Wataru Hirayama's outwardly liberal views on marriage are severely tested when his daughter declares that she is in love with a musician and is adamant to live life her own way, instead of agreeing to an arranged marriage. Outwitted by his female relatives, Hirayama stubbornly refuses to admit defeat.
Shin Saburi Kinuyo Tanaka Ineko Arima Yoshiko Kuga Keiji Sada Teiji Takahashi Miyuki Kuwano Chishū Ryū Chieko Naniwa Fujiko Yamamoto Fumio Watanabe Nobuo Nakamura Toyo Takahashi Ryuji Kita Mutsuko Sakura Teruko Nagaoka Hisao Toake Tsûsai Sugawara Ureo Egawa Norikazu Takeda Tokuji Kobayashi Fujio Suga Kentarō Imai Masahiko Inoue Masanao Kawakane Akiko Kiyokawa Nobuko Sora Yôko Chimura Isao Suenaga Show All…
Flor do Equinócio, Higanbana, Sommerblüten, 피안화, Цветы Хиган, Spider Lily, Fiori di equinozio, Fiori d'equinozio, Fleurs d'équinoxe, Flores de equinoccio, A napéjegyenlőség virága, A Flor do Equinócio, Ekinoks çiçeği, Flor de Equinócio
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Rio de Janeiro International Film Festival
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Brazil14
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It tastes better when I pay, regardless of how cheap it is.
in order to flourish, the younger generation must come out of the shell provided for them by their loved ones and feel the air fall across them, and attain a true sense of the reality with which they are to face, and one that they will be expected to change.
and that brings us to one of the largest parts of growing up, and one that Ozu captured perfectly, is that feeling of coming to the realisation that parental figures, and other family figures, are merely the same as a stranger you walk past in the street one day, or a friend you may have known for a…
Yasujirō Ozu’s Equinox Flower, so named after the delicate, scarlet-hued Lycoris radiata, is his first color outing and marks a return to comedy for the filmmaker after a 21-year stretch of straight dramas through the years of WWII and the austerity period directly following them. Though the decision to shoot in color was the studio’s (to best showcase the photogenic qualities of starlet-on-loan Fujiko Yamamoto), Ozu thoughtfully opted for German-made Agfacolor film—over studio-preferred Kodak Eastmancolor or Fujifilm—for its ability to better convey red hues. So while Ozu employs a characteristically muted palette of blues, browns, grays and greens, nearly each scene is punctuated by an injection of vibrant red—whether it be the design on a kimono or obi, the carpet…
"Can't I find my own happiness?"
As would be the case in the following decade with Orson Welles' The Immortal Story, Yasujirō Ozu's sudden late-career turn from black-and-white to color photography in Equinox Flower (彼岸花) reflected a capitulation to producers rather than an aesthetic evolution on the director's part. Though in my opinion both masters took to their imposed medium like fish to water, Ozu savored the transition and never returned to the black-and-white format, while Welles remained forever ambivalent about using color ("a great friend in need to the cameraman but it's an enemy of the actor") despite having to do so with increasing regularity in order to obtain financing—a sad story but admittedly one for another day.
Like Late…
Equinox Flower is not the first film in which Ozu dealt with changing nature of society and relationships in '50s Japan, but it's certainly among his more convincing, especially when compared to his previous effort, Tokyo Twilight.
The film is about a stern, workaholic businessman Hirayama who hypocritically sympathizes with the dilemmas of the young as long as they aren't his own brood. He's the sort of Japanese patriarch who advises young people to pursue love over marriage, but when it is his own daughter's sudden, unexpected engagement he isn't very pleased. He is one of Ozu most memorable characters. Maybe it's because the conflict he he struggles over is still relevant today.
This is certainly one of Ozu's most…
No matter how many times one watches an Ozu film, it never gets old. The only other Japanese director I can say that about is Mizoguchi.
Contrary to popular belief, Ozu didn't want to shoot this film in color. He didn't want to shoot any film in color. But he gave into studio's demands. As you would expect, his use of color is a bit awkward and not particularly subtle. He didn't exactly use every color in the book, but he relies on a few quite a bit. It helps him that this is one of his more static films.
