An Autumn Afternoon Analysis

The Rigid Repression of An Autumn AfternoonMidway through Yasujiro Ozu's An Autumn Afternoon, Shuhei, an elderly, widowed businessman with two sons (Koichi, Kazuo) and a daughter (Michiko), faces a dilemma. Although Michiko is well into her twenties, she has yet to find a male partner with whom she can settle down and raise a family. Based on previous observations, Shuhei believes that Michiko would be a good match for Miura, a colleague of Koichi's. In his desperation, Shuhei asks Koichi to sound Miura out about the possibility of a marriage to Michiko; Koichi subsequently broaches the topic while he and Miura are dining at a restaurant, but in a blow to Michiko's marital hopes, Miura states that he is already engaged to someone else.
The scene in which Koichi interrogates Miura ultimately stands out not so much for its emotional content as for the way Ozu initially transitions into it. To understand why, we can try to imagine what said transition would have looked like had Ozu decided to abide by classical, narrative-enhancing editing techniques. First, he probably would …show more content…
After all, when depicting conversations between two people, classically edited films tend to cut to reaction shots even as one character is still talking. In this scene, however, the cuts are perfectly synchronized with the turns in Koichi and Miura's dialogue: Ozu, in other words, waits for a character to stop speaking before cutting away to the other character. When combined with Ozu's simultaneous refusal to use over-the-shoulder shots - he prefers to shoot Koichi and Miura individually, such that we occasionally get the sense that their exchange is simply an outgrowth of post-production splicing - this eschewal of dialogue overlap gives the film a striking air of rigidity. We come away with the impression that Koichi and Miura's conversation constitutes a somewhat impersonal business