Equinox Flower (1958)
Directed by Yasujirô Ozu

Film Review

Equinox Flower (a.k.a. Higanbana) marked yet another turning point in the career of filmmaker Yasujirô Ozu, his first colour film.  It had been seven years since Keisuke Kinoshita had made Japan's first colour feature, Carmen Comes Home, and Ozu's first foray into the medium was more or less foisted on him by his bosses at Shôchiku, in an attempt to capitalise on their latest prized asset, Fujiko Yamamoto.  One of the most popular young actresses of the time, and easily one of the most photogenic, Yamamoto was under contract to rival company Daiei when she was loaned out to Shôchiku.  It seems unlikely that Ozu, a committed ensemble director, would employ someone of Yamamoto's star status in any of his films, but he made good use of her talents in what is little more than a glorified cameo role, playing a character that typifies his notion of modern youth: the carefree individualist.

The film came about when Ozu abandoned his plans to remake his earlier film A Story of Floating Weeds (1934) owing to an unusually mild spell of weather in the early months of 1958.  This provided an opportunity for Ozu to fulfil a longstanding ambition, to adapt a novel by one of his favourite writers, Ton Satomi, who had become a near-neighbour of his after his move to Kamakura in 1952.  In the end, Ozu and Satomi agreed to develop a script and novel together in parallel, the result being Equinox Flower, named after the red lycoris, a kind of amaryllis that is the very essence of Japanese daintiness.

Red was the colour for which Ozu had a natural affinity, as is apparent from each of his colour films.  In Equinox Flower, the director employs a characteristically restrained palette consisting of muted greens, browns, greys and blues.  But in almost every shot there is an eye-catching speck of red that serves as an irresistible focal point.  This might be a kettle that has a strange habit of moving about at will in the main characters' living room, it might be a vase ornately laden with pretty flowers, or it might be an item of clothing on a washing line.  (The reason why Ozu opted for Agfacolor, overruling his studio's preference for Kodak's Eastmancolor or Fujifilm, was because he wanted the red to stand out more.)  There is no obvious rationale for this stylistic indulgence, but it adds to the visual composition of the film, a smattering of fairytale unreality to offset and accentuate the ordinariness of the characters' humdrum lives.  Like his Hollywood contemporary Douglas Sirk, Ozu uses colour in a mischievous and ironic vein.

Here Ozu revisits the themes of earlier films, borrowing most of the plot from Early Summer (1951) but altering his perspective slightly so that now there is no doubt he is on the side of the younger generation.  In previous films which dealt with inter-generational conflict, Ozu was broadly even-handed, sympathising both with the older folk who were wedded to the traditions of the past and the youngsters who put their own search for personal happiness before slavish adherence to convention.  This cultural dichotomy, indicative of Ozu's own ambivalence about change, is succinctly captured in one scene in Equinox Flower, where the patriarchal father Hirayama and his wife Kiyoko (played by Ozu regular Kinuyo Tanaka) reminisce on the 'good old days'.  Kiyoko has fond memories of the time when families were close and shared a common purpose; her husband can only remember the hardship, the lack of money and material well-being.  In another scene, Hirayama and his drinking buddies are seen wallowing in nostalgia, mourning the passing of a male chauvinistic age in which everyone knew her place.  "Ever with us are the dreams of our youth..."

With youth culture and female empowerment now established facts of Japanese life, Ozu would have been foolish and ludicrously out-of-date if he had not altered his position to become more pro-woman and pro-youth.  In Equinox Flower, the patriarch (Wataru Hirayama) is no longer a figure of authority but a figure of fun, a stumbling cultural dinosaur who faces being blown away by the winds of change.  Hirayama is not only a social fossil, he is also a steaming hypocrite.  He happily countenances love matches between other people's sons and daughters but when his own daughter threatens to deny him the honour of arranging a marriage for her he is transformed into a sulking reactionary tyrant.  Outflanked and out-manoeuvred by the women who surround him, including his dutiful, long-suffering wife, he becomes emasculated, the proud head of the household reduced to a scowling, self-pitying eunuch.

Comedy, so much a feature of Ozu's early films, had been pretty well absent throughout the 21 years since his 1937 film What Did the Lady Forget?  Granted, there was the small matter of World War II and the long period of austerity that followed, but Ozu's reluctance to make a single comedy over this period is hard to fathom.  With Equinox Flower, Ozu greets comedy like an old friend, eschewing the boistrous slapstick of his early years for a more brutal form of satire, mercilessly caricaturing the older generation and their out-dated attitudes.  Whether it be the increasingly desperate lengths one old lady goes to to find a husband for her daughter, or the ease with which the scheming Yukiko manages to con Hirayama into giving his accord to his daughter's marriage, Ozu's humorous assaults on traditional parental authority are as cruel as they are funny.  Yet beneath the humour there is a sustained undercurrent of regret, a sense that Ozu is witness to a world that is perhaps changing too fast for his liking.  As we watch the final shot of a departing train that calls to mind the ending of A Story of Floating Weeds, a film in which a father is irrevocably separated from his son, we too feel a pang of sorrow for the passing of a time when families were closer and more strongly bound by mutual respect and understanding.

Film Synopsis

Wataru Hirayama is a successful Tokyo businessman who is preoccupied with marrying off his eldest daughter Setsuko.  When his friend Mikami tells him that his own daughter, Fumiko, has run off with a young musician, he agrees to visit Fumiko at her place of work to try to persuade her to return home.  Fumiko refuses to comply with her father's marriage plans for her and intends to lead her own life, with the man she has fallen in love with.  Hirayama soon discovers he has the same problem with his own daughter.  Setsuko has made up her mind to marry Masahiko Taniguchi, a lowly office worker, but her father is against the match.  Despite the well-meaning interventions of his wife Kiyoko, Hirayama forbids his daughter to leave the house until he has found out more about Taniguchi.  Yukiko, a friend of Setsuko, tricks Hirayama into sanctioning his daughter's marriage and reluctantly he is forced into allowing the wedding to go ahead, although he insists he will have no part in it...