Dernier caprice

After his second experience with colour, a light, happy "Ohayo", secretly epic and impressed, Ozu shot one of the milestones of his career: "Kohayagawa-ke no aki" is in my recollection, with "Banshun" and "Munakata shimai", his best work. Most of the themes exposed in previous films (father's intervention in his daughters' lifes, love (in the hands of others), solitude) are here integrated in a comedy-structured film that becomes a drama. It's perhaps his unique melodrama and it is shown with the desperate of the last breath for some characters, as usual in Ozu, doubtful and seeking a place for their quiet happiness.

There is no Ozu film nearest Sirk's or Minneli's universe like this one.

"Kohayagawa-ke no aki" reveals a spectacular display of color and form that only a true master of art can achieve. Yasujiro Ozu has outdone even himself in this regard. One can easily get lost in one scene after another and forget that a film is playing. It is a though one is in an art gallery of cultural art which happens of be that of Japan. Monet attempted to imitate the impressionistic art of Japan during his lifetime in the 19th century, as can be seen in his own collection. The trend seems reversed in the 20th century, with Ozu using the techniques of American and European hard-edge expressionist. The results are stunning, infinity better than his earlier works. The same scenes in black and white in 1956 are presented in 1963 with vivid complementary and contrasting color. Barrels against a wall are no longer just gray shades but brown tubs with white rims and adjacent white umbrellas and buildings. There are dozens of other equally impressive combinations. The most spectacular scenes are those without actors or minimal acting. But after all, this is a movie so one has acting and dialogue. Moving hand fans dominate many scenes to an almost hypnotic end. The striking neon sign of the NEW JAPAN presages the future. The Left Elbow Index considers film from seven perspectives--acting, production sets, artistry, character development, film continuity, plot and dialogue--with a rating of 10 for very good, 5 for average, and 1 for needs help. The sets, the artistry, and the plot are rated very good. The plots are intriguing: to marry or not, East vs West, and cultural change. The acting is average due to the fixed photo technique and the talking head approach. Dialogue is appropriate. However, character development and film continuity seem submerged in the attention to color and form. The LEI average rating is 6.0, with a full point more given for Ozu's quantum leap into a new world of color, resulting in a 7.0, or above average, equal to an 8 on the IMDb scale. If one is serious about film history, this movie is essential to understanding trends. I strongly recommend this film. Just sit back and enjoy one tableau after another. You may find your jaw dropping in wonder and awe.

This is classic Ozu, a small slice of life, a crucial turning point in the history of a family fighting the inevitable progress of time and change. In this case it is a family consisting of a widower, clearly someone with a racy past, and his four children - a somewhat dim son, two dutiful older daughters, and a sharp tongued younger daughter, outraged that her father is determined to age disgracefully. He (played by the impish Ganjiro Nakamura) is sneaking off from his duties at his struggling sake brewery to meet an old flame. His eldest daughter, in true later Ozu style is reluctant to accept the hand of an apparently decent suitor. His second daughter is torn between the 'good' match and her true love, an impoverished academic.

Ozu's penultimate film, and perhaps this is reading too much into it, but its hard not to see his vision of his own impending death in it, despite the great humour in it.

This is a meditation on a dying world - despite the vibrant photography, the film resonates with images of passing - constant visions of graveyards, an old dying Japan, the families roots in a dying form of business as they are overtaken by big, highly capitalised larger companies. The ending is sad and inevitable, but not tragic - life does go on, and a new generation wills step in, even if the old traditions are not maintained.

One striking thing about this film is the incredible photography. Have humble domestic interiors every looked so stunningly beautiful? The lighting is luminous, every scene is as perfectly composed as a Vermeer painting.

It is a bunch of baloney to say that END OF SUMMER is far behind Ozu's other efforts. I have seen most if not all of Ozu's most acclaimed works, and END OF SUMMER is the best one I've ever seen. It even surpasses TOKYO STORY, which many scholars claim is Ozu's best masterpiece, one of the greatest movies of all time. For my money, END OF SUMMER is one of the top five foreign movies of all time. The beautiful photography is sublime; the movie contains some of the funniest things in any Ozu movie; and the ending is one of the most heartbreaking, most superbly visualized endings ever put on celluloid! I just can't say enough good things about this movie. There may be another Ozu movie I haven't seen that surpasses this one, but I sincerely doubt there's more than one, if there's even one.

The penultimate film in his astonishing oeuvre, Yasujiro Ozu's story about an aging widower and his relationship with his three very different daughters has a strong sense of death throughout, contradicted with some of the most gorgeous cinematography available in cinema. Ozu's typical minimalist and economical visual style are quite conducive to realizing this theme, showing how even the most beautiful and poetic elements of life eventually run their course, as does everything in this life.

The main crux of the story rests on the patriarch of the family, Manbei, who continues to see a woman he knew while he was married, a notion which naturally upsets at least one of his daughters. The other two seem more pensive about the situation, leading them to contemplate their own lives as the eldest is widowed herself and debating whether or not to remarry while the youngest is wondering who she should marry. It is worth noting how Ozu portrays the elder generation as being more open to passion and vigorous living than the younger. The conclusion seems to be that despite the inevitability of death, how one lives one's life determines how they will be remembered rather than who they were perceived to be. Though death remains ever-important, it cannot and should not prevent one from attempting to live to the fullest possible existence.