Samma no aji (An Autumn Afternoon). 1962. Japan. Directed by Yasujiro Ozu. Screenplay by Ozu, Kôgo Noda. With Chishū Ryū, Shima Iwashita, Keiji Sada, Mariko Okada, Kuniko Miyake. DCP courtesy Janus Films. In Japanese; English subtitles. 113 min.
One of the most beautiful swan songs to appear in any art form, An Autumn Afternoon only deepens the gentle humor and pathos Ozu brought to his immortal tales of family love and loss. Facing the death of the cherished mother with whom he lived all his life, as well his own sense of mortality—he would die the following year from cancer, on his 60th birthday—Ozu could scarcely conceal his identification with the hero of An Autumn Afternoon, an aging widower and war veteran who must resign himself to a lonely fate after he marries off his youngest daughter. The film is not only the apotheosis of Ozu’s career and a fitting companion to MoMA’s premiere of The Ozu Diaries, it is itself filled with self-referential allusions to his expulsion from high school; the camaraderie of drinking buddies at the local bar; his unrequited love for the actress Kuniko Miyake; the knowing intimacy of his relationship with his perennial actor and alter ego Chishū Ryū; and the Japanese title of the film itself, A Taste of Mackerel, which comes from a poem Ozu inscribed in his diary after his mother’s funeral: “Down in the valley it is already spring/Clouds of cherry blossoms;/But here, the sluggish eye, the taste of mackerel—/The blossoms are melancholy/And the flavor of sake becomes bitter.”
2K restoration by Shochiku Co., Ltd., the National Film Center and the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.