As in Ozu's LATE SPRING, widower Chishu Ryu decides it is time for his youngest child, daughter Shima Iwashita, to marry. It comes on him suddenly in the midst of his comfortable routines -- the well paid executive position, the drinking bouts with his old friends, the nightcap at the inevitable bar around the corner -- that time is passing. She is 24. At first she resists. What will he and her younger brother do without her? He replies that they will manage.
Unlike the earlier movie, this one isn't about the daughter, but the father. Before the war Ozu had worked in many genres, with his largest influence seeming to be Leo McCarey. After the war he settled into a series of meditations of the Japanese family in a changing Japan, concentrating on first one member, then the other. As he grew older, so did the focus of the story.
Some people say Ozu's technique, which had favored ecstatic moving shots in the late 1920s, grew simpler. He set his camera on the floor, looking up at his subjects, and let the drama and comedy play out before it. I don't think so. I think that his interest in story grew less and his interest in character increased, and he found the tricks of camera movement, crane shots and structuring the background for composition, to be a distraction. And so, here, we come to know Chishu Ryu's character, even though he says little, orders nothing, yet clearly commands love and respect from all who know him.
Ozu's mother died, and he was trying to deal with cancer while he worked on his next movie when he died on his sixtieth birthday, December 12, 1963. For lovers of his films, there would be no WINTER. Instead, we may imagine the bar around the corner, the same family -- with Chishu Ryu perhaps now a great-grandfather - still caring about each other and coping in a constantly changing Japan.
