sacrifice and
blame
by Douglas Messerli
Yasujirō Ozu and Ryosuke Saito
(screenplay), Yasujirō Ozu (director)
風の中の牝鶏 Kaze no naka no mendori (A Hen in the Wind) / 1948
Yasujirō
Ozu’s A Hen in the Wind is hardly his
most appealing work. Not only is the film—about a war-time wife, Tokiko (Kinuyo
Tanaka) who, in order to pay for her son’s medical bills, becomes a 1-time
prostitute—melodramatically conceived, but its patriarchal attitudes are nearly
unbearable.
She survives, and he ultimately forgives
her, but in his determination that they should never speak about it again, he
is still blaming her for her own sacrifices. Even though he has discovered that
she visited the brothel only once—and we know what he doesn’t, that her
customer could not even get an erection—she is still blamed for the event.
Critic Joan Mellen felt that this violent
moment showed that Ozu “brilliantly and honestly confronted the post-war
moment,” showing how Japan—like the heroine—had become prostituted to the
sleazy values of the Occupation.” Yet for me he seems the director blames those
who stayed behind with few alternatives, instead of t
he young warriors who brutally went off to
war. If these represent his conservative family values, I certainly wouldn’t
want to share his family life. But then Ozu never married or had children.
The work kept reminding me of how Nora,
in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, was
attacked for having made sacrifices to save her husband’s Torvald’s life.
But Ozu gives poor Tokiko, who
unwillingly sacrificed her own body to save her son’s life, no choice of even leaving;
she is more trapped in their poverty-stricken homelife if the mid-20th
century than even was in the previous century’s norms. But then, it is also
apparent that Shuichi would never be able to care for their son, and that
Tokiko’s only choice, if she were to leave, would be to continue a life of
prostitution, becoming more of a Mizoguchi figure than an Ozu one.
Speaking of A Hen in the Wind, Ozu himself described it as “a bad failure.”
Los Angeles,
December 17, 2016
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