Flor de equinoccio

User reviewer Martin-f has an excellent summary ("Ozu at the top his game", martin-f from United Kingdom, 24 April 2006).

'Equinox Flower' is an incredible example of film art. It is my favorite (so far) film of Yasujirō Ozu. Ozu is a daring filmmaker because he handicaps himself almost completely. All of his contemporaries were moving their camera (e.g., the spectacular single-shot opening of Orson Welles's 1958 "Touch of Evil"). Ozu refuses to.

Ozu also refuses to provide dramatic subject material besides family arguments over whom a young girl marries. He also frequently has the camera on the floor looking up at his characters when they are seated, which is often. The actors are never allowed to veer off script, which often is banal dialogue. Finally, most of Ozu's imagery appears like a painting. This is Ozu's first color film; he makes quite a remarkable splash in this medium.

This is regarded as a comedy/romance. We should also say it concerns Japanese manners and patriarchy. We often see in Ozu's films a husband returning to the home from work, removing layers of his clothing and dropping them on the floor for his dutiful wife to take care of. (If Western males tried this there would be Hell to pay.) We see it multiple times here, and this husband/wife interaction helps identify the power relationship between big CEO and patriarch Wataru Hirayama (Shin Saburi) with his wife Kiyoko (Kinuyo Tanaka). At the film's opening when Wataru makes an impromptu speech at a wedding, he insults Kiyoko by publicly lamenting forced marriages like the one he had. Needless to day, Ozu does not plan on Kiyoko enduring these insults forever. She turns out to be a formidable rival.

There are three other young women. The woman playing daughter Sesuko's friend is great (i.e., who plays the pivotal trick on Wataru). She has a great role and she plays it very well.

Finally, Ozu's visual aesthetics are very well chosen and delightful. If you have the patience for 'Equinox Flower', it is very worthwhile.

Businessman Wataru (Shin Saburi) is continually approached by his friends and co-workers for advice and help, especially when it concerns potential marriages for their daughters. He is approached by Mikami (Ozu regular Chisu Ryu) who is concerned that his daughter has gone off with a man from a lesser family with a low-paid job. He agrees to meet her and try to talk some sense into her. One day at work, he is approached by a man named Maniguchi (Keiji Sada) who asks for his daughter's hand in marriage. Wataru is horrified that his daughter Setsuko (Ineko Arima) has been seeing this man without his knowledge, and insists that marrying him is not the right decision.

Japanese master is again on familiar ground with this gentle drama. Again, he explores themes of family, and change in a post-war Japanese society. Wataru is not a traditionalist by nature - he is generally quite open-minded, but only when it comes to his friend's families. When he has tea with one of Setsuko's friends, she explains how her mother is obsessed with finding her a match with a man with a decent job and background. Wataru is agreed that her mother is stuck in her ways. It becomes clear that Wataru is simply a father who cannot let go of his daughter. It's a sentiment that anyone, even those without children, can relate to.

Ozu does make a point of showing the increasing differences in attitudes between the generations. The parents are children of war. Wataru and his wife Kiyoko (Kinuyo Tanaka) discuss memories of being in the bomb shelters. Ozu doesn't want us to see the elders as narrow-minded and old-fashioned, but instead as people who grew up with danger and death all around them, and clearly hold protection and security in high regard, and for good reason. However, Ozu does show the women of Equinox Flower as the stronger sex, and the biggest advocates for change. Kiyoko tries to change Wataru's mind, but realises that this is a decision he will make on his own.

The film is full of Ozu's usual traits, including the usual gorgeous cinematography - and this is his first to be shot in colour. His camera is ever-still, watching from low angles, usually through doorways. He is offering his audience a window into these people's lives, and allows them to give their naturalistic courtesies as they would if no-one was watching. It is a delight watching a true master at work, and it's amazing how he finds fresh and fascinating ways to explore similar themes. I've never seen any of his films that haven't been anything less than brilliant, and I'm still to see his widely celebrated Tokyo Story (1953). An absolute delight.

www.the-wrath-of-blog.blogspot.com

This is Ozu's first color film, and also one of his more lighthearted later films. It also stands out as perhaps his first film where he unambiguously takes the side of rebellious youth over the wisdom of age.

