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esteeb.art · @esteeb.art@bridge.neodb.net

Rated Late Autumn 8/10

<strong>LSC 10 Week 11: The Four Seasons Week<strong> Yasujiro Ozu remains the undisputed king of making movies that make you want to call your mother. Easily the most delicate, thoughtful and melancholic screwball comedy in cinema history. Late Autumn is about 3 older men, friends from their youth, who try to fix up Ayako, the daughter of their recently departed friend, before she suffers the terrible fate of becoming an old maid. When Ayako proves to be unwilling to marry, the guys come to the genius conclusion that if they marry off her widowed mother, Ayako will follow suit. Thus a series of schemes and misunderstandings ensue that serve as fuel for both hilarity and sorrow in true Ozu fashion. It’s strange to me that watching Ozu sort of forces you to engage with the material on his terms rather than your own. He breaks with so much conventional (see: Hollywood) wisdom when it comes to presenting his subjects. He has this way of playing back and forth between two modes that sort of feed into one another and clash in really fun ways. The first is detachment. The camera lingers in these liminal spaces, hallways, empty rooms looking into other empty rooms. It was to the point that the first scenes, set in a funeral parlor, felt like you were watching the inciting incidents through the eyes of the dead man himself. It’s from this vantage we get to see the characters at their most flawed and human, it’s when they talk shit, when they lie, when they scheme and are selfish but they do it in a way that is somehow relatable and funny and sad. It’s all very human, low stakes stuff happening but it presented with an unembellished and, more importantly, deceptively nonjudgmental lens. As if Ozu is sort of presenting you with the reality of the situation and daring you to relate to it. He’s practically begging you ask yourself who YOU are in this situation or how you would react. How you feel about it is between you and you. But then he’ll hit you with the other mode: emersion. He takes that question of “who are you in this story right now?” and literally puts you in the POV of the two characters having a conversation. Each taking turns looking directly into the camera as they converse. It’s in these moments that Ozu confronts you with how the words being said effect the people saying them. He’s asking you to look at them and try to suss out their inner thoughts for yourself. Do you believe them? Why would they be lying to themselves or others in this moment and what does it say about them if they are? Plus you are forced to confront the conversation as if it is happening to you. It’s a really effective and intimate way to present conversation and you feel like you learn so much about the characters this way. A particularly well utilized performance in this mode was from the widow Akiko, played masterfully by frequent Ozu collaborator Setsuko Hara. Most of her dialogue is filmed looking directly into camera and it happens that she is the one whose situation drives most of the plot without her having much say in the matter. People scheme about her life and talk about her like she’s not there even when she’s in the room. But when she gets to say her piece about anything she’s looking right at you. Then you can’t help but notice the strain behind her smile, like there was a moment where I thought this woman looks like she hasn’t been allowed to show a genuine emotion to anyone besides the man she married, if that. There’s this sadness but quiet dignity to the character that is really something beautiful to experience. But all of the performances in this film are so multilayered and interesting. Especially how they lend to the interplay between the generational divide on display in the film. Akiko’s daughter Ayako is presented as stubborn, set in her ways, and wise. She goes out of her way to ignore the schemes of the older men trying to live vicariously through the guys they try to set her up with, but ends up falling for one of them anyway. But the film goes out of it’s way to show that she is doing this on her own terms, through the performace you really get the sense that Ayako is wiser and more emotionally mature than most of the older characters in the film. The same could be said about her work friend Yukiko, who sort of swoops in and steals the movie in the third act as the cutest fixer you ever saw. She brims with confidence and has this sly savvy to her that just had me grinning every time you see her get one over on the older men. Ozu is a director that always makes you think about simple, minimal compositions in deep space, frames within frames, thousand yard stares and quietly hurt feelings. Late Autumn has all this, lots of it, and it’s beautiful and tender as you would expect. But he always takes me off guard with how funny he can be. There’s a bite to his jokes, sure, but there are jokes, largely at the expense of our 3 busybody gentlemen as they reveal themselves to not be much more than teenagers with wrinkles. The jokes serve as a way to admit the universality of some of the emotions here as much as the sorrow. Because, ultimately, Late Autumn is a meditation on the passing of one stage of life to another. It’s all very low stakes but it’s also the most important stuff most of us will have to deal with. The highs and the lows of moving from the roles we play everyday, from wife to widow, daughter to wife, friends to lovers, and the people and places we have to leave behind with those roles. Like I said...by the end you really feel like you need to call your mom.

#lsc10 #lsc10 week11 #movie

Published 2024-12-01 00:00 UTC · bridged from Atmosphere