A Film Canon

Less an adaptation than a calibration of Ozu's dual tendency towards thematic liberalism and formal conservatism in the decade since Late Spring, Late Autumn culminates the paternal absences of Tokyo Twilight, Equinox Flower and Good Morning, presenting a world in which marrying for love doesn't preclude frustration and unhappiness, marrying for lust guarantees death, and marrying for convenience is "really tedious, when you think about it." As a result, the institution of arranged marriage - that is, Ozu's narrative apparatus - is identified with a last, pathetic surge of paternal authority, and the elaboration of a fourth marital criterion, to which end Ozu finally effects the collapse between domestic and professional space, traditionalism and capitalism, and marriage and employment, that has been building throughout his late body of work. On the one hand, this produces the first of his films in which resistance to arranged marriage is truly located within a matrix of female professional and financial liberation, opening up space for a hesitant affirmation of both love and sex outside marriage; or, alternatively, the same calm dissociation of love and marriage that suffuses his earlier films, but from the opposite perspective, as if marriage's dissolution as an institution only affirmed its residual strength as an inclination. However, it also speaks to a capitalist presence that has become sufficiently insidious to draw out and isolate the mercenary potential of arranged marriage, as well as incorporate Ozu's whole aesthetic into the exoticising, curatorial gaze that the Japanese now need to turn upon themselves to access their cultural heritage. Not only does every narrative space feel pre-fabricated, with Ozu's first extensive depiction of an apartment block forming the prototype for a series of packaged, semi-traditional cubicles of shots, but the meditative, anarrative spaces that typically fill Ozu's characteristic pillow sequences move rapidly from evacuated, traditional interiors, to a series of vistas transformed from wartime evacuation sites to tourist destinations. These would already be the most extraordinarily - and efficiently - expansive gestures in Ozu's late work, if they weren't simultaneously suffused with his most lavish use of colour to date; an attempt to restore the ideogrammatic illiteracy encapsulated in a peripheral hiker's inability to remember the symbol for 'refreshing', and the closest Ozu's restraint could come to registering the seismic shifts in which it ultimately and unwillingly participates: "Did you feel the earthquake last night?"  "No, was there one?"