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Equinox Flower
(Higan-bana)

Screening on Film
Directed by Yasujiro Ozu.
With Shin Saburi, Kinuya Tanaka, Ineko Arima.
Japan, 1958, 35mm, color, 120 min.
Japanese with English subtitles.

Ozu’s first film made in color is both a delicate elegy and delectable comedy—the portrait of a domestic tyrant at odds with his liberated daughter, who shuns the idea of arranged marriage. A succession of quietly implosive epiphanies, Equinox Flower combines the director’s signature visual precision with color coding (with special use of Ozu’s favorite, red) that underscores key elements of the environment. As the father is slowly won over, he sums up the director’s own sense of life’s capriciousness: “Everyone is inconsistent now and then, except God. Life is full of inconsistencies. The sum total of all the inconsistencies of life is life itself.”

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