The End of Summer (1961)

I've come to think that Ozu is the most original of all directors post silent era. The End of Summer is just another example of how Ozu manages to make a compelling film out of the most mundane of plots. This also one of the funnier Ozu movies. The early scene of Akiko's meeting with a potential suitor is handled with great light comedic touches (the nose signal). Ozu's signatures are all here: the static camera shots,shooting actors from behind, sudden jumps in timeline, and of course great acting. I can't think of a director who is more instantly recognizable not just for technique but also plot and dialogue. There is only one Ozu and this is one of his best, right up there with :Late Spring, Tokyo Story, Early Spring, and Tokyo Twilight

Of the Ozu films I've seen this one seems to stand out the most; there isn't a single shot of a train, only the sound of distant ones passing. There are attempts at arranging marriages, for a young woman and for a widow, but neither come to fruition. He almost throws a curve ball so to speak, since at the beginning of the film you're given the impression that it's going to be about two widows getting' the hook up, but then it turns out to be more of a study on the widowed father of the Kohayagawa family. There's also one more thing I've yet to have seen in an Ozu film, as far as I can remember: a dead person on screen, usually we're entering the stories of these people's lives after someone has croaked. Definitely the most bittersweet of the Ozu films I've seen thus far, there are moments of genuinely touching comedy and also a few moments of blatant commentary on the modernization of the Japanese woman at the time, with the one daughter whose only regret after her "father" dies is that she doesn't get the mink stole she wanted, not to mention she's going out with a new American guy every other day.

Ozu's penultimate film is also one of his best. As in many of his movies, the theme here deals with the dynamics of a traditional Japanese family. The aging patriarch of a family has to deal with marrying his two grown daughters (one is divorced with child, the great Setsuko Hara), the financial problems facing his small sake producing business, the reunion with his long lost lover and their capricious daughter and, last but not least, his impending death. The death theme hangs throughout the movie; Ozu was probably thinking of his own death when he filmed this (he would live only a couple of years more); the last shot has black crows standing over the patriarch's gravestone. Ozu's films in color are even better than those in black and white: his famous sense of composition shines even better. Besides, I love color films from the late 1950s and early 1960s period, perhaps because they show us what society look like before the great disruption of the late 60s (this is not personal nostalgia, since I wasn't even born then). Overall, one of Ozu's best films.

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.