I’ll love you always, Setsuko Hara!
Yesterday the sad news became public that Setsuko Hara died almost three months ago, on September 5, at the age of 95.
Hara is one of the most charismatic presences that ever graced the silver screen. I remember falling in love with her when I first saw the most famous movie she starred in, Yasujiro Ozu’s much praised masterpiece Tokyo Monogatari. This must have been some 27 years ago, when I started to study Japanese.
I have grasped every chance to see anything featuring Hara since, including the Nazi film she debuted in in 1937, Die Tochter des Samurai.
Hara virtually always played the self-sacrificing Japanese wife, mother or sister, enduring anything an adulterous husband, callous in-laws or God and the Devil threw at her. The eternal virgin, your beacon in a wild sea. There’s one exception (that I know of) and that is Akira Kurosawa’s The Idiot, in which she plays a femme fatale-like lover.
Hara is the caring mother everyone wants, always a listening ear, always there for you. With her kind face, her large, glistening eyes, a little droopy. I remember being shocked by seeing her nipples shine through her blouse in Kurosawa’s No Regrets for Our Youth, the most political film she played in. I guess those nipples reminded me of the fact that she was a woman of flesh and blood, not the virgin Mary I fancied her to be.
She made herself disappear from public life completely in 1962, and never made a film since. She declared she had never liked acting and did it solely to support her sisters and family.
I have long hoped I would somehow succeed in meeting her and interviewing her, this wonderful, mysterious woman. I guess it wasn’t meant to be.
The video above is the Ozu movie Tokyo Monogatari in its entirety. I suggest you connect your computer to your big-screen television, close the curtains and let yourself be enthralled by it and especially by Setsuko Hara, one of the greatest actresses that ever lived. (PB)
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