Generally speaking, Ozu films are variations on a theme. In postwar years, the tension between tradition and modernity became a…
Perhaps the oddest film I can think of is this: an Ozu film that does not leave me feeling emotionally devastated. I was taken aback by the ending with its openly hopeful tone. The beautiful colors, bright but not garish, accentuate Ozu's usual melodrama, combining with the eventual uplift naturally, as if the shift in medium is what inspired the shift in tone, or as if Ozu's--dare I say it--happiness spilled onto the celluloid somehow.
The moment the father says something about his daughter making such an important decision without him struck me powerfully; having made important decisions this year without a lot of consultation with anyone, exactly, especially not family, it resonated oddly. It was just enough to send…
For someone who never married or had children and spent most of his adulthood living with his mother, it is rather noteworthy how keen an insight Ozu Yasujirô offers in this film through the behavior of his protagonist, Hirayama Wataru (touchingly played by Saburi Shin), toward his daughter (Arima Ineko) upon learning that she wants to get married. While the differences in class (between the family and the prospective husband) and ideology (the hitherto secret relationship; the manner in which Hirayama becomes aware of the couple's immediate plans) certainly play a role in his initial refusal, Ozu also hints at something more primitive: a jealousy or rivalry based on the fact that another man could supplant him in her life.…
Ozu's first color film is an absolute stunner.
How does he keep making masterpiece after masterpiece? Why haven't any of you seen this? Why is this so unsung, so uncelebrated? More amazingly, how does Ozu keep finding ways to tell the same story over and over yet transcend each version with new, invigorating perspectives?
EQUINOX FLOWER (1958) is basically a retelling of EARLY SUMMER (1951) but with a much bigger ironic twist. Yes, familiar Ozu ground is covered: a liberated daughter chooses her own marriage at odds with the arranged plans of her parents; the relations between fathers and daughters are stuck in a generational quagmire; and traditional Japan is quietly subdued by modern Japan. But what makes this story…
I wish more fiction writers would pay close attention to the collaborations between Ozu and screenwriter Kogo Noda. Equinox Flower, for example, is "just" a string of short, talky scenes that incrementally develop the plot. The conversations tend to be about family and marriage, though sometimes they're more tangential. Most are experienced via room-encompassing tatami shots. (Red teapots often dot the foreground, as this is Ozu's first color film.) Few have what we might think of as conventional dramatic impact.
Yet such a full picture accumulates by the end: of Japan's postwar middle-class and its gender dynamics in general; of the Hirayama family, with its internal gambits and compromises, in particular. The storytelling is gentle, assured, and honest, not to…
“She’ll do just fine without you.”
One of the strangest moments in my life was when the change finally caught up with me. I had embarked on the most significant change of my life, ventured out on my own. I had grown and changed so much in such a short time in ways I didn’t even realize when suddenly I caught a glimpse of myself and realized I had grown up.
It was a bittersweet revelation. As I struggled with it, I turned to film, something that always helped me connect with those feelings I couldn’t articulate or work through. Ozu was a natural choice, and Equinox Flower was the incessantly vibrant, quietly touching cinematic soul food I needed tonight.
This…
Sixty in September: 21/60
Wow. I have this feeling every time I step back into Ozu's world. Tokyo Twilight was the Ozu film I've seen most recently. And I loved it. It takes place in winter. It is cold, fully of lonely places, and lost souls. Full of misunderstandings and hardened hearts. It seemed made for black and white, for midnight.
In color, this film is a whole new world. A rebirth. An explosion. I was in awe continually. The palette is incredible. Warm, full of reds, oranges, yellows, and earth tones. There is a constant movement from interior spaces to outdoor pillow shots. But, more than in any other Ozu I've seen, he chooses natural scenes or objects. We…
Not Another Director Binge
Ozu Marathon: Part Twelve
Ozu loves to explore shifting cultural values by examining the difference between the pre- and post-war generations' attitudes towards marriage, family, and domesticity, and here we get a kind of inversion of one of his common structures: rather than the marriageable daughter who resists arranged marriages in order to stay home and take care of her aging parents (e.g. Late Spring, Early Summer), here we find the marriageable daughter who resists arranged marriages in order to marry for love rather than for financial comfort and convenience.
There's a feminist bent to all of Ozu's marriage pictures, which perhaps reaches its peak in Late Autumn with its almost comically impotent patriarchy and its…
