100 years ago in 1920, Setsuko Hara was born in the city of Yokohama, Japan. Thanks to the powers of nepotism and the influence of her brother-in-law, she got a job at the Nikkatsu Studios at the age of 15. In the next few years, she rose to prominence. By the 1940s, Hara became somewhat of a symbol of new Japanese womanhood. Curiously enough, that's not how she's best remembered today, in part thanks to her most famous directors being ones that cast her in roles typifying the conservative values of a traditional Japan. Despite multiple collaborations with such legendary filmmakers as the master of melodrama Mikio Naruse and Japan's superstar director Akira Kurosawa, it's her work in the films of Yasujiro Ozu that now most define her legacy…
The contemporary reputation of Yasujiro Ozu is almost impossible to disentangle from that of Setsuko Hara. Despite having a career that spanned from the 1920s to the 1960s, encompassing silent comedies, crime thrillers, and theatrical tragedy, Ozu's late films are his main claim to fame today. That period coincides with his his collaboration with Hara, making her the unofficial face of Ozu's cinema in modern considerations. There's also the matter that no other performer better embodied the director's vision than this spellbinding actress.
In 1949, when Japan was still reeling from the aftermath of World War II, Yasujiro Ozu was coming into the last and most important phase of his career. After many years perfecting a characteristic style and set of thematic preoccupations, the director would go on to dedicate the last decade and a half of his life to the creation of some of the most harrowing domestic dramas ever made. His stories, shot close to the ground inside carefully composed domestic spaces, centered on intergenerational conflicts and were often marked by the painful passage of time. He found poetry in the mundane and heartbreak in the very rhythms of ordinary life.
Late Spring came out that year and it told a story very familiar tale to anyone with even a passing interest in the cinema of this auteur. Noriko is the daughter of a widowed professor and is perfectly happy to live with her father, tending to him instead of pursuing marriage. Theirs is a life contently lived until pressures from outside seed doubt in the hearts of father and daughter. It comes to a point when the professor believes he's condemning his beloved daughter to unhappiness by keeping her by his side, while Noriko thinks her spinsterhood and constant presence are preventing him from moving on from her mother's death.
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It's a complicated situation where both sides lie to one another and themselves to do what's best for the people they love. Noriko sacrifices her independence as a single woman and accepts matrimony, leaving behind her father who ends the film completely alone. Nobody is suffering by the time of the conclusion, but there's a sense of loss that's inescapable. At its heart, this is a story of two people willing to sacrifice themselves out of love for family. The problem is that they don't realize their sacrifices are unneeded and harmful. It's only the expectations of society that have made them believe that the path to happiness is for Noriko to be married.
While Ozu is often associated with a traditional vision of domesticity, his later films mercilessly dissect the myths of conservative social structures. More often than not, his characters are irrevocably hurt by their attempts to do what's socially expected. In the cinema of this master, ideas of honor may command familial life, but they're also a cancer eating away at people's souls from within. This paradoxical cinema that both celebrates and condemns tradition requires performers that can play both sides of this issue. They often do it at the same time while moving through a repertoire of disparate tonalities that can run the gamut from scatological humor to devastating tragedy in a single scene.
Setsuko Hara was better than anyone else at meeting the actorly demands of Ozu's late films. As Late Spring's Noriko, she delivers one of the best performances ever recorded in film, projecting a smiling and sweet, almost beatific, idea of youth that is slowly smothered by outside pressures. She is the perfect daughter and the perfect bride, an icon as much as she is a person, but the actress shades this façade with hints of emotional chaos going on beneath the surface. Nobody has ever been as able to devastate with a kind smile as Hara, for she always said with her face what her scripts wouldn't verbalize. She articulated the bittersweet nature of Ozu's stories in ways that overwhelm and haunt.
Their second film, 1951's Early Summer is a repetition of Late Spring's themes, though they are expanded into a cast of around 20 characters instead of the duo of the earlier picture. Hara's role is again that of an unmarried daughter cajoled into matrimony with emotionally complicated consequences. Her name is Noriko again too, even if she plays this second iteration with more humor than before. As for their third film, the famous Tokyo Story, there's little chance for lightheartedness in that tale of families fragmented under the weight of the modern world and the unstoppable movements of time. Here, Hara may have been playing a widow rather than a bride, but her name was still Noriko and her performance was still perfect.
Their fourth film, Tokyo Twilight, was Ozu's longest film as well as his last one shot in black and white. Coincidently, it's also his most thematically dark, going to peaks of melodramatic plotting that could have easily turned into sensational luridness in the hands of other filmmakers. Thankfully, both the director and his actresses (Ineko Arima and Isuzu Yamada are almost as good as Hara) anchor the drama, forcing its ungainly angst into the shape of disciplined cinema. The production also allowed Hara to explore a colder side of her screen persona, playing a woman whose heartbreak sours into passive cruelty by the narrative's tragic end. All that and she's finally called something other than Noriko.
Speaking of names, for her last two Ozu films, Setsuko Hara would wear the name of Akiko, the same one of her suicidal sister in Tokyo Twilight. 1960's Late Autumn would find the actress abandoning the archetype of the innocent daughter. This time around, she's a widow with an adult daughter, both women entangled in a web of well-intentioned deceptions that bring nothing but heartbreak to all involved. It's amazing how much pain comes not from malice, but love, in the cinema of Ozu and Hara. Despite Late Autumn starting with the funeral of Akiko's husband, the specter of Death is even more noticeable in 1961's The End of Summer, where Hara is again a widow. It's a tale of matchmaking and the precarious bonds of familial devotion, a poem on the cycles of life as they reach their end and a song about people's eternal pursuit of happiness. Like all Ozu's films, it's beautiful and Hara is without fault.
She may have spent her career playing some of Japanese cinema's most beloved brides and widows, but Setsuko Hara never married in real life. That earned her the nickname of the Eternal Virgin, an epitaph that seems both at odds and perfectly in synch with the way Ozu portrayed her. In any case, despite much acclaim, the virginal star that was Setsuko Hara quit her career quite early, in 1963. That was the year Ozu died, tying their legacies even more tightly together, though Hara never confirmed if the director's death had anything to do with her retirement.
According to her, she never liked acting, seeing it only as a means of subsistence. In any case, she was wonderful at it, her films are some of the best ever and she will forever be one of my favorite actresses of all-time. Here's to Setsuko Hara.
The six collaborations of Setsuko Hara and Yasujiro Ozu are available to stream on the Criterion Channel. The animated masterpiece Millennium Actress is also inspired by her life and legacy. It's available to stream on Hoopla, Kanopy, and Pluto TV.