A Hen in the Wind (Yasujiro Ozu, 1948)

Shuji Sano and Kinuyo Tanaka in A Hen in the Wind

Tokiko Amamiya: Kinuyo Tanaka
Shuichi Amamiya: Shuji Sano
Akiko Ida: Chieko Murata
Kazuichiro Satake: Chishu Ryu
Shoichi: Hohi Aoki
Fusako Onada: Chiyoko Fumiya
Orie Noma: Reiko Minakami
Hideo: Koji Mitsui
Hizoko Sakai: Takeshi Sakamoto

Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Screenplay: Yasujiro Ozu, Ryosuke Saito
Cinematography: Yuharu Atsuta
Art direction: Tatsuo Hamada
Film editing: Yoshiyasu Hamamura
Music: Senji Ito

I was startled by the opening scenes that set up the plot for Yasujiro Ozu's A Hen in the Wind* in which a woman waiting for her husband to return from the war tries to make ends meet for herself and her small son by selling some of her possessions. The woman who buys her things suggests that she would make more money by selling her body. Shocked, she rejects this suggestion. But when her child falls ill, she sees prostituting herself as the only way to pay the hospital bills. The striking thing about this opening sequence is that it's almost identical to the plot setup in Kenji Mizoguchi's Women of the Night, which was made the same year as A Hen in the Wind and stars the same actress, the great Kinuyo Tanaka. But then the plots of the two films diverge: In Mizoguchi's film, both the husband and the child die, and the woman finds herself descending deeper into prostitution. Ozu, however, brings the husband home and the child survives his illness. But there is misery to come for Ozu's heroine, Tokiko: She feels compelled to tell her husband, Shuichi, the truth about what she did to pay the hospital. He does not take it well: He stews with resentment and eventually makes his way to the brothel where Tokiko had her assignation. There he encounters Fusako, a young prostitute, and instead of having sex with her, questions her about why she chose this way of life. Though he decides to help Fusako give up prostituting herself, and even goes out of his way to find her a job in the company where he works, the encounter does nothing to ease Shuichi's mind about Tokiko's actions. When he returns home he gives way to his simmering anger and, giving her a shove, causes her to fall down the steep stairway from their upstairs rooms. It's a moment of unaccustomed violence for Ozu, who throughout the film takes his usual steady, measured course in portraying these troubled lives. But it serves as a catharsis, bringing husband and wife back together -- although not in a way that will satisfy some viewers, especially in an age conscious of domestic violence: Tokiko pleads for forgiveness and even suggests that Shuichi beat her. In the final scene that shows the couple, they embrace and Tokiko clasps her hands tightly behind his back. (The film actually ends on a shot more characteristic of Ozu, in which we see life go on in the outside world in the shadow of the giant storage tanks that dominate the industrial slum where they live.) Ozu later called A Hen in the Wind a failure -- just as, coincidentally, Mizoguchi expressed his disappointment with Women of the Night -- but it remains a fascinating display of Ozu's directorial skills, especially his way of building tension quietly and making his points without didacticism. For example, he uses his characteristic subjective camera to good effect in a scene between Tokiko and her friend Akiko, who is shocked by Tokiko's prostituting herself. Tokiko asks what she would have done if she found herself penniless with a sick child. Although the question is addressed to Akiko, the camera takes her place, so that Tokiko looks directly at us, making the audience the target of the question. I don't know if the similarities between Ozu's and Mizoguchi's films are entirely coincidental -- it's almost as if they shared a common premise and dared each other to make a film out of it -- but the two films provide a unique opportunity to compare the style and technique of two great directors.

*I haven't seen an explanation for the title, which is a literal translation of the Japanese title. It seems to be a simile out of a proverb: "As [something] as a hen in the wind," but nobody I've seen on line has provided the source.

Record of a Tenement Gentleman (Yasujiro Ozu, 1947)

Hohi Aoki and Choko Iida in Record of a Tenement Gentleman

Otane: Choko Iida
The Boy: Hohi Aoki
Tashiro: Chishu Ryu
Tamekichi: Reikichi Kawamura
Kawayoshi: Takeshi Sakamoto
Kikuko: Mitsuko Yoshikawa
The Father: Eitaro Ozawa

Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Screenplay: Tadao Ikeda, Yasujro Ozu
Cinematography: Yuharu Atsuta
Art direction: Tatsuo Hamada
Music: Ichiro Saito

