Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Late Autumn!

The auteur theory, popularised by French New Wave critics-turned-makers-of-the-sort-of-films-a-critic-would-make, has been a disaster for the cinéma, not because their faves like Hitchcock and Ray weren't authors of a sort, but because after it became universal doctrine among the sort of person who makes video essays (bald), every hack filmmaker started self-consciously repeating motifs and turning his flicks into his own niche jerkoff material.

But long before the New Wave bores ruined everything, one filmmaker devised an authorial stamp so unique, and made such good use of it, that despite being acknowledged as the GOAT, he's almost never been ripped off. Video-essay Norwoods gush over such played-out hyperkinetic gimmicks as "the oner", but Yasujirō Ozu defied the crass culture of acceleration by increasingly eliminating camera movements from his ouevre as it matured from the silent era to the 60s, favouring tasteful minimalistic composition and a defiantly languid pace for his long succession of domestic dramas.

Strap the fuck in for some static noodle eating action like you've never seen.

"Boring!" you cry, throwing your rattle on the floor, kicking your stubby feet in your pram. Yeah, I thought so too, but Ozu is the rare filmmaker you grow into and not out of. His subject matter is the stuff of everyday life: generational friction, matchmaking, misunderstanding, loss, acceptance, shooting the shit about your college-age crushes, the fate of the old when left behind. His lengthy career captured changes in a society enamoured of tradition and the new in equal and irreconcilable measure. An Ozu film examines and observes, comments sparely and with room for ambiguity, and looks for the good in its conflicted characters. If you watch several back-to-back, you'll find they blur together in the memory, all variations on a theme, like eddies in a river always flowing down toward the sea.

Idea for a YouTube video: every Ozukino but it's just the establishing shots.

Late Autumn is my favourite one in part because it plays as a tribute to Ozu's frequent star and waifu, Setsuko Hara, once the young protagonist chafing against her elders' wishes, now the serene mother of another iteration of the same. Will she remarry? Will her daughter still find time to visit her when she moves out with her new man? You wouldn't care, you couldn't be compelled to care, but Ozu and his cast beguile you to care, because their neatly composed world is worth preserving. Many of his characters are Buddhist, many of the conflicts in his films about forgoing attachments and the transience of things: change is sad, but inevitable. But on the flipside, he very gently pushes back on that philosophy with the subtly radical rejoinder: it's inevitable, but sad.

Setsuko Hara > Mona Lisa

There is no order in which to watch the Ozu titles Late Autumn, Late Spring, etc.; it's just a naming convention he liked. None of his films are direct sequels to one another, but recurrences with difference, like the seasons themselves. Reject Hollywood; watch Ozu.