RIP Setsuko Hara – One of Japanese cinema’s most… | Little White Lies

In Praise Of

RIP Set­suko Hara – One of Japan­ese cinema’s most endur­ing icons

25 Nov 2015

Words by David Jenkins

A pensive woman with dark hair and a kimono-style top, looking directly at the camera in a black and white photograph.
A pensive woman with dark hair and a kimono-style top, looking directly at the camera in a black and white photograph.
The shin­ing star of movies by Ozu, Naruse and Kuro­sawa has died at the age of 95.

At the age of 95 and hav­ing long since spurned the lime­light of deserved celebri­ty, one of the icon­ic faces of Japan’s clas­sic era of film­mak­ing has passed away. Set­suko Hara, who will be known to many as one of the lead play­ers in Yasu­jiro Ozu’s canon­i­cal fam­i­ly saga, Tokyo Sto­ry, drew a line in the sand by pub­licly announc­ing her retire­ment from screen act­ing some 50 years back, and, famous­ly, has had lit­tle inter­ac­tion with the press and media in those inter­ven­ing years.

West­ern audi­ences will like­ly be famil­iar with one of her ear­ly roles as an irre­press­ibly plucky stu­dent in the film No Regrets For Our Youth, one of the for­ma­tive works by leg­end-in-the-mak­ing, Aki­ra Kuro­sawa. Yet it was her col­lab­o­ra­tions with Ozu and Mikio Naruse for which she will like­ly be remem­bered, which include titles such as Late Spring, Repast, Sound of the Moun­tain, Ear­ly Sum­mer, Tokyo Twi­light and Tokyo Sto­ry.

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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.

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