by Colin Marshall
To modern Western viewers — and even to a lot of modern Eastern viewers — the films of Yasujirō Ozu, with their rigorously mannered appearance and undeniably narrow topical range, feel neither accessible nor relevant. What a shame that is. The Ozu enthusiast’s typical response to dubious uninitiated friends is that, behind the aesthetic formalism, deliberately restrained acting and unshifting focus on the midcentury Japanese household lies a great artistic bounty. But that sounds wrong, somehow; these qualities don’t build a wall meant to keep out the unworthy viewer, nor do they simply emerge as the by-products of a peculiar authorial process. They’re the very architecture of Ozu’s style, the struts supporting, the spaces accommodating and the entryways leading us into what’s so stunningly effective about his films.
Ozu was a craftsman. The analogy is hardly unique to me — best of luck finding a film writer who hasn’t made it — but it clicks so well that employing it is irresistible. From the late 1920s to the early 1960s, Ozu directed over fifty films, refining (and occasionally expanding) his cinematic technique with each one, using similar elements every time but honing the skill with which he united them. Save for a few very early projects, all of his movies are, broadly speaking, thematically and compositionally alike. In his exceptional book on the filmmaker’s life and work, Japanese film scholar Donald Richie observes that Ozu “had but one major subject, the Japanese family, and but one major theme, its dissolution,” that “the conventionality of the events in the Ozu film is even by Japanese standards extreme” and that these films “are shot from an almost invariable angle, that of a person sitting on the tatami matting of the Japanese room.”
That a stationary camera, mundane subject matter and the same elements revisited over and over (Ozu even recycled character names from script to script) comes as a turn-off to filmgoers today is perhaps unsurprising. But just one viewing of an Ozu film — practically any Ozu film — should suffice to make a solid case of why these aren’t necessarily negatives. Ozu’s priority was not showing his audience the world, nor showing them experiences alien to their own, nor forcing them to observe from unconventional vantage points. He was concerned with one element above all else, an element compared to which all the others were merely unwanted opportunities for distraction.
That element is character, and at the center of 1958’s Equinox Flower, the onetime black-and-white stalwart’s debut in glorious Agfacolor, stands one of Ozu’s most fascinating. Portrayed by former matinee heartthrob Shin Saburi, the middle-aged Wataru Hirayama starts the film looking like just another of Ozu’s upper-middle-class patriarchs. But he’s quickly humanized at the wedding of a friend’s daughter, when he’s called upon to deliver an impromptu speech. He expresses admiration for the bride and groom, a couple who managed to come together without their parents’ hands arranging it, and half-jokingly nods toward his envy, his own marriage having been of the “unromantic” arranged variety. When a colleague later visits Hirayama’s office and confides his worry about his uncommunicative daughter who’s moved in with her boyfriend, Hirayama readily agrees to help out by visiting the bar at which she works and having a talk with her.
