Film Review
An artist is seldom the best judge of the quality of his work, but for
many years after it was made there was a general consensus of agreement
with Yasujirô Ozu that
A Hen
in the Wind was one of his worst films. Ozu himself came
to loathe the film in later years, dismissing it as a 'bad failure',
and it is one of the director's most overlooked works, barely seen in
the West until quite recently. Ozu's dislike for the film may
stem from its starkly grim portrayal of Japan's post-war austerity,
which is reflected as much in the bleak slum setting, where barely
habitable shacks are dwarfed by soulless industrial monoliths, as in
the people who inhabit it. Critics of the time were quick to
point out its lack of verisimilitude, such as minor flaws in the set
design, which diminish the film's realism. Overshadowed by the
flawless masterpieces that Ozu went on to make afterwards, it is easy
to see why
A Hen in the Wind,
a comparatively modest piece, should be forgotten.
And yet no work by any great filmmaker, Ozu least of all,
deserves to be forgotten.
A Hen in the Wind is interesting
because of its perceived shortcomings, but its greater interest lies in
the fact that it is one of the few Ozu films to have been made during
the period of American occupation of Japan, at a time when the country
was on its knees, struggling to regain its dignity and
prosperity. Ozu's depiction of post-war Japan is strikingly
different to the fetid realism that the young Akira Kurosawa
brought to his films,
Drunken Angel (1948) and
Stray
Dog (1949). As in Kurosawa's films, the detritus of a
shattered nation is visible in every exterior shot, but there is
lyrical quality to the images that Ozu presents which suggests that
things are not really as bad as they appear. The industrial hulks
that dominate the landscape and from which emanates a constant
background throbbing sound, like the beat of a gigantic heart, suggest a
country that is in the process of being reborn. And this is
essentially what the film is about: putting the recent past behind us
and moving on.
In the disgrace of an ordinary Japanese woman who turns to prostitution
to save her son's life, a selfless act which leads her to be estranged
from her husband, we can read a crude metaphor for Japan's national
loss of honour through the experience of WWII. The story is one
that is more typical of Ozu's contemporary Kenji Mizoguchi than Ozu
himself, although there are some plot similarities with Ozu's earlier
film
The Only Son (1936).
Lacking Mizoguchi's almost obsessive interest in the plight of women in
pre- and post-war Japan, Ozu's portrayal of the self-sacrificing mother
is less convincing and veers dangerously close to Hollywood melodrama,
despite an exceptionally moving performance from Kinuyo Tanaka.
By Ozu's own standards, the film lacks depth and subtlety, and this is
apparent both in the crudeness of the characterisation and the
over-dramatic incidents that make up the predictable narrative.
No other film made by Ozu contains such distressing elements as a
(suggested) rape and a violent physical assault by a husband on a wife,
two of the surprises that
A Hen in
the Wind has in store for its unwary spectator. The fact
that Ozu rarely employed violence in his films is what makes the
sequence in which the heroine (Tanaka) is knocked down a flight of
stairs so shocking. Ozu even emphasises the brutality of the
sequence by shooting the wife's fall head-on with one of his familiar
long static shots. The husband cannot bring himself to come to
his wife's aid, so she must pull herself to her feet and climb back up
the stairs to her living quarters. It is an unbearably cruel
scene to watch and the degree of violence, physical and emotional, is
probably taken too far. It is hard to believe that the two
characters can ever have felt anything for one another before the
incident, and we fail to believe that there can ever be a life for them
together afterwards. The reconciliation that Ozu contrives for
them fails to ring true, despite the quality of the acting and the
sheer elegance of the mise-en-scène.
As Ozu himself acknowledged,
A Hen
in the Wind is a flawed film, but that does not mean that it is
one that should be dismissed as a failure. The characterisation
may not be as subtle as we would come to expect of Ozu in his later
films, but there are some exquisite moments of truth and poignancy,
such as the delicately handled scenes in which the indignant husband
visits a brothel and begins to understand a woman's motivation for
becoming a prostitute. How the characters react to their
straitened circumstances is also revealing of the Japanese psyche at
the time of occupation. When the women talk about how expensive
things have become since the end of the war it looks as if they are
sharing a private joke, not railing woefully against misfortune.
Life is a struggle, but a spirit of implacable resilience shines
through all the characters in the film, particularly the women.
Despite its apparently grim subject matter,
A Hen in the Wind leaves you with a
profound sense of hope, a belief that however hard things get, it will
all turn out right in the end.
© James Travers 2013
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Next Yasujirô Ozu film:
Late Spring (1949)