Episode 310: AN AUTUMN AFTERNOON (1962) with Kris Montello

Trylove

With returning guest Kris Montello, Programming Director for the Asian-American International Film Festival and programmer for the Slamdance Film Festival!

Yasujirō Ozu didn’t intend for AN AUTUMN AFTERNOON (1962) to be his final film, but it feels like it. Chishū Ryū is Shuhei Hirayama, an aging salaryman, widower, and father who’s slowly coming to grips with the realities of growing older — primarily the fact that his only daughter Michiko (Shima Iwashita) is spending the best years of her life making dinner and cleaning house for him. Over conversations, reunions, baseball games, and too many drinks, Shuhei’s friends, family, colleagues, and even strangers gently (and not-so-gently) remind him of the life he’s not letting her lead.

In this episode, we call on Kris’s Ozu expertise and a lifetime of love for his films to highlight the special cozy intensity of AN AUTUMN AFTERNOON, theorize the commonalities and connections among Ozu’s works, and study the portrait it paints of a man getting ready for a lonely end to a full life.

Find Kris…

• At krismontello.com
• On Letterboxd at DHCKris
• On Twitter at https://twitter.com/kris_montello
• At the the Asian-American International Film Festival
• On Trylove episodes about SAMURAI REINCARNATION (1981)

**References: **

• Give to the Trylon’s Film Forever Fund so they never have to increase ticket prices!
• “A Familiar and Familial Farewell: Ozu’s Final Film” by Dan Howard for Perisphere, the Trylon blog
• “The Architecture of Family: An Autumn Afternoon and The Royal Tenenbaums” by Andrew Neill for Perisphere, the Trylon blog
• “An Autumn Afternoon: Ozu’s Diaries” by Donald Richie for the Criterion Current
• “Ozu and the poetics of cinema” by David Bordwell
• “Directed by Yasujiro Ozu” by Shiguéhiko Hasumi
• Check the calendar, preview upcoming series, and buy tickets at https://www.trylon.org/
• Contribute to Perisphere, the Trylon blog: https://www.perisphere.org/perisphere-blog-post-guidelines/

#YasujiroOzuInColor #35mm

Follow us on Twitter at @trylovepodcast, Bluesky at @trylovepodcast.bsky.social, and email us at [email protected] to get in touch!

Show art by Emily Csuy. Theme: "Raindrops" by Huma-Huma/"No Smoking" PSA by John Waters. Outro music: “Theme/Polka/Finale” by Takanobu Saitô (as Kojun Saito) from the AN AUTUMN AFTERNOON soundtrack.

Timestamps

0:00 - Episode 310: AN AUTUMN AFTERNOON (1962)

2:47 - The Patented Aaron Grossman Summary (under exclusive license from AG Enterprises, Ltd.)

5:46 - A definitive Ozu film

16:20 - How Ozu characters present and communicate

23:39 - Stories that seem to naturally emerge from their conditions

27:11 - Putting the thing the movie’s ABOUT behind the thing the movie IS

42:35 - What Shuhei’s guides teach him about the incoming loneliness

57:47 - The navy buddy (Daisuke Katō) and the dead wife doppelganger (Kyōko Kishida)

1:12:39 - Characters who reveal Shuhei’s new grief and guilt

1:22:51 - The Junk Drawer

1:43:54 - To All the Loves We’ve Tried Before: 1962

1:48:29 - Cody’s Noteys: Taiyo-love (Japanese baseball trivia)