• 風の中の牝鶏 (A Hen in the Wind), 2/10/23 (Fri)

Ozu veers into Mizoguchi territory in this 1948 film in a Waterloo Bridge-type story of a wartime returnee who learns to his shock that his poverty-stricken wife had turned to prostitution. Tokiko’s (Tanaka Kinuyo) husband has yet to be repatriated from the war in those turbulent postwar years, so she is raising their child alone as she hopes for his safe return. Living in dire poverty, she is forced to sell her last kimono to survive. The broker suggests offhandedly that she sell her body instead, an idea that Tokiko indignantly dismisses. When her son falls ill, however, circumstances leave her little choice, and she gives in for one occasion to raise the needed cash for the hospital.

Shortly thereafter, the husband (Sano Shuji) finally returns for a joyous (in Japanese terms) reunion. Things almost immediately go wrong when he learns what Tokiko has done. He becomes obsessed with her action. He tracks down the brothel and calls a girl to see how this works, only to lecture her for selling her body. She rolls her eyes, saying that all men say this but sleep with her anyway. She retorts that she’s doing what she has to in order to live. Finally realizing that her values are perverted by poverty, he asks his boss to give her a job, only for the boss to ask reasonably enough why the husband can forgive a stranger but not his own wife. The husband understands that in theory but finds it impossible to apply at home. His wife’s efforts to placate him infuriate him instead, and he shoves her at one point so hard that she goes tumbling down a staircase in a hair-raising scene. This brings him to his senses, and when she comes crawling back, they pledge to start anew.

The strange title, A Hen in the Wind, suggests a mother figure being pummeled from all sides. There doesn’t seem to be a particular proverb with “kaze no naka” (“in the wind”), but there are lots of film, song and book titles with that phrase, most famously film-wise Shimizu Hiroshi’s masterwork Kaze no Naka no Kodomo (Children of the Wind) as well as the similar Kaze no Tani no Nausicaä (Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind). So it must have some reverberation for the Japanese. I don’t know where they came up with the idea of a mother hen, and it’s hard to see anyway why a hen would have trouble with the wind. It’s not the title I would have picked.

The film has some strange moments. When the wife comes home to find her husband there after four years, the couple just smile and look at each other, which feels odd even for an Ozu film. Also, within five minutes, they’re already fighting over her brief turn to prostitution. Some homecoming.

Worse, when she plunges down the stairs – a harrowing scene taken head-on in a single brutal shot rivaling the much-later The Fall Guy – the husband steps halfway down the stairs, asks the lifeless Tokiko if she’s okay, and disinterestedly returns upstairs. This is not like Rhett running down to help Scarlett (a film that Ozu had seen at this point). Tokiko tells the landlady that she clumsily slipped on the stairs and creeps slowly and painfully back up to her husband, begging for his forgiveness. It’s very hard to watch this level of self-debasement. It’s tempting to see this as a picture of Japan crawling back to the US, though I doubt anyone involved had that in mind. That’s followed by a lecture from the husband, who apparently still doesn’t understand the wife’s selflessness in sacrificing her own pride and values for her child’s sake. It doesn’t help when she’s clinging to his legs crying for mercy. It hardly felt like an Ozu film at that point. There was a final striking image seen from the husband’s back, when Tanaka’s arms slip through and her hands clasp as if in prayer.

Tanaka is the heart and soul of the film, the main reason that it works at all. Others are not in her league. The theme of forgiveness and redemption is blunted by the extremes of the husband’s personality and his lack of empathy for his wife even to the end. Maybe he felt that his sacrifices during the war trumped hers, but that was not shown here either. His actions felt unnatural. Ozu is stepping out of his comfort zone and is not good at it. He did have some interesting shots, such as the reunited couple as seen from the viewpoint of the baby, and some of his later stylistic traits, such as the low-lying camera, are already evident here. Still, while the film is well made in technical terms, it’s difficult to recommend given its portrayal of the insensitive husband as well as the wife on her knees pitifully crying for him to take her back. The best that can be said is that the film implies that they have a future together, though whether that’s a positive message will depend on the viewer.