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Born in 1962 in Tokyo, Hirokazu Kore-eda started out directing documentary
films.
His debut narrative film, Maboroshi No Hikari (1995), was peculiar
in the way it filmed its characters from a distance.
An old woman leaves the house where she had been staying, pursued in vain by a little girl. She has decided to return to her own village to die.
Years later, the girl has become a woman. She is married and has a son. Her husband is a good man, although he steals a bicycle after strangers steal his own. They live simply but happily. He works in a factory, while she takes care of the home. They live in an apartment near the railway tracks, and trains are constantly seen passing by.
One day the police come to take the woman with them: her husband has been killed by a train, his body mangled beyond recognition. The train driver claims that the man was walking along the tracks as if he wanted to be run over.
A neighbor finds what seems to be the ideal husband for the widow. He too is a widower and has a little daughter. The woman and her son set off on a journeyonce again by train. They leave the industrial district of the metropolis and travel to the rural landscape of a remote seaside village. At first the relationship between the new husband and wife is cold and formal, but they gradually come to know and like one another. The boy finds a little sister to play with. The calm, imposing natural surroundings provide the backdrop to their renewed serenity. There is no longer a train; there is the sea.
Harmony seems to reign, but a visit to her parents unsettles the woman. Simply returning to the place where the accident occurred is enough to make her reflect. She cannot find peace: why would her husband have chosen to commit suicide?
She returns home sad and troubled. Her husband is powerless to help. One day he sees her, as if hypnotized, following a funeral procession through a snowstorm. The procession stops at the seashore: the clouds have parted, and the setting sun envelops the woman's figure as she remains alone on the beach. The man blames the sea. Yet the majestic, silent landscape restores peace to the family.
Wandafuru Raifu/ Afterlife (1998)
is a Kafkaesque tale about an allegorical laboratory where the memories of the dead are recreated.
It is also a philosophical investigation in the nature and value of memory,
and what makes life worth living. It may also be a metaphor for cinema itself,
since each movie focuses on "one memory" only out of all the possible stories
that one could tell about any single protagonist.
A building in the middle of a park serves as a way station between death and heaven. A group of young people works there under the guidance of a supervisor. Each of them interviews the dead and explains how death works: in order to pass from that "purgatory" to heaven, they must choose a single memory from their life, and that will be the only memory they retain for all eternity. The young workers first interview the dead, then watch the recordings and discuss the cases with their supervisor.
Among the dead are a prostitute, a pilot, a dancer, a delinquent, a foolish teenager, an old woman who believes herself to be a child, and a man who does not want to remember anything at all.
Once they have chosen their favorite memory, the team must recreate it on film.
The young workers therefore conduct meticulous research in order to reconstruct the setting as faithfully as possible. Gradually, they become increasingly involved with their cases. The roles almost reverse: the young interviewers begin telling their patients about their own lives and confessing the memories that haunt them.
Among the interviewers is a young woman who is assisting a more experienced young man. Having died young in the war, he is thrown into crisis when he discovers that his current "case" is the man who married his former fiancée. She too has died, and the young woman helps him recover the film of the memory that his fiancée chose to take with her forever: it is the memory of one of their meetings in the park.
The young man decides that he too wants to move on to heaven and is therefore ready to choose the single memory he will carry with him: the memory of himself, alone on the park bench.
The young woman takes his place in the bureaucracy of the station. Another group of dead people is already waiting to be interviewed.
Distance (2001) is a half-baked character study and an ill-defined
analysis of social diseases, that, stylistically, borrows heavily from
Blair Witch Project.
The director does not seem interested in all in creating and following a
plot (which is basically wasted here). His attention is all focused on the
process of "believing": how do some ordinary people come to believe in
something that changes their lives, and how do other people, who did not
experience that "change", come to understand what had happened.
It is, ultimately, another meditation on memory and meaning, through the
solitary calvary as well as the collective self-flagellation of four
individuals.
It is the third anniversary of the day when a religious cult killed scores
of people with a bacteriological weapon.
