Where the Stress Falls

Equinox Flower and Ozu's Balanced Sensibility

Yasujiro Ozu's Equinox Flower (1958) was his first color film, and on the surface might have marked a significant shift for him; yet, in many ways, the film is remarkably consistent with his body of work. His static, low-level shots frame the actors and the interiors of homes; the narrative is economical and tightly controlled; the encroaching imprint of the West appears in subtle, seemingly cursory signs and conversations; the private dilemmas of families develop in simple, quiet, yet irrevocable ways. In addition to all these staples of his films, Equinox Flower reveals another consistent characteristic of Ozu's artistry: how his work is moving and meaningful in the simplest, gentlest manner, in the flash of a smile, the nod of a head, the turn of a frown, the expressive affirmation of a single "yes", the brief stare into the distance. After a crucial confrontation between Wataru Hirayama (Shin Saburi, pictured above) and his wife, Kiyoko (Kinuyo Tanaka), about their daughter's marriage plans, Ozu lingers on Kiyoko's slightly down-turned face as the complexity and the potential outcomes of her family's trouble manifest in her eyes and the curve of her mouth. In this patriarchal culture, Ozu has afforded the family matriarch the respect and emotional space she deserves and has allowed her to express her true self, to prove that she is hardly the compliant wife she is expected to be.

Ozu's respect for women marks Equinox Flower as the creation of a sympathetic mind. Setsuko (Ineki Arima), the Hirayamas' eldest daughter, wants to break with tradition by finding a husband by herself; her friend, Yukiko (Fujiko Yamamoto), gingerly resists her own mother's pressure to get her to marry an affluent physician. These women are representatives of a younger, more individualistic generation, one yearning to be free of burdensome traditions, and their confrontation with the unbending representative (namely, Wataru) of an old-fashioned generation forms the central drama of this film. Kiyoko, not entirely unsympathetic to her husband's concern about Setsuko's financial future, has the unenviable but vital task of finding the middle ground between parties whose vision of modern life is influenced not only by age but by seemingly irreconcilable values. Ozu presents Kiyoko in neutral colors, has her stand next to the bright red radio that broadcasts music through the Hirayamas' living room. By contrast, Wataru increasingly becomes shrouded by dark browns and grays, particularly after Setsuko returns home from visiting her boyfriend, when Wataru emerges from the cool darkness of an unlit room to confront his daughter. (Equinox Flower is not dramatically different from Ozu's other late work; the new color palette only, though nicely, augmented his methods for conveying his themes of conflict.)

Brilliantly, Ozu uses a form of narrative counterpoint to turn Wataru into one of his greatest of character studies. At the film's opening, Wataru, as a wedding guest, explains his envy for newlyweds who married out of love, not arrangement, while he coarsely recalls the old Japanese traditions that forged his own marriage; yet he cannot bestow the same grace upon his own daughter. To obtain a better understanding of his own family situation, Wataru meets with Fumiko (Yoshiko Kuga), an old friend's daughter who has broken custom by moving in with her boyfriend. While he listens intently, she admits she's happy, despite her lover's lowly and uncertain economic status; later, Yukiko asks Wataru for marital advice, and he tells her to marry whomever she wants. Yet he will not afford Setsuko any of these same considerations (and his attempt to give Fumiko spending money illustrates just how anxious he is about these women's economic futures). Most of all, in a particularly tender moment, Kiyoko reminisces about the family's togetherness during the war, despite their poverty. Wataru counters her memory by expressing his disdain for the experience, and, here, the truth of his character emerges.

He is not, in Ozu's beautifully balanced portrait, despicable; stubborn, to be sure, but not despicable. His adherence to the apparent wisdom of arranged marriages, his nearly monomaniacal focus on the economic stature of his daughter's potential husband, his resistance to Setsuko's desire for individual freedom, are the natural result of having lived through the hardships brought on by the Second World War. His stubbornness, additionally, is the natural response of a man accustomed, for most of his adult life, to supporting his family by working in characterless, uniform, drab-gray offices, by being a member of a society that has emphasized productivity, efficiency, security, and risk-free choices. And by keeping these elements either in the background, or by referring to them tangentially, Ozu never resorts to jejune commentaries on societal conditions, never lets Wataru's past experiences take the onus entirely away from his own personal idiosyncrasies, and, most of all, never entirely condemns Wataru or men with similar old-world concerns.

