A Hen in the Wind

In postwar Japan, a wife has to deal with the consequence of her decision when she needed her son's hospital charges during her husband's absence. The theme, women's harsh reality at the time, is exceptionally serious for Ozu. It makes Hen in the Wind uniquely and intensely emotional, combined with Ozu's style, such as off-screen actions, implicative montages, and singsong dialogues.

Ozu's first movie after the war is full of scenery that points towards a rapidly industrializing Japan. There are no remnants of what happened a handful of years ago. As a son of a single parent, I empathized with the film's protagonist. Yes, Ozu does make his character do the extreme because that makes for a far more engaging cinema.

A Hen in the Wind also manages to depict a real look at marriages and how much woes Japanese (and Southeast Asian) women were subject to. At that time, both capitalist and communist nations put out propaganda films to show their women as leaders. A Hen in the Wind.gives you an authentic peek at how much genuflecting women from these cultures had to perform in order to live a very ordinary life where poverty awaits them at every corner. The Italian film, Bicycle Thieves (released around the same time) makes a great companion piece to A Hen in the Wind. If you've loved one, you'll love the other.

Ozu's late film are far more varied than "common wisdom" would have it -- but, by any measure, "Hen in the Wind" (from 1948) is especially "atypical". This is the only Ozu film I've seen (out of 21 or 20) that has a tangible (and even raw) physicality -- it is more like proto-Imamura than "standard" Ozu (no -- Imamura was not yet working as Ozu's assistant -- that only began around 1951). Characters crawl, slither, and slide about. Sometimes, visually oversized bare feet stick into the foreground. Kinuyo Tanaka loses all self possession at the climax, and practically keens her dialog -- at a much higher pitch than I've ever heard her use in any other film.

This is an interesting story that deals with the collateral damage caused by WW2 (and the ensuing occupation) -- as it affected the lives of one young married couple. It was a flop with the audience, I guess -- so it became a path not traveled further. Artistically, it may not be completely successful, but it was a worthy effort.

Kaze no Naka no Mendori deals with a very serious social problem of the time -- the return of those away at war. Frequently supposed dead and often delayed by years after the war's end, returning soldiers came back to families that had had to make all manner of compromises and sacrifices related to their absence. Often the returnees found that their wives had re-married, or worse...

This is one such story. Unusual for Ozu in that it depicts actual physical family violence. A bit shocking if you are used to his other films, in which disapproval is often expressed with raised eyebrows and silence.

A good film with fine performances.

For a while, I've felt like Ozu's titles would work well as lines in haikus. Well, the English versions. Maybe the Japanese originals also retain the right number of syllables, but A Hen in the Wind is five syllables, like the opening line of a haiku. It's also an evocative image that instantly calls to mind potential symbolism, symbolism that follows through from the film itself, a woman caught up in circumstances outside of her control, trying to find some way to land. I do think the film, though, is one of Ozu's unsung masterpieces. This movie crushed me a bit. It's right in this perfect place between melodrama and character-based storytelling, the sort of thing Ozu is not as famous for but could obviously handle really well.

Tokiko (Kinuyo Tanaka) is married to Shuichi (Shuji Sano) who has not been home in four years since before the end of the war. Their son, Hiroshi, has no living memory of his father. Left alone for years, Tokiko has managed to carve out a half-way decent, but impoverished life, maintaining a household that feels like a home for Shuichi's return. Things go wrong with Hiroshi suddenly becomes sick, requiring medical help including ten days in the hospital, something she simply does not have the money for. Through her friend Akiko (Chieko Murata), she knows of a madame who runs a geisha house on the far side of Tokyo. Desperate, Tokiko takes the job for one night to get the money, a choice she does not share with Akiko. And then, of course, Shuichi comes home.

So, what's going on here? It feels like slightly heightened melodrama, delving a bit into the realm of scandalous with Tokiko going into prostitution (all off-screen, of course), but what elevates it above melodrama is the characters and how Ozu approaches telling stories in general. He's not interested in sensationalism (I'm actually regularly reminded of how Clint Eastwood films things), telling his stories in purposefully reserved terms, so when he does deal with stronger emotion, it stands out more. Throw in the fact that these actors are holding back, even at their most emotional moments, and you've got a recipe for drama without melodrama. And that's where emotional power rests quietly.

So, Tokiko has to reveal to Shuichi what she did. It's just the right thing to do, even though she knows it could completely tear her entire life apart. Shuichi gets depressed and angry, confiding in his friend at work, Satake (Chishu Ryu), and deciding to track down the geisha house where she worked. Why? Maybe to find out if she's telling the whole truth and not holding something back. Maybe to get back at her by submitting to temptation. It's not clear, and it's not supposed to be because it's not clear for Shuichi. He's angry, and he's acting out. Until he meets the prostitute he could have relations with, Akiko (Chieko Murata), and he calms down, talking to her about her situation.

There could be a reading that the film excuses prostitution (Ozu apparently wrote about using comfort women while stationed in China in his published diary), but I don't think that's what he's doing. He's telling a story after a war, a time with countless terrible things having happened, and no word at all about Shuichi's involvement in any kind of specifics. What did he do? What did he do that would anger Tokiko? Surely there's something...including comfort women (none of this is explicit, by the way, I'm just trying to approach the material intelligently). He can't rule his emotions so quickly after a shock, but he can learn to get past them.

And the movie actually ends with a surprising shock of violence (melodramatic touch), and then the quiet of an Ozu film. That period of reflection is always key to an Ozu film, and here it's vital. We, along with the characters, consider what has happened, the implications and the potential consequences, all while the film is still going. It's a wonderful way to approach things, and one that's so easily done wrong. Ozu just knows exactly where to put these pauses, and he uses them exquisitely.

Really, this is a marvelous gem of a film. It's one I'd never heard of, and one I think deserves more attention. It's great.