The End of Summer

Selected by Nicholas Nixon

“The best, the most subtle, the most ambitious, and the most successful in achieving the blend of comic insight and tragic vision that informs this director’s cinema … It has a quality of luminous intelligence exceptional even in a career for which such intelligence was generally the controlling point of view.” -Roger Greenspun, The New York Times

Ozu’s penultimate film, made at Toho and boasting many of that studio’s contract players, is a rich, ensemble family drama that follows a delicate trajectory from comedy to tragedy. Its plentiful cast of characters, each granted their own narrative stakes and romantic entanglements, revolves around the head of a family-operated sake brewery (Nakamura Ganjiro, of Floating Weeds). He is busy trying to marry off his widowed daughter-in-law (Hara Setsuko, in her final Ozu performance) while keeping his dalliance with an old mistress secret. When the sisterhood gets wind of their father’s impropriety, a heated quarrel portends an end to the aging, impish patriarch. Or does it? One of Ozu’s most lush and modulated efforts, The End of Summer is also among his most poignant—a film, as the title suggests, about conclusions, but not necessarily closure. Its tender staging of two sisters-in-law crouched in unison by the water’s edge is nothing short of sublime.

Part of the Fraenkel Film Festival