An Autumn Afternoon

Japanese director Yasujirô Ozu’s 1962 film An Autumn Afternoon, is a beautiful and slow exploration of family, sacrifice, aging and love. This month, we urge you to explore this gentle masterpiece in a newly restored format, which is in cinemas from May 16. 

An Autumn Afternoon is a distinctly personal insight into Ozu’s world. It tells the story of an elderly widower, played by Chishu Ryu, who still lives with two of his children (a son and a daughter), but despite the apparent ease of their situation, suddenly realises that he wants his daughter to get married. 

An Autumn Afternoon plays out themes of aging and family through mundanities and minutiae of daily life: something that was groundbreaking at the time. However, the film has enough intricacies to keep its audience interested – and for those who are not familiar with Ozu’s work, it is a perfect introduction to his oeuvre. There are moments of light relief scattered throughout the film, too- a joke about virility pills is a welcome break from the insistent melancholy.

It is a joy to see the work that The Shochiku Studios, Japan’s National Film Centre and the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, carried out on restoring and re-expressing the colour of the original. Ozu made 36 films in his lifetime, but only the last six were made in colour, and this work shows the vivid palette Ozu was capable of using.