Equinox Flower

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. Yasujiro 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, wrenching. Russell Merritt wrote: “Ozu was one of the great precisionists [and] the exactness of Equinox Flower (his first color film) is apparent everywhere. . . . His fastidiousness is not just an assertion about the resources of the movies. It is also an idea about life.” Nathaniel Dorsky noted: “Often the most intimate and poignant dialogue between two characters in an Ozu film is that between two women. In Equinox Flower, Ozu offers a progression of shots and cuts during a discussion between two women which dismantles time and space. There is no temporal reality; as a viewer you begin to float, you start to cry.”