In a universally great cast, Shin Saburi plays a typical Japanese father - a successful executive with a nice home life, two lovely daughters, and a dutiful wife. He is, by the standards of the time, an open minded and liberal man who, we see from the very beginning, welcomes the idea of a marriage based on love, rather than the more traditional arrangements, such as his own marriage. He is also very much a hypocrite as he (provoked by a clumsy attempt to ask for his hand) refuses his elder daughter permission to marry the man she loves. His objection to the marriage has less to do with the suitor than, it seems, his feelings that his paternal authority has been undermined.

As with all Ozu films, it gradually meanders to its close with a general acceptance by all the characters that life goes on and that only by tolerating each other can society move forward. The tone of the film is more comic than usual (some very amusing scenes), and it lacks the emotional punch of some other Ozu films. It is a bit more loosely plotted than usual, with an unusually contrived plot by Ozu standards, but its still a pleasant and wise film.

One standout performance is the quietest of them all - the great actress Kinuyo Tanaka plays the traditional wife. In one crucial scene, the camera lingers on her face as she is quietly absorbed in listening to music on the radio - telling us all we need to know about this woman who has sacrificed her individuality for her husband and family. It is in little moments of magic like this that Ozu films show why they are essential viewing - this film, while not one of his major works, is no exception.

This line uttered by Ozu favorite, Chishu Ryu, toward the end of the story helps sum up the mixture of comedy and melancholy that pervades this excellent film. The other reviewers have well described the amusing irony of Wataru Harayama's (Shin Saburi) avuncular support of his friends' daughters' desires to marry for love but his shocked resistance when he finds out about his own daughter's similar desires. But alongside Ozu's depiction of the daughters' plans for their futures is that of the fathers' nostalgia for their pasts.

Harayama, Ryu's character Mikami, and their other friends from middle school days have stayed in touch and regularly compare notes about their carefree days before their own arranged marriages, workday routines, and worries about their daughters. In one scene of a class reunion they wear uniforms, sing songs, and recite elegiac poems. And the one wife we meet, Harayama's (brilliantly played by Kinuyo Tanaka), who has stoically borne her husband's discontent all these years, sees her patience rewarded as she becomes the bridge between him and his daughter.

One other note of reality--Yukiko, the delightfully liberated daughter of a family friend who conspires with Harayama's daughter to play a crucial trick on Harayama, was played by Fujiko Yamamoto who lit up every scene she was in. I wondered why I hadn't heard more about her, and found out from Wikipedia that at the height of her popularity in 1963, when her contract was up for renewal, she asked for some better terms and the head of her studio (Daiei) not only fired her but invoked an agreement with the other studios to prevent her from being hired by any of them. She never made another film. That's another glimpse of old Japan.

Ozu is such a pleasure, a quiet one, meditative.

The story here is about lives, whether they are arranged and what agency we have in arranging them. Many viewers will suppose that the topic was chosen because of some desire to make a comment about Japanese society.

No, its because the filmmaker had turned introspective in his later years. His films are characterized by the way the shots are composed. Each one is a matter of absolute perfection. The perfection is so complete, you have to stop and study. You have to rerun certain scenes to see how amazingly the components arrange. He is the ultimate classical Japanese composer. Sometimes you see that the sets must have been especially built for one setup. Pure geometries and symmetries dominate. The camera is always static.

The effect is that what you see has nature. Its natural, human. It flows in much the same languid, undramatic way that life does around us. But what we see is that flow in a highly composed context. Every element in that context naturally occurs but seems to have found its own harmony to please the eye of the viewer. Its the cinematic Japanese garden.

There's a subtle thing here. Ordered nature presented so that the human composition seems so in tune with nature that we love it. But it is arranged. It is pure and unnatural too, sort of abstractly sublime.

This viewer is a Westerner who works with Japanese concepts of ideal, natural harmony. Watching this makes me cry with a pleasure that avoids being joy.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.