In the wake of his wife’s death, aging Shuhei Hirayama (Chishu Ryu) struggles to maintain balanced relationships with his three children. He tends to spoil his eldest, the happily married Kazuo (Shinichiro Mikami), who spends more of his father’s money than his own. The middle child, 24-year-old Michiko (Shima Iwashita), is looking for love herself, but feels obligated to run Shuhei’s household and care for his youngest child, teenaged Koichi (Keiji Sada), who can’t connect with his father.

This last film by Yasujiro Ozu was also his final masterpiece, a gently heartbreaking story about a man’s dignified resignation to life’s shifting currents and society’s modernization. Though the widower Shuhei (frequent Ozu leading man Chishu Ryu) has been living comfortably for years with his grown daughter, a series of events leads him to accept and encourage her marriage and departure from their home. As elegantly composed and achingly tender as any of the Japanese master’s films, An Autumn Afternoon is one of cinema’s fondest farewells.