Four relatives and friends of members of the cult get together and
travel to the remote jungle area and to the specific location, a lake,
where the ordeal occurred for a memorial.
Each of them walks to the end of a little bridge, says a prayer and throws a
lily in the water.
(The bodies of the cult members were burned and their ashes were scattered
in the lake).
When they return to their car, they find out that it has been stolen.
They meet a former member of the cult who survived and trek with him to
the cabin where the cult members used to live.
Overnight, in the cabin, the relatives and the former cult member discuss what
it was like to be in the cult.
A series of flashbacks shows how their friends and relatives, all
ordinary people, became members of the cult.
The action in the present is filmed with a hand-held camera, whereas the
flashbacks employs lengthy shots.
In the flashbacks, a man deserts his wife and their baby, a wife
leaves her husband, a medical student in a swimming pool
a sister
Some of the flashbacks show, instead, a police officer interrogating the
survivors to make sense of what happened.
In the morning, the stranded group gets a ride back into town.
visting the old man, but old man just died - wasn't even his son
Masaru one of them shows pictures during a picnic to his girlfriend
One of them walks back to the lake and burns all of his pictures and the
bridge itself.
Dare Mo Shiranai/ Nobody Knows (2004) is another
austere documentary-style semi-improvisational
film that involves four people who live in their own closed fantasy universe.
This time the universe is a happy and innocent one, one in which they feel
safe. And this time the four protagonists are
children who don't know the real world, and suddenly they have to explore it
and learn how to cope with it.
The film is neatly divided in three parts. At first it merely describes the
artificial and precarious paradise in which the children live. Then it
descibes their attempt at preserving the paradise once its artificial nature
has become undeniable (the mother has left them).
The camera now focuses on small insignificant objects that suddenly acquire
a much bigger meaning: they replace the mother who is no longer there,
because each of them reconstructs a memory of her having existed and
cared for the children.
Finally, when the equilibrium has been broken, a new "mother" appears to
help restore a new kind of equilibrium.
The first part of the movie is about presence: presence of the mother and
of the siblings, a presence enhanced by the fact that they are isolated from
the rest of the world. The second part is about absence: the mother is gone,
the children slowly lose faith in the unity of their family.
The third part is about freedom from the mother who used to determine if the
state was one of presence or absence.
Akira, who has been until then a passive victim of circumstances, suddenly
becomes a tragic figure, a victim of destiny.
The three parts also mark a progression from unawareness to dignity to
degradation.
The film recasts the themes of loneliness and alienation (explored by filmmakers
since the time of Antonioni) into the world of children, the world of
collapsing families. Not the victims of industrialization, but the victims
of parental selfishness.
A mother,
Keiko,
and her little boy, Akira, introduce themselves to the new landlord, promising
to be quiet tenants. Later the movers deliver their furniture and luggage.
Inside two suitcases are two more children, a girl and a boy.
Later Akira walks to the station to pick up his sister Kyoto.
The mom reminds the children that they have to be silent and not wander outside,
otherwise they will have to move yet again. Clearly none of the children
goes to school.
Akira and Kyoto take care of the younger ones when their mom is at work.
When she comes back from work late in the evening, she helps Akira study
while Kyoto does laundry for everybody.
The family arrangement is unusual, but they live happily together.
One night she talks to them about their fathers: it turns out that they
are children of four different men. And she told Akira that she is now dating
a new one, and she hopes he will marry her and take care of all of them.
One morning Akira finds a note from his mom: she's gone for a while and
left him some money. Akira has to take care of the children for one month,
begging two of the fathers (or suspected fathers) for additional money.
One day he is almost arrested for a misunderstanding at a convenience store,
a fact that could have turned into a major tragedy for the other three hidden
at home.
The mother comes back bringing presents for everybody. The children are
excited. But she leaves again, promising to be back by Christmas.
The children stick to their rituals inside the home, still obeying her
commands not to go outside. Akira is already aware that there is trouble ahead.
