A Hen In The Wind

Yasujiro Ozu's second postwar film, A Hen In The Wind (1948) is unusual in that it deals with some melodramatic content. A married woman (Kinuyo Tanaka also starred in Mizoguchi's Fallen Women in 1948) prostitutes herself for a single night in order to earn money to pay for hospital bills for her son while waiting for her husband, (Shuji Sano) to be repatriated to Japan. When he returns she tells him and he has trouble accepting the fact, but after he meets a younger woman who was forced into prostitution and after he has injured his wife in a domestic incident can he forgive her and move on. Critic David Bordwell suggests that this film deserves to be better known for the unusual treatment of its conventional material and partly for the ways that it uses stylistic choices that would become common in his later films. In essence the film asks: what did Japan lose in losing the war? The postwar struggle of survival is laid bare. Bordwell points out that the film ends with a quiet resolve to ignore past mistakes and to face the future with an 'impure', but realistic hope.