Laikals The greatest movie ever made..!

SpecialsTarget Disturbing yet enthralling

Lancoor A very feeble attempt at affirmatie action

Ariella Broughton It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

samhill5215 Of Ozu's trilogy on marriage Japanese style this one is my favorite. In fact many of my comments apply to the other two, Late Spring (1949) and Early Summer (1951). All three deal with the concept of marriage as seen in traditional Japanese society and even though to my western eyes it seems antiquated, Ozu manages to present it as a sensible, inherently logical way to pair two people. But what ultimately attracts me to his work is his presentation. The plot unfolds in a slow, languorous way. It's linear but with gaps in time which are fully explained so that we are not left guessing as to intervening events. What we see and hear is the important stuff. We, in essence, are eavesdropping on intimate family conversations, the kind of things discussed at every dinner table, things important to a family but more or less irrelevant to the outside world. Somehow Ozu makes that interesting. Naturally the actors play an important part and the presence of two of my favorite Japanese actors, Setsuko Hara and Chisu Ryu, in all three are a definite plus. So why is this one my favorite? Humor and lots of it. The first two are rather serious, drama-filled works where the characters exhibit much angst. Late Autumn on the other hand is light and airy, there's a bounce to it, and it's filled with a lot of sexual innuendo that is completely absent from the others. It's as if Ozu was saying to us that the post-WWII years was a time for Japan to buckle down to the serious work of rebuilding society. By 1960 the joy of living had returned to his country. It could afford the bumbling of three well-meaning and occasionally lecherous men whose efforts at match-making were only half successful.

theskulI42 Well, it was bound to happen eventually: The more films I viewed from noted Japanese auteur Yasujiro Ozu, there was going to come a time when my well of interest ran dry. I have now seen ten of his films, and Ozu seems unique among filmmakers, even the most praised, by being essentially the anti-Billy Wilder. Where Wilder's mind was so brilliantly scattered that he did pictures in nearly every conceivable genre, and did them well, Ozu was always more interested in mining different stories out of the same cloth, hopping from patch to patch on a quilt of nuanced familial drama. Where Wilder branched out, Ozu dug his roots in deep. He had an exclusive stable of actors, comprising some of the most talented and, like their helmsman, subtly versatile actors in the business, including the transcendent Chishu Ryu and the great Sestuko Hara, appearing here as the mother to the always-adorable Yoko Tsukasa, essaying the role that Hara herself brought to life in Late Spring. Ryu has the remarkable ability to present to us a man of any age with very little in the way of physical alterations (in the span of five years, he played father, brother and grandfather to Hara and was utterly convincing in all). Hara has the exact opposite gift: That of an ageless wonder. Early on in Late Autumn, a comment is made that Hara and her daughter Tsukasa look more like sisters than mother-daughter, and it's absolutely true. In the eleven-year span from Spring to Autumn, Hara has swapped roles but kept the same face, and she brings her A-game yet again, looking more weary and fatigued than ever before.But there's a problem. Where Ozu's style had always seemed evocative and direct, here is seems...stilted and awkward. The use of direct address in discussions seems disjointed and stiff. What felt emotionally confrontational in Late Spring comes off here as almost amateurish, merely content to blandly cut back and forth between one talking head and another. The fact that he's done that all his career perhaps says something about this film as an individual entity. Or perhaps it's just become all too familiar. When you're looking to derive a myriad of tales from the same few thematic points, there's always the danger of indifference; having the same actors play similar characters doing similar things in similar ways in movies with similar titles, it's a testament to his brilliance that he managed to make it more than one film, but here, it all just strikes of creative exhaustion: He's seemingly run out of stories to the point that he's now reworking the similar stories he's already done, as this is almost directly a remake of his 1949 masterpiece Late Spring, except mostly from the female perspective. While it appears to be a monumental shift for such a gradual director (I still remember first experiencing Tokyo Story and being so startled by its singular tracking shot that I was shaken to my core), actually far too little is new. Most of the motions and emotions we are presented with were all essentially inferred in Late Spring, and this seems if nothing else, an unnecessary diversion to a place we're already been.Now this is not to say that the film is a complete dud. Everyone involved is so talented that they can't help but stumble into several moments of effective heartstrain, most notable the touching restraint of the final shot, but I just can't shake the feeling that with Late Autumn, instead of hopping to a new stitch on the quilt, he's stepping right back onto trampled-down, treaded ground. Where Late Spring presented this story and devastated me, going right to my heart and laying me out flat. To Late Autumn I'm a bit more...subdued. I never connected to the characters or the situation in any tangible or meaningful way, and my response to the film was less "Holy crap" and more "ho-hum".{Grade: 6.5/10 (B-/C+) / #24 (of 34) of 1960}

GyatsoLa One of many great movies by Ozu, this is an apparently simple comedy (a comedy that puts a smile on your face rather than guffaws of laughter) but with depths of feeling and sadness that are, as always with Ozu movies, so unexpected. Although not by any means a 'major' or 'serious' movie, its full of touches that show what a masterly director he was.Arranged marriages have a bad name for many people - I was very surprised on a recent trip to Kyoto to be told that they are still quite common - but this is a movie that shows that they are as full of the complexities and pitfalls of conventional romance. The story revolves around the clumsy attempts of three well meaning men to help out the wife of their late friend by acting as matchmakers for his daughter. Its complicated by the fact that all three of them were in love with the mother in their early years - unsurprising as the mother is played by the always luminous Setsuko Hara. The daughter is less than impressed by the matchmaking, especially when the men decide to set up one of their number with her mother.The plot is in many ways very similar to Ozu's wonderful 'Late Spring', which starred many of the same actors. But while Late Spring was full of thematic richness and drama, this movie is a lot simpler, but is equally bitter sweet at the end. The happiness of the older characters at marrying off the younger generation is matched with an awareness of the loneliness of old age. Its also worth noting that the usual imaginative Ozu camera angles in this movie are matched with gorgeous colour and lovely set design.One point of interest for this movie is that it was clearly intended as a crowd pleaser. For those who think that Ozu is too 'arty', this movie shows why he was hugely popular with ordinary cinema-goers in Japan and remains so to this day. His simple stories resonated deeply with Japanese people at a time of great change, but his genius is in the universality of these movies - they have never truly dated, the are as insightful and fascinating as ever.In summary, this is not a movie in itself that will convince the doubtful about Ozu's right to be considered one of the all time great directors, but it is a delightful movie for any cinema lover (or for that matter, anyone interested in Japanese culture) to enjoy.

zzhou5 just a simple family story rendered so touching: a mother and a daughter were confronted with choice of life when the father died. The dilemma involves the conflict of traditional Japanese values and modern individuality.The story ends with the mother's self-sacrifice for the daughter's happy marriage. The disintegration of a family to embrace the new generation's happiness, in my eyes , is always cruel but inevitableThe film is tinged with nostalgia and subtle feelings. The end is my favorite: the mother's expression, half sad and suddenly lighted up... quite an antidote to the Hollywood's Happy-end