Customer Reviews

The End of Summer (Kohayagawa-ke no aki)[Region 2, English Subtitles]

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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.

One of the finest form of Japanese poetry is Haiku, a seventeen sound-counts or kind of syllabus, grouped in five - seven - five such sound-count. One of the words in a Haiku, should contain a reference to a season or period of time or a clear event associated with seasons.

Ozu with his films "Equinox Flower", "Late Spring", "Tokyo Twilight", "Early Spring" , "The End of Summer" and "Late Autumn" has created a Cinematographic Haiku, a poetry of images, events and concepts.

To understand Ozu in his very best, one must see his entire work and understand the issues which were dominant in the post war Japan.

Such new concepts challenged the old way of thinking and set the premises for the today Japanese society.

Concepts such as "Salary Man", "Office lady", wearing western cloths and the economic challenges in a global environment, created a new generation ready to put the war behind them and move forward to modernization while at the same time wanted to maintain links with tradition.

The previous generation was puzzled and confronted and yet unable to come to terms with this new world.

In the struggle of the previous generation to come to terms with the new order, parents were sadden by what they could see as a double defeat, that of the war and that of the social order and yet somber and reserved in their behavior and reasoning.

The End Of Summer, is one of the finest examples of Ozu's work.

Photography and colours using simple backgrounds and scenery is one yet verification of Ozu's Haiku approach.

The story is a reverse case from his other films where the widow elderly father is rediscovering his younger times companion to the amazement of his children.

It s now the children who are struggling to come to terms with their father's behavior rather than parents to deal with their rebellious children.

Simple and beautiful this film contains sorrow and laughter, happiness and challenges as it develops until the very end.

But watching this film alone will be meaningless in understanding the fine art of Ozu unless you see the entire collection of his work.