THE END OF SUMMER d: Yasujiro Ozu
Kohayagawa-ke No Aki / The End of Summer (1961)
Direction: Yasujiro Ozu
Screenplay: Yasujiro Ozu, Kôgo Noda
Cast: Ganjiro Nakamura, Setsuko Hara, Yôko Tsukasa, Michiyo Aratama, Chieko Naniwa, Hisaya Morishige, Reiko Dan
By Dan Schneider of Cosmoetica:
When an artist has reached a level of such high art that he and his work can be spoken of as being in the top tier of his art form, something terrible happens: often brilliant — but not quite ineffably so — work is looked upon with a lesser eye by critics and audiences alike. This is not an unnatural development; once treated to fancy cuisine, even a good steak can seem a comedown to most palates. Yet, that is a frustrating development, for sometimes quality is overlooked or dismissed because it is merely an 8 of 10, rather than a perfect 10.
Such is the case concerning the critical reception of Yasujiro Ozu’s 1961 effort Kohayagawa-ke No Aki / The End of Summer (or literally, The Fall of the Kohayagawa Family).
In fairness, The End of Summer, Ozu’s penultimate film before his premature death, is not as unassailably great as his "Noriko Trilogy" (Late Spring, Early Summer, Tokyo Story). However, it is still an excellent film in its own right, which knows when to not let a scene play out, and which, at 103 minutes, does not overstay its welcome.
Now, sometimes a film contains a small element that serves as a fractal for the whole. In the case of The End of Summer it is the appearance of a character named Noriko, though this time around she’s not played by the Trilogy’s great Setsuko Hara. Perhaps it was some god of cinema’s karmic hand, but the fact that Hara is called Akiko in The End of Summer shows how just slightly off from greatness the film is.
Something else that augurs the slight fall from grace of The End of Summer is Toshiro Mayuzumi‘s score. Whereas all aspects of the Trilogy were in perfect harmony, Mayuzumi’s score is often light and comic at inappropriate moments. When it is needed to be comic it serves well, but a listener almost feels like the scorer fell asleep during editing, thus allowing the same whimsical tunes to play on for too long — or to be heard in places where it should not be at all.
Shot in color (in contrast to the black-and-white trilogy), The End of Summer is a visual feast. Ozu’s famed "tatami mat" shooting style defines the spaces inside the characters’ homes, but for some reason the use of color heightens the flattening effect of the static shots, making them resemble even more the two-dimensional art of Classical Japan. That’s probably because the colors mute the shadows that are heightened in black and white, which thus adds definition and seeming solidity to objects that, in color, flatten out.
Written by Ozu and longtime collaborator Kôgo Noda, the screenplay is very good, deftly mixing comedy (though not as "sitcom level" as the farting in Good Morning) and drama (though not as sublime as that found in the Noriko Trilogy). The result is a film that uses contrasts to great effect: the comedy leavens the black subject matter of death and the disposition of a life’s remnants, while the drama never lets the comedy get too silly or cartoonish, keeping it within the realm of the real workaday experience that all people, be they the Japanese of half a century ago or modern Westerners, can relate to. This, of course, being the essence of universal art.
More information about: Chieko Naniwa, classic movies, film reviews, Ganjiro Nakamura, Michiyo Aratama, Setsuko Hara, The End of Summer, Yasujiro Ozu, Yôko Tsukasa
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