Synopsis

In the early 60's in Tokyo, the widower Hirayama is a former captain from the Japanese navy that works as a manager of a factory and lives with his twenty-four year-old daughter Michiko and his son Kazuo in his house. His older son Koichi is married with Akiko that are compulsive consumers and Akiko financially controls their expenses. Hirayama frequently meets his old friends Kawai and Professor Horie, who is married with a younger wife, to drink in a bar. When their school teacher Sakuma comes to a reunion of Hirayama with old school mates, they learn that the old man lives with his daughter that stayed single to take care of him. Michiko lives a happy life with her father and her brother, but Hirayama feels that it is time to let her go and tries to arrange a marriage for her.

Production Budget Analysis

The production budget for An Autumn Afternoon (1962) has not been publicly disclosed.

CAST: Chishū Ryū, Shima Iwashita, Keiji Sada, Mariko Okada, Teruo Yoshida, Noriko Maki DIRECTOR: Yasujirō Ozu CINEMATOGRAPHY: Yûharu Atsuta MUSIC: Takanobu Saitō PRODUCTION: Shochiku, Shochiku Ofuna Film Studio

Box Office Performance

Theatrical box office data is not publicly available for An Autumn Afternoon (1962). This may indicate a limited release, direct-to-streaming, or a release predating modern box office tracking.

Profitability Assessment

Insufficient publicly available data to assess profitability.

INDUSTRY IMPACT

PRODUCTION NOTES

▸ Production

It was shot using Agfacolor, and the credits of the film are placed before a backdrop of painted fronds instead of the sackcloth used in all of Ozu's films since A Story of Floating Weeds in 1934.

The Japanese title, The Taste of Sanma, refers to the sanma or Pacific saury fish. As a seasonal food, sanma is used in Japanese culture to represent autumn. The French title of the film translates to The Taste of Sake. Both these titles were found in a poem by Ozu in his diaries written after the death of his mother:

Down in the valley it is already spring Clouds of cherry blossoms; But here, the sluggish eye, the taste of mackerel- The blossoms are melancholy And the flavor of sake becomes bitter.