This week, I watched Yasujiro Ozu's 1949 masterpiece, Late Spring, and was immediately captivated by the performance of Ozu regular, Chishu Ryu, who plays a widower called Professor Somiya, and spends most of the film trying to get his daughter Noriko (played by Hara Setsuko) to get married as she is now of an age where she is expected to do so. However, Noriko is content living the single life and tending to her father's needs, and resists being paired off. Ryu eventually tricks Noriko into changing her thinking by pretending he is to re-marry.
I was immediately shocked when Ryu first came on screen, as I am by any great work of art, and shocked not because Ryu was doing anything outrageous, on the contrary infact, his character here is gentle and reserved and loving, but shocked because of the vividness of his expression which comes from within and makes the actor appear to glow. And this expression is, of course, driven by the strength and purity of the actor's intentions.
So much of contemporary acting is false and manipulative, we see actors continually narrating the character's “feelings”, as though they had taken acting lessons from Tony Blair – they show us how heroic they are by acting “heroically”, and how earnest they are by acting “earnestly”, serious by acting “seriously”, and perhaps they allow their bottom lip to quiver just to let us know there is “sensitivity” beneath the “strength”, and why not go the whole hog I say, and do it in a Welsh accent so that the actor can show us how versatile an artist he is and be doubly sure of extorting a compliment, afterall, there are careers to be made, “personal brands” to build, artistic truth is way down the list if it's on there at all. No, Chishu Ryu wouldn't know a personal brand if it came up and slapped him in the face with a wet kipper, much less would he care, he's too busy wrestling with the demands of the scene to worry about what people think of him. He is committed to facing up to the demands brought forth by true creative effort, and doing so with honesty, simplicity and integrity.
Ryu's performance in Late Spring is startlingly vivid and delicate at the same time. And it's this combination which produces such powerful results. When Ryu explains to Setsuko that happiness is not something you expect but something you create, a moment of genuine meaning is brought forth, the writer's words are made to reveal a truth whereas in the hands of a lesser actor they may have become a cod philosophy. Ryu's work is about being reserved, and withholding emotion or not concerning himself with it, or even how he feels at all, he's simply doing the tasks presented to him as well as he can scene by scene, and what we witness is true courage and true strength.
So what?
Well, it means we, the audience, take a stake in the character's trials and tribulations, their fate becomes important to us, and, crucially, we commit ourselves to the same process as that of the character which is also the same process as that of the actor, and we are, at the film's end, truly moved, in our hearts, the same way the actor/character is because their struggle is our struggle, and, finally, we enjoy that sense of peace brought about by the cleansing process of the struggle. This commitment to a process is very different from, and an infinitely richer experience than, having our attention held by a constantly flickering stimulation.
Finally, I can think of no better way to sum up Chishu Ryu's work in this film than by quoting something Simon Callow wrote about Sir John Gielgud : -
“...perhaps the word is grace, in the theological as well as social sense, a kind of effortless radiance stemming from some profound ground of being”.
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