Equinox Flower Reviews

EQUINOX FLOWER was one of the great Yasujiro Ozu's last films, and his first in color. Dealing with his usual theme of middle-class Japanese families and the problems between parents and their children, this time there is a new emphasis on youth, as the daughter of a middle-aged businessman dares to defy him in choosing a man of her own to marry. At the wedding party of a friend, Wataru Hirayama (Shin Saburi) gives a toast to the newlyweds. When he goes home, his daughter tells him that she hates the idea of pre-arranged marriages, and so does her sister Setsuko (Ineko Arima). The next day, a young man named Taniguchi (Kenji Sata) whom Wataru has never met, comes to Wataru's office and suddenly asks for Setsuko's hand in marriage. Wataru is shocked and says no. When he goes home, he asks Setsuko why he and his wife have never met or even heard of this young man. Setsuko goes to Taniguchi and brings him home to meet her mother, who immediately approves of him, but her father remains stubbornly resistant. He asks someone at his office who knows Taniguchi what he's like, and hires an investigator to find out more about him. Wataru and his wife have a big fight over the situation, with her telling him he's being selfish. He goes to the golf course where a friend tells him that Wataru's wife has asked him to act as a go-between for Setsuko's upcoming nuptials. Wataru grudingly agrees to attend the wedding, but still refuses to give his approval. At an alumni reunion after the wedding, Wataru and his friends talk about how they're getting old and that parents eventually have to give way to their children. Wataru then goes on a trip to see some friends, who tell him he should visit Setsuko and her new husband to make up with them. He agrees to do it and boards a train, whistling a song to himself as the car speeds down the tracks toward Hiroshima. At one point in EQUINOX FLOWER, Setsuko pleads to her father, "Can't I find my own happiness?" That question succinctly summarizes the key theme of most Ozu movies--how family members feel the need to interfere in a person's search for fulfillment. Usually, they think they're acting in the best interests of the other party, but the result is invariably sadness and disappointment for both parties. In EQUINOX FLOWER, however, there is a happy ending, with Wataru reconciled to his daughter's new life and accepting the fact that parents must let their children go at some point. In most of Ozu's films, the opposite is the case, with the children interfering in their parents' lives. But EQUINOX FLOWER seems to show Ozu consciously moving toward a new emphasis on modern society, with its impersonal office buildings and high-rise apartment complexes, and the problems of the younger generation. This also extends to the film's style as well, utilizing color film for the first time, albeit in a typically restrained and unostentatious way. The color merely serves to point out the contrasts between the beauty of the country, with its lovely landscapes, mountains and lakes, and the garish red and blue lights of the city, with its bars and commercial neon signs, including an amusing shot of the MGM Lion and the RCA-Victor logo. Of color, Ozu said that "It's all right once in a while, but if you see it all the time...you get fed up with it." The overall style is even more controlled than usual, with a typical lack of fades or dissolves and no camera movement at all. As in LATE SPRING (1949), Ozu eschews formula standards of dramatic convention by omitting the actual scene of the wedding ceremony, choosing instead to focus on its planning and consequences. The result is poignant and moving, and if EQUINOX FLOWER is not one of Ozu's greatest films, it's still a gentle and touching late work from this master. The irony of Ozu's life and art is that the man who made some of the most incisive and perceptive films ever about familes, never had one of his own--he lived with his mother his entire life.