Late Autumn is character as jigsaw puzzle, with tantalising missing pieces—the characters' silences, the film's empty spaces.

Ozu's film concerns the mystery of the human essence, and much of it is devoted to the surmises, opinions, machinations and viewpoints of those around the mother and daughter, including Aya's friend Yuriko and three friends of her late father. As in Citizen Kane, each observation or comment presents the two women in a new, slightly different light. The goal is not so much truth or completeness as an appreciation of the elusiveness of truth. The most 'dramatic' scene—Akiko 'rhapsodising' about her late husband when it is suggested she should remarry—is not even shown, only related in dialogue. We see the two main characters principally through the other people—further, the implication is that we see them through our eyes, or through Ozu and Noda's. Our conception or impression of a character in a film is ultimately just that—our conception—and not the character itself, who is necessarily filtered through our subjectivity and is thus distorted, however slightly. We can't quite know others (or ourselves): this is the sense of the character of the father in Late Spring …, and the sense of Late Autumn as a whole.

The four friends serve a dual purpose. They are half-callous, half-conscientious manipulators. Their scheming separates, unites, provokes Akiko and Aya. Fate-like, they determine the 'plot'. They are also extensions of the two women. Yuriko, for instance, shares their distaste for second marriages (her own father remarried), but is more 'realistic' on the subject. Her disloyalty to her mother, however, is balanced by loyalty to Aya and to her mother, whom she promises to visit often after Aya leaves. This sense of almost comically convoluted, conflicting loyalties to oneself, one's parents, one's offspring and one's friends is strangely crystallised in one simple action: angry at her for approving her mother's remarriage, Aya orders the concerned Yuriko out of the apartment. Reluctantly, Yuriko leaves, but as she walks away she whirls around, pausing momentarily, and only then departs for good.

That moment of hesitation is like a miniature of the conflicts of mother and daughter. It suggests, in its quirky conciseness, how it is possible for Aya, at two different times, to respond very differently to the idea of her mother remarrying; why Akiko wants does not want Aya to marry; why Ozu can't explain to us exactly why Aya cries. Taken separately, Aya, Akiko, Yuriko and the three older men reflect each other's inconsistencies and sense of divided loyalties, or split affinities. Together, they are like a fantastically detailed, permutated composite character—mutually enriching analogues of each other that form one master portrait. For all this detail, however, Ozu is finally forced to come back to Hara's suggestive smile at the end of the film, that ironic smile which intimates that there are still many details that he has left out of the portrait….

[An Autumn Afternoon] is similar in story and structure to Late Autumn—too similar, perhaps. It is always a source of amazement how many formal and narrative elements Ozu repeats from film to film, and yet how distinctive each one is as a whole—no one, really, like another. Only An Autumn Afternoon of Ozu's later films seems to me to have no clear identity of its own; to be, in its almost rote reshuffling of the elements, simply reminiscent of earlier films in story, structure, scene and character…. Its closing note—Ryu sitting alone and drunk in the kitchen, in long shot, after his daughter's wedding—is a typically memorable Ozu ending. But even this coda has an air of forced variation, as though Ozu and Noda did not want to repeat themselves, or not exactly. What they do here they do well; it's just that they did it before and better, with more sense of form and purpose….

In one unfortunate way, An Autumn Afternoon did represent a new departure for Ozu. Alone of his late films, it is almost exclusively peopled by the 'mean', 'mediocre' creatures that his detractors (and even some of his defenders) say always was Ozu's speciality. The ordinary, mean or simply less than extraordinary characters that appear in his earlier films—the children in Tokyo Story, say, or the mistress' daughter in The End of Summer—are merely part of the natural diversity of character in those films, a diversity that includes several Setsuko Hara characterisations which qualify as among the most extraordinary creations in film. But An Autumn Afternoon is filled with unthinking, peremptory fathers, brothers and husbands, whose 'selfishness' too schematically makes loving wives and daughters stern, snippy and pettily dictatorial, in turn driving the weak-willed men to drink. As with There Was a Father and its characters strait-jacketed by fate, this seems less a bleak or honest view of life than a narrow one. In the context of this circumscribed world, even Ozu's pay-off images—the daughter in her wedding gown, the father alone—lack their customary resonance. (p. 48)

A final point: all the people in the film talk about loneliness. One old man describes himself as 'all alone'. When he passes out drunk, a friend warns the father: 'Beware—that could be you.' His son tells him, 'You'll be lonesome when she goes.' Near the end a woman asks him, 'But won't you be lonely?' Finally, drunk, he admits to himself, 'Yes … all alone in the end.' These admonitions and admissions could be seen as the characters' collective, vain attempt to confront and dispel the fact of loneliness, but they seem closer to superfluous comments, a thematic tipping of the hand. In Late Spring the imminence of the father's solitude is submerged in the drama of cleaving father from daughter. His sudden solitariness is almost a shock, when of course it was the film's inevitable, tacit conclusion. The talk about loneliness in An Autumn Afternoon seems intended to fill a dramatic or aesthetic void—there is simply nothing else for the characters to talk about.

The End of Summer … is from one angle a justification of selfishness; from another, a statement about one's responsibility for one's own life; from yet another, a statement on the basic immutability of character. 'It's his character'; 'Character? You mean he can do as he pleases?'; 'It's your life': these are representative lines. Concepts of self, self-interest and responsibility intertwine. At the centre is the fact of death: because one has only one short life one cannot entrust it to another person.

The two key images isolate the two independent-minded sisters of the Kohayagawa family, Akiko … and Noriko…. The sisters refuse to marry simply for 'the good of the family', whose business is failing, and in relation to the family this refusal is seen as selfish and divisive. In relation to the fact of death, however, their refusal is seen as necessary, urgent. Their 'selfishness' is, on another level, an acceptance of responsibility for fashioning the shape of their lives. The periodic shots of the sisters side by side, kneeling or standing in unison, are exquisite yet ultimately ironic images of accord—ironic because their personal accord means discord for the family as a whole. Their smiles of mutual agreement are subtly inverted subversion: they agree to disagree.

The film is so light and charming on the surface—but the last three shots are of the crows [harbingers of death]. A peasant (Ryu) at one point comments, 'New lives replace old', but the film does not conclude with cyclical images of rebirth but, like Citizen Kane, with images of finality and death. New lives replace old, but they are different lives. In one scene the whole family rushes into the frame to see the old man, abruptly recovered from a severe heart attack, up and about and refreshed by his 'sleep'. Later, Ozu shows the family again crowding into the frame, this time to see the smoke from the crematorium. This 'double exposure' is like an image of the fact of death, and what it means in this one case. The idea of rebirth expressed by the peasant is an abstraction; death is a fact, and while the two sisters may recapitulate their father's life in spirit, Ozu implies that it is the fact of his death that is his chief legacy to them. (pp. 48-9)