Une femme dans le vent

It is not one of Yasujiro Ozu's best films. Both just after the war he made Record of a Tenement Gentleman (1947) and the Late Spring (1949) but this one comes between these two. The others are fine but not this one, it is not terrible but it is that, we know what is going to happen. The husband is away in the war and she is having to sell her clothes so she can feed her toddler. It gets more sad for her when he is unwell and naturally the hospital bills have to be paid. Even she knows what she will have to do and her friend mentions what she can do. We don't see her prostitute herself but we know and of course her husband is soon back home lazing around and has to find out how she had got the money. Raping her and throwing her down the stairs are because he is rather upset and that he felt unmanly. We can't really comprehend this couple, especially because of the war, but certainly in Japan we can just about understand how it is for them.

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.

"Record of a Tenement Gentleman" is Ozu's actual first post-war movie, but while it is set in a post-war environment it still relied a lot in his themes of family, father/mother and son, family love that Ozu had always explored, rather than discussing questions from a post-war society.

"A Hen in the Wind" does that. It offers a true war/post-war situation and deals with the people that suffer from it.

The story is quite simple and I've found some of his other movies to be more emotional. However, it is one of his most serious and violent. I do think Ozu is capable of adding more depth to his movies than what we see here, but I was very happy to find a different subject from what he does usually, explored in a such disturbing way. Ozu's themes are pretty much the same all over his work, but "A Hen in the Wind" stands out for a different kind of serious issue. It is, for that, very refreshing.

Very serious, very sad, very human, unexpectedly violent and a touching look at a post-war situation, it stands out mostly for being different from Ozu's usual themes.

A sensitive and powerful examination of the moral compromises made during World War II and the toll they take on families. Kinuyo Tanaka gives another of her sensitive and compelling performances as a woman forced into prostitution to care for her sick child, and is unable to keep her secret when her husband returns from the front. Ozu takes on the topic of prostitution while steering well clear of its potential for sordidness (something I find both a virtue and a limitation... in some ways it's *too* tactful). The scenes between the two exceptional leads contribute to a film blessed with some of the most uncomortable scenes Ozu has filmed, delving deep into raw unresolved emotions of guilt, honor and devotion.

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.