Daily | Setsuko Hara, 1920 – 2015

Setsuko Hara in ‘Tokyo Story’ (1953)

“Legendary actress Setsuko Hara, who starred in the Yasujiro Ozu movie Tokyo Story, died of pneumonia on Sept. 5 at a hospital in Kanagawa Prefecture, her family said Wednesday,” reports the Nikkei Asian Review. “She was 95.”

“‘Isn’t life disappointing?’ someone asks Setsuko Hara in Tokyo Story (1953), who replies, smiling, ‘Yes, it is.'” Nick Pinkerton in the Voice in 2011: “Born Masae Aida, Hara was the very image of ravishing fortitude; the actress met the head-on gaze of Ozu’s camera with her headlamp eyes in six films, made four with Naruse, and played against type in the bad-girl Anastassya role in Kurosawa’s 1951 The Idiot, a problematic production that nevertheless gets the note of provincial burlesque in Dostoyevsky. At 43, Hara retired at the height of her stardom, shortly after Ozu’s death in 1963…. Before lapsing into media silence, Hara intimated she’d been forced by familial economic necessity into a career she never loved, mirroring her screen persona of quiet self-sacrifice and Confucian fealty to one’s kin.”

“After six masterpieces together, it is hard not to think of actress Setsuko Hara as Yasujiro Ozu’s embodiment of the postwar Japanese woman,” writes Matías Piñeiro in the current issue of Film Comment. “However, it is interesting to put this image up against the role she played years earlier for Akira Kurosawa in No Regrets for Our Youth. In the 1946 film, Hara portrays Yukie, a farm girl growing up the hard way from childish middle-class student to socially engaged working adult. As this classical heroine, the actress plays every step of her evolution in such a straight-forward manner that even her ever-changing hairstyle works toward this end. No matter what external appearance she bares, Hara’s greatness is her ability to project an inner self that prevented her from wearing those styles as if she were at a costume party.”

In February, our own Alece Oxendine wrote an appreciation illustrated with ten gorgeous photos.

Then, in late March and early April, the Japan Society presented the series The Most Beautiful: The War Films of Shirley Yamaguchi & Setsuko Hara. “Hara was a domestic star before her discovery by the international art cinema crowd, and then for only her postwar performances,” wrote curator Markus Nornes. “She debuted in 1936 as a cinematic paragon of youthful womanhood. During the war, this meant playing a pure and innocent daughter supporting the young men deploying to the meat grinder of modern warfare, a persona tweaked into the ‘eternal virgin’ after 1945…. Hara never addressed her contributions to the militarization of Japanese cinema and the seduction of young people into the war effort.”

Update: “In many of her films,” writes Ronald Bergan for the Guardian, “Hara’s luminous smile communicates a variety of sentiments—sometimes she smiles out of genuine love, sometimes as an attempt to hide pain. In the rare moments when Hara’s characters cry, after otherwise accepting all of life’s misfortunes, the emotional release can be heartbreaking.”

Updates, 11/26: “Her first big starring role came in the notorious German-Japanese co-production The Daughter of the Samurai (1937), co-directed by Arnold Fanck, the mountaineering-obsessed geologist-turned-filmmaker who first made Leni Riefenstahl a star,” notes Ignatiy Vishnevetsky at the AV Club. “The film—a melodrama about agriculture, swastika imagery, racial purity, and the cosmological importance of occupying Manchuria—remains one of the most bizarre propaganda efforts to come out of the Axis powers…. A sublime screen presence, Hara radiated grace and subtlety, her face quietly registering the complex interchange of emotions that run through Ozu’s minimalist dramas of aging and family life. Every one of her collaborations with the director is, in its own way, remarkable.”

Criterion has posted a 2006 essay by Donald Richie in which, after sketching the highlights of her career, he addresses her sudden retirement: “Her studio, to which she represented a considerable investment, tried every blandishment, critics howled their disappointment, and there was even talk of her being onnarashikunai—’unwomanly’—a grave insult. She had her reasons, however. She was not Setsuko Hara—she was Masaé Aida. Her screen name all those years had been a studio-built pseudonym. And now, she said, she wanted to be herself again…. The Setsuko Hara we have known and loved, Japan’s own idolized Eternal Virgin, now exists only on the silver screen.”

And from Little White Lies editor David Jenkins: “Below, by way of articulating her quietly intense presence on screen and her effortless handling of poise and dynamics, we present the climactic scene from 1960’s stunning Late Autumn, where Hara has just sent her daughter off to marry and thereby imposing a sentence of solitude upon herself. Even without the context of the preceding film, it’s a moment of astonishing emotional power, and the ambiguity in Hara’s eyes—neither elated, nor dejected—is the stuff of cinematic mana.”

Update, 11/29: “Some have called Hara the Japanese Garbo because of how she retired young and completely disappeared,” notes Noah Bushel at Filmmaker, “but if there is any comparison, to me it would be Ingrid Bergman. While Setsuko was sometimes classified as a vestal virgin, her performances are much more adult and complex than that. She was a woman. Like Ingrid Bergman, there was a rare mixture of intelligence and warmth and some worldly wariness too.”

Update, 12/1: “In her own right, she was a rebel, sexually and politically,” writes Patrick Z. McGavin at RogerEbert.com. “She was subliminal; she cast a trance. In the Ozu films, Hara was often quick to smile or laugh, but it was a complicating gesture, sometimes instinctive or spontaneous but more often than not a cloak that shielded a deeper pain or confusion. She was in great films made by great directors. Hara submitted herself to her directors. It was not a one-way street. What she gave back stands in time as varied, and beautiful, as any wonder of the cinema.”

Updates, 12/27: Robert Gottlieb for the New York Review of Books: “She is inescapably refined, sensitive, well-born, and almost always modern—she’s the archetype of the post-war young woman. Yet she also embodies the virtues of the traditional Japanese woman: loyalty, self-sacrifice, suffering in silence; she’s the perfect daughter, wife, mother. She was utterly real, yet she represented an ideal… the ideal. It was the revered novelist Shusaku Endo who said of her, ‘Can it be possible that there is such a woman in this world?'”

“As a flickering image of our innermost hopes, she is completely irreplaceable,” writes Kelly Vance at Eat Drink Films.

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Tags: setsuko_hara, yasujiro_ozu