Film Diary 9/15: Setsuko Hara splits the veil in “No Regrets for Our Youth.

From the moment you she entered the screen in the “No Regrets for Our Youth”, I knew she was the star. I didn't know her face well enough to know she was Setsuko Hara, but I knew she was Setsuko because her energy told me so. The story of a woman looking for purpose who finds it not in struggle, but during it. Who finds love not in labor, but in commitment to the ideas that drive it, becomes vividly real, in Hara's eyes. An exercise by Kurosawa meant to drive home the power of labor, that ultimately also drives home the power of perseverance and community, becomes vividly real in Hara’s hands, and body. What she crafts; something unique in it specificity, as to how it articulates not only the attributes of struggle and its consequences, but how the woman’s body, and mind respond differently and similarly is quite simply staggering. The site of Yukie’s greatest pain is also the site of her rebirth as someone truly seeking out what she dare didn’t name, or could not…freedom, a living. In No Regrets, Hara gives what instantly became one of my favorite performances ever. Total in its revelation of the arc, impressive in its balance of grace and ferocity, stillness, and poetry, stoicism, but with the internal fire of a large furnace. Every look from Hara into the camera is as if she found God in the veil between the silver screen and the present, and her gift is eternity.

Authenticity, presence, being present, an active listener, emotive quality, physicality, whatever you may think of when you think of acting it's in this performance. It's as much a character actor performance as it is a movie star performance. Every scene that is almost purely about Hara’s considerable presence is right then and there affirmed by her physicality and commitment as a character actor, especially when looking at it across from her work with her work with Yasujiro Ozu which couldn't be further apart as women and yet still attached by a seam. Yukie rises and looks into the camera as the news of her husbands demise is announced, and then walks away and all the sadness of what her world is to become lives in that walk. Her eyes betray the intensity of her perseverance, her unwillingness to go down, to let those who would see her down, watch her display it as well, be they those above her station, below her, or at her side. Her cadence changes, the intensity of it as she grows, as her fire grows. She becomes more skilled at work, and at saying what she means. All of this takes in terms of time ten seconds of screen time in each instance, foreshadowing her future before the movie even gets to it. Every action is statement, from how she plays piano, (ferociously and with no patience) to how she stands after years of work, (arduously but proudly) from placing a hair tie, to allowing her mother to take her basket.

It's the type of performance I will shamelessly plug into any conversation as an excuse to talk about her with glee. It's a conversational art piece, private, but between intimate parties even as a culture. As art it speaks to you and you in turn want to speak to someone about it, and if they see it, they too will want to talk about it. It's telephone, or is it “Ringu”by way of magic in a performance. The arc of Yukie Yagihara is an arduous journey. It is both one of intense and extreme political change (she goes from hating leftist to at the very least adapting foundational principles) and physical change, (from upper middle class to abject poverty by choice) and it is long. Where Yukie begins as a woman is not anywhere near where she is at the end, and the story of that growth exists almost completely in Hara’s performance in her work…literally. When she tills the ground, you feel the back breaking nature of the work in her body. She sets into it, her toes digging into the dirt, her body folding, she makes you feel the blisters on her fingers though they're not shown, and moves with disjointed force in the fields and with the plow and how. Eventually she moves in such a way as you almost here the bones creak and crack. Every step seems as if she's walking through a blizzard in three feet of snow. Kurosawa provides the tedium, expressing it in montage after montage of nothing but the same action and the repetition of the words that give her courage. Hara contextualizes it, and wears the effects of it. The transformation in her face near the end is very little about the make-up and very much about a spiritual transformation that happens from within, from behind the skin of her face. For all her suffering Yukie has found purpose, and in losing her “man” she has found herself , but at what costs? Why?.. Kurosawa makes no bones about it; it's oppression and that oppression goes double for the women. It is not her husband's death alone that causes suffering, it is not what radicalized her either, it is his words in combination with her work, not in a sense of production for corporate ends, but production for human connection and protection. In the end one of her former suitors who himself became a traitor to the cause, tells Yukie “Your sheer life force makes me feel ashamed”. It's a haunting reveal of what alot of men should feel and maybe on occasion about the position they've helped re-ify and hold up, ( when you see women working several steps behind what you have, accompishing more then you with your foot on their back, there is a sense of shame) but it's also an accurate representation of Setsuko Hara’s performance and it's evocative and emotive power. While having seen Hara in a few of Yasujiro Ozu’s films, I consider this my awakening to her powers and it will be through the refraction of her light in this movie that I will watch and study the rest of her career as I watch it.