Instead, after observing how Wataru struggles to accept a younger generation's values and choices, Ozu places him in the center of the film's foremost symbol of transition, namely, a train. Wataru leaves the family's dilemmas behind him, both spatially and emotionally, traveling towards Hiroshima, Japan's own epicenter of change, where his daughter will likely find a new life, and where further transitions will undoubtedly, yet wonderfully, occur.

Late Autumn

In an era in which cinema, particularly in the United States, exemplifies what Susan Sontag once called a "combinatory and re-combinatory art," surviving on rehashed ideas, many filmmakers could learn a significant amount about cinema from a master like Yasujiro Ozu. His Late Autumn (1960) might not share the beautifully sustained and serene tone of his earlier masterpiece, Late Spring (1949), but it has the same essential story: a widowed parent, reliant on an only child, must ensure that the cycles of family and life continue by helping that child marry, even at the price of ensuing loneliness. The child feels a deep bond with the parent, fears change, and worries that a new relationship will entail the cruel abandonment of another. "That is how it is with parents and children," Akiko, played by the great Japanese actress Setsuko Hara, tells her daughter, Ayako (Yoko Tsukasa).

Using different source material, Ozu reworked the essential narrative of Late Spring by altering the relationship (mother and daughter, instead of father and daughter), changing the role the parent has in the daughter's marriage, and adding a trio of meddling, middle-aged businessmen whose machinations to find Ayako a suitor illustrate Japan's continuing patriarchal traditions, while their own eventual manipulation by one of Ayako's young friends suggests the very decline of those traditions ("we are no match for the girls these days," one of the men remarks). Like many of Ozu's family dramas, Late Autumn quietly delineates a single family's dilemmas and a national culture in flux; one of the men's daughters wears American clothes, attends baseball games, and adheres to the great post-war symbol of Americana, Elvis Presley. But Ozu's proficiency as a filmmaker ensures that each new survey of similar ideas is an achievement unto itself; here, Ozu's lighter tone and his occasional comic touches allow him to observe Japan's transitions without necessarily condemning or endorsing them.

Whatever differences Late Autumn might have with its predecessor, the similarities are more significant, particularly a quality that Michael Atkinson attributed to Late Spring that applies to the later film equally well: "Ozu's Zen-infused sensibility translates on film to something like the art form's nascent formal beauty: patiently watching little happen, and the meditative moments around the nonhappening, until it becomes crashingly apparent that lives are at stake and the whole world is struggling to be born." When the emotional drama between Akiko and Ayako finally, and fully, takes center stage, after the daughter has gradually developed a relationship with a young man, Late Autumn evolves into a richly beautiful, evocative film and narrows its focus to the changes experienced by mother and child. "If I find someone, what would you do?" Ayako asks. "Would you be lonely?" Akiko assures her that no price is too great for her child's happiness, but her daughter's omnipresence is not the only thing she'll miss; as Ozu carefully illustrates throughout the film, particularly on a vacation the the two take together, their freedom as single women will diminish as well.

Ozu renders these concerns and changes with characteristic visual skill. He traces the emotional boundaries of familial obligation, habit, expectation, and aspiration by occasionally lingering on his actors' faces, framing them in simple, centered compositions, and employing a relatively shallow depth-of-field. Moreover, at roughly an hour and twenty minutes into the film, comes a brilliant, touching moment. Mamiya (Shin Saburi), one of the meddling businessmen, tells Ayako that her mother has a chance to remarry and asks her how she feels about this. Realizing that her content, stable life with her mother will change abruptly, Ayako bows her head in sad contemplation. Ozu sustains the emotional note by showing a waitress arrive to deliver food and then cutting to a wider shot behind Ayako, as she continues to sit silently; her head remains lowered, while her presence in the center of the frame augments both her private emotional struggle and the general somberness of acknowledged, eventual separation.

