Equinox Flower is about a successful businessman and his attempts to cope with a daughter who defies an arranged marriage and runs off with a pianist. Ozu's sympathy is never with one character over another, therefore ours cannot be either. Perhaps this is what makes his films, for all their designed tranquility, so wrenching. Russell Merritt writes, “Ozu was one of the great precisionists (and) the exactness of Equinox Flower (his first color film) is apparent everywhere: in the formal pattern of camera setups, in the opaque non-expressive acting, in the framework of parallel plots, and most of all in the exquisite design of his spatial editing....His fastidiousness is not just an assertion about the resources of the movies. It is also an idea about life, about what Susan Sontag called ‘the discovery of what is necessary.'”