Equinox Flower

Ozu is one of the more interesting directors to address the issues of urbanization and modernization. This film looks at young women in postwar Japan who want to break the cycle of miai and the traditions that try to call them back to it.

Ozu has an amazing sense of the urban landscape and the contrast between the modern and the traditional. This film has the added bonus of color, a feature which Ozu uses effectively in the 1950s Japanese home and as well as at the office. His obsession with the ways in which modern people work and the buildings that facilitate this work leads to shots that set the scenes for his films in ways that other directors neglect. In other words, Ozu understands that a simple shot of men washing windows on a skyscraper, a row of green chairs framed in suits, or a home decorated with a printed cotton table cloth and a Bakelite radio provide us with an understanding of the setting that is difficult to achieve through simple dialogue.

I often see Ozu's films as remarkably feminist in their critiques of a paternalistic society where married women are servants to their husbands, but I wonder if this is my interpretation from a half of a century down the road. At any rate, they clearly examine gender in a critical and insightful way.