Ryu again portrays a widowed father of three who takes a notion to marry off his daughter and pulls it off with the help of his drinking circle of ex-school chums. After the wedding, still dressed up, he is asked at a bar, "Formal affair-funeral?" "Something like that," he replies. Ozu's beautiful last film is at moments his most Sirkian, an almost bitter portrayal of loss linked to the tensions of modern living and the unsavory effects of the consumer society on family life (displayed in golf clubs and Frigidaires, in a heightened awareness of objects). Many elements of previous films are folded into this one, slightly altered. And that nothing is as it was implies, somehow, that nothing is as it should be: The former sensei who now runs a noodle shop (reminding us of 1931's Tokyo Chorus) and drinks-where, indeed, are the dreams of youth?; the characteristic Ozu corridors that here give way to alleyways, signs, dumps and ruins. "It is autumn again," Donald Richie writes, "but now it is deep autumn. Winter was always near, but now it will be tomorrow." Ozu died in 1963, on his sixtieth birthday.