A Film Canon

Equinox Flower retains the sensory and sensual intensity of Tokyo Twilight, but inverts it's pessimistic, noir-inflected darknesses into Ozu's first, riotous use of colour, as well as translating its particular fascination with female viscera from a melodramatic to comic register - most memorably in a medical examination that reduces a character's body to a mere conduit for a series of vividly coloured concoctions, but most pervasively in Ozu's use of wayward daughter Setsuko's (Ineko Arima) defiant lipstick as a colour anchor, from which the most lurid, Westernised - and yet indelibly romantic - depictions of Tokyo in his late work seem to be extrapolated, and which offsets the extended, silent gazes around which his trademark conversations tend to be edited, precluding the sublime, melancholy serenity of the older generation in a similar manner to the earlier film. In fact, Equinox Flower goes even further than Tokyo Twilight in its infantilisation of the parental generation, presenting the most contradictory, confused father in Ozu's career (Shin Saburi), and compounding his nostalgia for submissive children with a nostalgia for effective parents; or, alternatively, transforming the war from the ultimate occasion of nostalgia to the object of it: "Remember...we would rush to the shelters...I reminisce about those times...we were together as a family then." Combined with the added compositional nuances of colour, this may explain the film's particular preoccupation with ceremony - whether in the form of Ozu's (uncharacteristic) decision to not merely display a wedding ceremony, but open with one, or the pervasive structural and fantastic investment in the traditional figure of the 'go-between' and the reconcilation - and differentiation - of generations he fleetingly embodies.