He becomes the little Ulysses who has to explore the city to understand how
they can survive without any guardian at all.
He pretends that mom sent them presents, but he is the one who bought them.
His sister Kyoto saves the money for when she can buy a piano.
For little Yuki's birthday the present is a walk outside the apartment,
through the streets of the big city that she has rarely seen.
They stare at the monorail that runs over their heads and Akira promises
that some day they will board it.
Akira makes two friends at a videogame store. They are spoiled, ill behaved
and selfish. They steal a toy from a store and invite Akira to do the same.
He refuses, puzzled. When he waits for them in front of the high school (that
he has never entered), they make fun of his house.
The economic situation is dire. Their bills are unpaid. Kyoto is aware of it
and gives Akira the money that she was saving for the piano. The only person
to know about them is the cashier of the convenience store, who kindly helps
Akira with leftovers. Akira decides
that their routine is pointless and takes everybody for a walk outside.
The city suspends their water service, so they have to go outside and get
water from drinking fountains at the nearby park. There they meet a melancholy
older high-school girl, Saki, who visits them at home and suddenly understands
their dire situation. To help, she accepts to entertain a businessman for
money. Akira sees it, and, disgusted, throws her money away and runs back home.
But their situation is getting worse by the day. And the children are no
longer disciplined. They are taking more and more chances going outside.
One day Akira happens to be near a baseball field when one of the teams needs
an extra player. He is happy to wear the uniform and play for real.
But just then, back at home, Yuki falls from a chair and falls in a coma.
Desperate for help, Akira finds the high-school girl and begs for money.
He uses the money to buy toys for Yuki, but Yuki dies. Just then they
receive an envelop from their mother with, finally, some money.
Akira and the girl put Yuki's corpse into the same suitcase that she arrived
in, and take the suitcase on the monorail (Akira's promise comes true but in
a cruel fashion). And they bury the suitcase outside the city, near the airport
and the sea. She takes his hand that is trembling. They take the monorail again
to go back to the city, all dirty from all the digging they have done with
their naked hands. The following day Akira and the girl are roaming the
streets with Akira's little siblings.
Kuki Ningyo/ Air Doll (2009),
based on Yoshiie Goda's manga "Kuuki Ningyo" (2000),
starring Bae Doona, shot by Pin Bing Lee and scored by Katsuhiko Maeda (aka Worlds End Girlfriend),
is the fairy tale of a sex doll that becomes alive, becomes a
sweet-natured
human with a good heart, but her brief "life" ends up in tragedy.
That pretext becomes a
fascinating philosophical poem of the intersection between human and object,
somewhere between "Pinocchio" and John Badham's Short Circuit.
photographer Elena Dorfman's series "Still Lovers" (2005)
It develops as a genre-bending film, alternating
erotic, horror, melodramatic and comedic sections.
The doll acts as a metaphor for urban alienation and deep emotional emptiness.
She becomes a sort of heroine in a society with no heroes. It is the humans who have lost the ability to feel emotions and the doll instead feels emotions as she tries to please humans, but tries in vain to elicit the same emotions from them.
It is a very pessimistic view of humanity. Human society needs dolls, replaceable substitutes for emotional voids, not more real companionship. By the end both the human and the doll have become garbage, just different kinds (one is compostable, the other one is not). The fates of humans and objects is not so different.
The film was made way before the boom of Artificial Intelligence and five years before Alex Garland's Ex Machina.
Hideo is a humble middle-aged man who commutes every night back home arriving after dark.
He looks like an ordinary single man living a life of simple routines, but, when he gets home, he has dinner and chats with... a sex doll
dressed in a maid's outfit
that he calls
Nozomi. He tells her what happened during the day and then makes love to her in bed and then washes the artificial removable vagina.
In the morning he kisses her before leaving the house.
However, one day she starts moving after he left. She gets off the bed, naked, taking uncertain steps, and walks to the balcony.
