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. Out of such themes-the stuff of soap opera-Ozu creates his masterworks. Ozu is a consummate director who, like Godard and Bresson, is better known for a style than for individual films. He is one of the world's great comic directors; he is also one of its greatest precisionists. The exactness of Equinox Flower-made in 1958 and Ozu's first color film-is apparent everywhere: in the formal pattern of camera set-ups, in the opaque non-expressive acting, in the framework of parallel plots, and most of all in the exquisite design of his spatial editing. Why Ozu is not only a much greater, but also a more interesting director than, say, Buñuel or Tati, is that he has worked out a form that perfectly expresses and accompanies what he wants to say. The form of Ozu's films is designed to induce a certain tranquility in the spectator, a state of spiritual balance that is itself the subject of his films. 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." Russell Merritt