Late Autumn

In Late Spring, Setsuko Hara played a young woman whose protests—“I’m happy as I am”—went unheeded by a well-meaning widowed father who wanted to see her married. Late Autumn is a reworking of the earlier film, with Hara playing a widowed mother allowing her young daughter to think it is in her mother’s best interest that she marry. Donald Richie noted: “There is an elegiac sadness in Late Autumn and, perhaps in consequence, some relaxation of the extraordinary objectivity that so distinguishes Late Spring. Of this 1960 film [Yasujiro] Ozu has written: ‘People sometimes complicate the simplest things. Life, which seems complex, suddenly reveals itself as very simple—and I wanted to show that in this film.’” Three years after Late Autumn (and the same year as Ozu’s death), Hara (“the Eternal Virgin”) suddenly quit acting; she lived away from the public eye until her death in 2015.