Sixth Annual Allan Fish Online Film Festival – Day #4: Equinox Flower (Yasujirō Ozu, 1958)

BRIEF THOUGHTS ON OZU’S FIRST COLOR FILM, AND A HUMBLE ODE TO ALLAN’S HAIKU-LIKE ESSAY STRUCTURE

by Robert Hornak

After absorbing most of his prodigious catalog before it, Ozu’s first color film becomes my own Dylan-goes-electric moment. The first scene, Hirayama (Shin Saburi) giving a speech at the wedding of a friend’s daughter, feels like Ozu trying out his new toy on that unsuspecting ceremony. Coming directly off so many black-and-white masterpieces, the color here feels delicately correct, but a bit too careful, even dare I say unsure. Like a master baker putting finishing touches on the top tier of a five-decker cake, wherein mastery is still subject to gravity. One can sense, not quite excitement, but tension created by the color that is counter to the reflective soul of his previous movies. This color has the power to make me nostalgic for that feeling. But this is a luxury more than a legitimate regret, and more my problem than that of the great director. For the color’s power is just what Ozu seems to be reaching for, tempering. A shot of a clutch of flowers in a vase near the beginning of the film, or the arrestingly bright redness of his ubiquitous, ever-obliging teapot, is a dare exacted upon the shot, an admonishment to our expectations, perhaps a challenge to us, to test our own ability to still find the simple, unassuming beauty in something so vibrantly attention-getting. There is also something about the color that makes the editing more noticeable, so the story feels less fluid – when we’ve been trained by him over dozens of films to find stability, even meaning, in only, say, graphic rhymes or mathematical geography, then any cut to audacious color demands notice, and these edits supply a jolt. 

But everything else we expect to see in an Ozu film is there, all of what Allan himself called Ozu’s “perfunctorily perfect” world. The precise compositions, the yearning music, the common, fly-on-the-wall dialogue. Soon the color becomes ensnared in the rigid simplicity of Ozu’s singular, tatami-level perspective and it, too, is tamed into quiet submission, no longer an affront to the sense of temporal distance one automatically feels, and is often comforted by, in his black-and-white movies. Yet meanwhile, there’s a psychological justification in the mix: the boldness of color matches the new level of openly bold young characters – Setsuko (Ineko Arima) levels more than a bit of moxie toward her father Hirayama over the subject of whom she wishes to marry, where previous entries showcased the classically demure approach amongst the daughters of paternal marriage-arranging. Likewise, Hirayama presents a more threateningly stern father figure in this film. There’s some of this parental impression in Ozu’s final black-and-white film, the previous year’s Tokyo Twilight, and sometimes before that, but color cinches it all up into a whole. Here there’s an overt hostility, not just the usual undercurrent, born out consistently in Hirayama’s gruff face, especially when contrasted with the more sad and wistful expression of Ozu’s usual paternal muse, Chishū Ryū. It seems in a single film, Ozu has gone from essentially prim and reserved to allowing his characters to embrace deeper (more colorful?) wells of anger, resentment, romantic frustration.

Ozu’s reluctance to apply color to his films is known, but his eventual assent finds seeming peace within consideration of the film’s Japanese title, Higanbana (彼岸花), which translates as “flower of autumn equinox”, or one could say “flower of early autumn”, or one could go further and simply call the film “Early Autumn”, in keeping with so many of Ozu’s titles in his later period: Late Spring (1949), Early Summer (1951), Early Spring (1956), Late Autumn (1960), etc. Why does Ozu pull out a specific element of early autumn as his title rather than rely on his trusty seasonal construct? Perhaps it’s his excuse – to use color. The higanbana only sprouts at the equinox, is bright red, and can be found growing in copious amounts in graveyards. “Higan” means “other shore” and the flower appears when the night, full of ghosts of ancestors unruly and otherwise, has begun to get longer, the better darkened berth to wrangle the sins of the past. Ironically, it’s only the female variety of the plant that made its way to Japan (they’re originally from China), thus they cannot reproduce by wind-blown pollen, but only from bulbs. Let’s just go ahead and be explicit: a Japanese higanbana can only find purchase via an arranged marriage with the dirt. A key scene features Hirayama talking to Fumika, a friend’s daughter, about the struggles she has with her father’s way of thinking about marriage. The girl says, “Father doesn’t have to worry about me.” And Hirayama responds, “Things don’t work that way.” This is spoken by Ozu’s human representation of a philosophy the film is pushing past, into a new way of thinking that shatters the black-and-white of the old world. Yet this retrograde sentiment remains as good a summary of Ozu’s entire body of work as I’ve seen. We must accept Hirayama’s point of view in traditional shades of black-and-white, but we feel the thrust of the change around him in full, blossoming color.