There are Web pages devoted to the "funny titles" that other countries give American films. The Japanese title for Leaving Las Vegas (Mike Figgis, 1995) allegedly translates as I'm Drunk and You're a Prostitute, and Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze, 1999) becomes The Hole of Malkovich. But presumably other countries have similar sites devoted to silly Anglicizations of their film titles, too. Certainly the Japanese have every reason to wonder how the translators came up with an off-the-mark title like Record of a Tenement Gentleman for Yasujiro Ozu's film. The setting is not what we call a tenement: a multistory apartment building in a slum. It takes place instead in a row of small houses in an impoverished suburb of Tokyo, where people eke out a living as artisans or peddlers. And the protagonist of the film is not a gentleman but a middle-aged widow named Otane, who agrees to take in for a night a small boy who has followed one of her neighbors home. The boy was separated from his father, a carpenter, when the two of them went into the city in search of work after the apartment building in which they lived burned down. He made his way back to where they used to live, which is where he began to tag along with Tashiro, a fortune-teller by trade. Tashiro shares a home with Tamekichi, a tinker, who refuses to take the boy in, so they persuade Otane to shelter the boy for a night. Things do not go well: The boy wets the bed, and Otane, already grumbling at having been pressured to take him in, becomes even more grouchy at the "stupid" child. She takes the boy to the place where he once lived, but the neighbors there say that the father hasn't yet returned. Otane even tries to abandon the boy, running away from him when they start back, but he's too quick for her. Of course, anyone who's ever seen a movie knows where this is going: After he wets the bed again, the boy runs away, afraid of Otane's anger, but she realizes how much she has come to enjoy his presence and her heart softens when he returns home. She begins to indulge the boy with new clothes and even has their photograph taken together. And then, of course, just as Otane has decided that motherhood suits her, the father arrives, having tracked the boy down. That Ozu manages never to descend into mawkishness with this familiar premise is remarkable, but also a great tribute to his actors, especially Choko Iida as Otane, who makes the transformation from grumpiness to affection entirely credible. The film is also a tribute to the stubborn endurance of the Japanese working classes in the difficult environment of the immediate post-war period. 

Late Spring (Yasujiro Ozu, 1949)

Hohi Aoki and Setsuko Hara in Late Spring

Shukichi Somiya: Chishu Ryu 
Noriko Somiya: Setsuko Hara 
Aya Kitagawa: Yumeji Tsukioka 
Masa Taguchi: Haruko Sugimura 
Katsuyoshi: Hohi Aoki 
Shoichi Hattori: Jun Usami 
Aiko Miwa:  Kuniko Miyake
Jo Onodera: Masao Mishima 
Kiku Onodera: Yoshiko Tsubouchi 
Misako: Yoko Katsuragi 
Shige: Toyo Takahashi
Seizo Hayashi: Jun Tanizaki

Director: Yasujiro Ozu 
Screenplay: Kogo Noda, Yasujiro Ozu
Based on a novel by Kazuo Hirotsu
Cinematography: Yuharu Atsuta 
Art direction: Tatsuo Hamada 
Film editing: Yoshiyasu Hamamura 
Music: Senji Ito 

The opening of Yasujiro Ozu's Late Spring is deceptively calm: the usual establishing shots of landscape and buildings and trains, the kind of images with which Ozu typically punctuates his narratives, and a group of women gathering for a tea ceremony. One of the women is Noriko, whose brilliant smile is also deceptive. This is the first film in Ozu's so-called "Noriko trilogy," to be followed by Early Summer (1951) and Tokyo Story (1953), in each of which Setsuko Hara plays a woman named Noriko. The three Norikos have nothing in common except that they are all unmarried. (In Tokyo Story she is a widow.)  The Noriko of Late Spring lives with her father, Shukichi, who is played by Ozu regular Chishu Ryu. (In Early Summer, Ryu plays Hara's brother, and in Tokyo Story her father-in-law.) The deceptions of what might be called the "get-acquainted" section of Ozu's film, which establishes for us the relationships among the characters, lie in the apparent happiness and contentment of father and daughter and the untroubled world in which they live. But Late Spring was filmed only four years after the end of the war that devastated Japan, which was still under occupation by American forces. The wounds and pain of the country and its people are invisible in the film, partly because of occupation censorship, but they provide a kind of tension in the viewer who knows what the characters must have suffered. There is only a brief mention of this in Late Spring: Noriko has been to the doctor and reports that her health has improved. Another character's reference to "forced work during the war" sheds some light on what may have caused her illness. Later, Noriko and her father visit Kyoto, and he remarks how much nicer it is than "dusty" Tokyo, obliquely referencing wartime destruction. The central deception, however, lies in Noriko's apparent contentment with her unmarried state: She feels it is her duty to spend her life caring for her widowed father, and brushes off any suggestions that at 27 she should really be thinking about getting married -- or worse, that her father might choose to remarry. She calls the second marriage of one of her father's friends "filthy." We who have seen this situation before, however, realize that the deception Noriko is perpetrating is on herself. Perhaps because she has lived through so much change and upheaval, Noriko is trying to persuade herself that her current happiness serving her father can be made permanent. And so she suffers a shock when her father displays interest in a beautiful widow, and another when he suggests that she might meet the young man her Aunt Masa thinks would be a suitable husband for Noriko. What Ozu and his frequent collaborator Kogo Noda establish here, working from a novel called Father and Daughter by Kazuo Hirotsu, is worthy of Henry James or Jane Austen -- I think particularly of Austen's Emma Woodhouse and her self-deluding attachment to her father. Eventually, Noriko is persuaded into marriage -- in a masterstroke of direction we never even see the groom -- by her father's lie: He claims that he has been planning to remarry, thereby eliminating any objection Noriko could have to seeking her own path to fulfillment. The film ends with a melancholy image of Shukichi alone, peeling an apple -- a kind of Jamesian twist on an Austenian situation. This magisterial example of Ozu's late style -- low camera angles, absence of pans and dissolves, emphasis on the somewhat claustrophobic interiors of the Japanese home -- is reinforced by Tatsuo Hamada's art direction and Yuharu Atsuta's cinematography, but most of all by the superb performances of Hara and Ryu.