This shot illustrates yet another method by which Ozu masterly observes and understands family dynamics, the complexity of transition, and people's emotional lives; he employs similar visual techniques later in the film, particularly when focusing on Akiko's seemingly tranquil but deeply felt reactions to the changes occurring around her, drawing out, as he did to moving effect in Late Spring and The End of Summer, themes of inevitable struggle and conflict. In Late Autumn, Akiko finds that life involves a struggle between freedom and sacrifice, between the independence and closeness these women shared as widow and single daughter, and Akiko's willingness to surrender their enjoyment of all that to the shifting, ensuing stages of her daughter's life.

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Michael Atkinson's statment about Late Spring taken from his essay "Home with Ozu", included with Criterion's edition of the film.

The End of Summer

Film critic Phillip Lopate once wrote that director Yasujiro Ozu's career "tends to provoke a religious hush, making it difficult for the critic to isolate the virtues and defects of individual films. Compounding the problem is Ozu's consistency: on the surface his pictures seem to share so many elements, resembling each other structurally and thematically, that it is not always possible even for an aficionado to disentangle in memory Late Autumn from An Autumn Afternoon, say."

Ozu's The End of Summer (1961), which Criterion recently released as part of their Late Ozu box set, reminds me that this is the sort of cinematic problem I don't mind facing; for if The End of Summer blurs at all into Ozu's other films, it does so at little or no expense to the experience of it. One remarkable consistency, for example, in Ozu's mature work is its austerity, which makes many other films seem needlessly, hopelessly cluttered, burdened by the excesses of plot or characterization, stifled by the affectations of style. The End of Summer is like many of Ozu's later films in this respect; without embellishment or histrionics, it focuses on family and the basic decisions that perfectly ordinary people face: whom to marry, whether or not to fulfill family expectations, how to live with the idiosyncrasies of parents and siblings, how to memorialize lost loved ones, whether to embrace or deny traditional cultural and familial values. Through conversations and, particularly, shifting points of view, these issues seep quietly into The End of Summer and move it forward unobtrusively, working like gentle undercurrents. A father surreptitiously reignites an old affair and worries his family; the family business struggles in an era of mergers and large corporations; two sisters feel pressure to marry the respectable suitors they don't love.

The film's austerity also lies, as expected, in Ozu's characteristically unadorned canvas, his trademark low-level shots, his abandonment of the zoom and the pan, and his refusal to use traditional dissolves or the closing iris. The simple, stationary "pillow" shots of the Japanese landscape and the interiors of the family's home mark narrative transition and convey spatial presence and absence, the sense of coming and going, of things changing and going awry. Noriko (Yoko Tsukasa), one of the daughters, calls the family doctor to help her ailing father, and the ring of the telephone and ensuing silence reverberate across images of empty rooms and hallways, the visual ellipsis connecting the moment of the phone call with the later instance of the doctor's diagnosis (a brilliantly simple transition, in my opinion). Akiko's (Setsuko Hara's) apparent, unexpected absence at a bar where her affluent suitor awaits underscores an unspoken but fateful decision about their potential marriage; here, Ozu shows us the effect of her decision on her suitor, but not the decision itself.

Ozu's seamless visual minimalism creates an appropriate, understated tapestry for his central concern. The End of Summer, as the title implies, is about the inevitability of change, the temptation to resist it, and the fading of tradition and the onset of modernity. Neon lights bring Osaka to life at night; the right angles of the city's concrete and steel structures stand off against the curved rooftops of older Japanese temples; the imposing figures of American suitors, shot from shortly above floor level, block the doorways and crowd the halls of a traditional Japanese home; Akiko and Noriko feel bound by family strictures but desire futures of their own; a son doubts the need to merge the family business with another but also feels the pull of a new economy. And within this rubric of change, resistance, and the gradual dilapidation of traditions, another, equally vital contrast emerges between generations and between freedom and obligation. "I'm still considering whether or not I can maintain this life," Akiko tells her sister, Noriko. Later, in one of Ozu's beautifully static compositions, Akiko and Noriko kneel, realizing that the inherent sadness of change, and particularly of painful generational transition, can bring the unexpected, bittersweet beneficence of knowing where familial obligation ends and individual freedom begins.

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Phillip Lopate's quote from "Three Ozu Films From the Fifties," in Totally, Tenderly, Tragically: Essays and Criticism from a Lifelong Love Affair with the Movies (New York, 1998).

Criterion's Late Ozu box set is part of their Eclipse series, which features basic DVD sets of films by particular directors.