Having been the daughter in Late Spring, Setsuko Hara plays the mother in Yasujiro Ozu’s melancholically satirical 1960 reworking, which ranks among his finest films. Mocking the chauvinism of the older generation, Ozu follows the efforts of a trio of pompous salarymen to marry off the widowed Hara and her twentysomething daughter, Yôko Tsukasa.
Static camerawork and precise interiors reinforce the mood of formalism, but it’s amusingly shattered by Tsukasa’s co-worker, whose feisty appeal for constructive change contrasts with the angry iconoclasm of the incoming nuberu bagu. This is a superb example of the gendai-geki brand of petit-bourgeois melodrama.