Next up on the S&S list is a movie from Yasujirō Ozu starring Chishū Ryū, wherein an aging father realizes that he needs to get his adult daughter married. No, not that one. No, not that one either. This one does not star Setsuko Hara as the daughter in question. Also it’s in color, because it’s 1962 now.

So this is still doing the Ozu thing, giving us a portrait of a postwar Japan grappling with itself through family relationships. The people are all sharply observed; the cinematography is fully Ozu, with the tatami mat perspective and the direct camera address. What feels different here are two things, which are weirdly in tension with each other.

The first is that the movie — in line with its later setting — feels more explicitly feminist than previous ones. It shows us various marriages wherein the women are put in unenviable positions — being cheated on, or having to do all the responsible work of running a household while the man remains something of a child. So is it down on marriage? Well, no, because it then shows us a family where the daughter stayed single, taking care of her aging dad, and her life is also miserable and sucky. The movie seems to have a damned if you do, damned if you don’t theme going.

But then the second thing is that this feminist sentiment is paired with the most passive heroine of this set of movies.[1] The daughter in Late Spring was adamant that she didn’t want to get married at all; in Early Summer, she was adamant that she wanted to marry a specific guy. Here, she’s vaguely open to the idea of getting married, but doesn’t seem to have any urgency about it. And while there’s a guy she’s interested in, when he turns out to be unavailable, she moves on to a marriage her dad arranges.

And the ending of the movie is a happy ending of sorts for her dad, but she’s just shuffled off to her marital home, and who knows how that goes for her; certainly not us — we never even see the groom — because that’s not what the movie cares about.

It feels weird to set up the situation as being more feminist than previously, but then to resolve it in even more of a traditional, patriarch-driven way, without (as far as I can tell) intending that as any kind of subtle message.

But then, maybe the message here, and in these other movies, is simply one that has nothing to do with feminism at all. Ozu never married and lived with his mother for his entire adult life. She died in 1961 or early 1962 (sources vary, oddly), this — his last film — was released in 1962, and he died in 1963. All the people talking about how important it is to marry the daughter off, and how sad she’ll be if she has to spend her life taking care of her elderly dad, well, maybe this has nothing to do with being a woman at all.

Biographical analysis to the side, this is a characteristically excellent movie. Because I’m mostly watching these off a Great Movies list, I worry that I’m getting a biased take on how great Ozu is — the guy made 54 movies, and I’ve only seen four of his most widely praised films. But my uncontroversial take at this point is that yeah, he’s pretty great.

  1. To be clear, and maybe oddly, these are not the only movies Ozu made about an aging dad and a daughter who needs to get married, so these three don’t really form a complete set. But I haven’t yet seen the others, so can’t speak to how they handled the situation. ↩︎