozu’s world still exists. Of course, by that time (1985) Tokyo had turned into this great Western-influenced megalopolis which seems to bear little in common with the comparably more sedate, slower-paced world of Ozu’s films.
Of course, though, the fact that the setting of Ozu’s films has changed doesn’t mean that the films have changed — indeed, they are timeless, mainly because they are so interior, and because they touch on a variety of matters that never change: the sense of loss as you age, the growing sense of disappointment, the inability of people who are quite close to each other to communicate, the difficulty of expression overall.
Of particular note are the interviews with Ozu’s main actor, Chishu Ryu, and his cameraman Yuharu Atsuta, both of whom were completely devoted to Ozu and are overcome with tears at his memory. Ryu, who had the kind of adaptable body and face that allowed him to play both his own age and characters much older, doesn’t think much of himself as an actor. He recalls in particular one day where Ozu made him do the same scene repeatedly. Other actors, he thinks, caught on much better and much more easily.
Atsuta’s interview is remarkable. He spent virtually his entire career with Ozu, and when the director died he found it almost impossible to work for anyone else. He speaks of Ozu with great depth and reverence and feeling — to the point where he breaks into tears and turns the camera away. It was like a moment in an Ozu film.
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Kenny
So i’ve watched equinox flower here and I’ve finally watched Late Autumn. Both movies seem to take place in the same world, with the same actors playing the exact same characters.
when I checked it out on IMDB, it seems as if the characters had different names in both which I thought as odd seeing as even some of the locations were the same.
What do you think?
also Shin Saburi is becoming one of my favorite actors.
Can any one suggest any other films that feature him. thanks