Bittersweet in the Parenthood

A Short Review of Film An Autumn Afternoon

An Autumn Afternoon (1962), Yasujiro Ozu’s last film, which is also considered as his finest work, describes the generational split and the huge changes on social conventions in the postwar Japan. The whole film is about the protagonist, Hirayama, who has joined the army and becomes a successful business man after the World War II, tries to arrange a satisfying marriage for his daughter, Michiko.

Michiko has run the household for her father for many years, assumedly since her mother died. While the father remains widowed, Michiko barely thinks about marriage, so does Hirayama himself, at the very beginning of the film. After seeing his high school teacher and his daughter’s “miserable” life, Hirayama feels the necessity to let Michiko get married at a proper age.

Even though it’s a film about the marriage, the scene that Michiko accepts the marriage, the fiancé, the negotiations between the father and the daughter, and even the wedding scene, all of them haven’t been shown in the film. For the marriage, Yasujiro Ozu only gives viewers a glimpse of the bride in the traditional Japanese wedding dress, with a calm smile.

Contrasting with Michiko’s unemotional reaction, Hirayama’s chances depict the loneliness and emptiness that a father may have in his daughter’s wedding day. Without the stretching of a wedding ceremony, Hirayama’s transition is very concrete and concentrated.

Hirayama’s responses to the wedding remind me the plot in Boyhood (2014), the mother (Patricia Arquette), breaking down when she sees her son leaving her apartment for college. All of the love and dependence turn into pain and suffers. In the bar, the bartender asks Hirayama if he is back from a funeral, and he states “sort of”. Perhaps in his mind, he has just witnessed his family crumbled in pieces, like in one autumn afternoon, seeing the last warmth descending into the bitterly cold.