The Taste of Sanma

I've got enough movies on my DVR that I'm in danger of not getting around to some of them before they get deleted, since YouTube TV only keeps stuff on your DVR for nine months, in exchange for a theoretically unlimited DVR. In fact, I think I've got quite a few foreign films recorded that I've needed to get around to watching, so there are going to be several posts that I wrote up quite some time before scheduling them to show up on the blog; it's not as if I want four or five posts in a row on Japanese films, for example. First up is director Yasujiro Ozu's final film, An Autumn Afternoon.

It's the early 1960s, and Shuhei (given name) Hirayama (Chishu Ryu) works in an office where he has a couple of young women working under him. This is the era when it still wasn't a certain thing that a woman would keep working when she got married, and one of his secretaries informs him that another one is about to get married, at the age of 23 or 24. That age thing is also important, because it's still apparently a time in Japanese society when if a woman doesn't get married before a certain age, she's going to be fated to be a spinster.

And, in fact, Mr. Hirayama has just such a daughter himself, Michiko. She's been helping take care of Dad largely because he's a widower, having lost his wife quite a few years back, presumably during one of the American bombing raids in World War II. Michiko doesn't have such strong memories of Mom, similar to her kid brother Kazuo. On the other hand, they have an older brother, Koichi, who is already married to Akiko.

After the opening scene with Mr. Hirayama at the office, the action cuts to a baseball game, which is in part a way to show that Japanese society is changing, what with the American occupation after the war and all the cultural influences that brought. We then cut from exterior shots of the stadium to the game being shown on television at a bar, followed by Hirayama and some of his old friends from his school days. There's some talk about the younger generation, and people getting married off or not getting married off.

Hirayama has regular meetings with his old school friends, and at one of them, a surprise face shows up: one of their former teachers, Sakuma. Sakuma didn't have the greatest fate in life, but in one key area he has something of not in common with Harayama: he's got an adult daughter taking care of him, who is also under threat of becoming a spinster. The sets Hirayama to thinking that he has to marry his own daughter off before she gets old enough that Japanese society no longer considers her marriageable.

An Autumn Afternoon is in many ways a slice of life movie, although I certainly wouldn't say it's plotless. It's more that the look at the life of its characters is more that than a decided story arc. It also has a leisurely pace -- but in the case of a movie like An Autumn Afternoon, that's something that actually works. The movie also does something that I've increasingly found myself liking in foreign films, which is crossing cultural boundaries and not being pretentious arthouse stuff. A lot of the themes here are things you could easily see being done in Hollywood films or movies from other countries, although obviously not quite the same way since there is Japanese-specific stuff.

But suffice it to say that An Autumn Afternoon is definitely a winner, and one that deserves to be watched.