She trie women's clothes that she finds in Hideo's closet, but then she wears
her maid's uniform and walks out in the street where she sees a man send his daughter out to school and sees people throwing garbage bags in the collection place.
She sees the workers sort out burnable and unburnable garbage.
She sees an elderly madwoman who is obsessed with crime and goes to the police to confess old crimes she didn't commit. She learns simple sentences from all these people. She plays with children and is disappointed when their mothers come to pick them up.
She sees an old lonely destitute man who spends his days sitting on a bench and staring at nothing. She walks into a video store called "Cinema Circus"
and is fascinated by the shelves of DVDs. She meets the clerk, Junichi, and sees the notice that they are looking for another employee.
When it gets dark, she runs home. Hideo puts her in a wheelchair and takes her to a park, where they sit just like a romantic couple.
She remains stiff and still like the doll she was.
{All of this happens in the first 18 minutes].
She starts working at the Cinema Circus, trained by the older boss and by the friendly Junichi.
She learns quickly but has obvious gaps of knowledge.
She sees a business women wearing stockings that look like her legs: they have a line running vertical.
A horny young man spies on her when she's bending.
Every evening at home she behaves like the doll she was and obeys Hideo's routine.
Every now and then Hideo has to inflate her with the air pump through a valve in her navel.
She shops in a department store and learns that there's a chemical to hide the lines in her plastic skin. She tells Junichi that she has never seen the ocean and he tells her. He then takes her to a restaurant where she doesn't know what to do with food, but she witnesses a birthday celebration at the table next to theirs.
One day when Hideo is out she finds the box she came in and finds out that she's a cheap air doll. She learns how to pump her in herself with the air pump.
Junichi helps her at the video store. When she sees the business woman again,
Nozomi runs after her and offers her the cream that removes skin imperfections (thinking that the lines in the stockings are skin imperfections).
She chats with the old man who turns out to be a pessimistic philosopher who
is disillusioned with alienated urban people. When she tells him that she is empty inside, he tells her that everybody in the big city is.
She doesn't realize the horny young man is stalking her.
Suddenly, we discover that Hideo is a waiter at a restaurant.
At home she still behaves like a doll, still and silent, but now she thinks all
the time about her new sentient condition.
One day at the video store she cuts herself and starts losing air.
Junichi finds her lifeless on the floor. Junichi quickly realizes that she's an air doll and inflates her closing the tear with adhesive tape and blowing her into her navel.
He doesn't seem all that shocked.
She's happier than ever. Later, Junichi lies that he's an air doll too.
Junichi keeps riding her in his motorcycle but at night she is still
Hideo's sex doll.
We see again all the characters, and Hideo being scolded at the restaurant:
he is meekest of them all.
One day Hideo enters the store and Nozomi hides her face from him.
The boss reveals that he has seen them together at the park and he knows she is the lover of the older man. He treats her like a prostitute and rapes her.
[Somehow he doesn't realize that he is raping a sex doll].
One night Hideo comes home with a new sex doll and is preparing to throw Nozomi in the garbage. Nozomi than reveals herself as a sentient being. He is initially
terrified but then just disappointed that she became a human being, because he finds human beings annoying.
Nozomi runs away. She sleeps on the park bench and dreams of levitating in a sky of water.
She visits the old destitute man who is touched by her warm heart.
She then wanders around until the finds the doll factory.
She meets her maker who doesn't seem surprised to see her as a live person and simply says "Welcome home". He doesn't know how dolls acquire hearts but he tells her that she is not unique.
She asks what happens to dolls and he tells her that they become unburnable garbage, not too different from humans who become burnable garbage.
She walks to Junichi and says she will do anything for him.
He has his own perverse fantasy: not sex but disinflating her and and re-inflating her. She allows him to do it a few times, then they go to sleep.
Now she tries to return the favor: she cuts is belly, expecting air to come out.
Instead, blood comes out. He lied. He is human. She tries in vain to find the
plug to inflate him. He dies in her arms.
She wraps Junichi's body carefully in a plastic bag and leaves him in the garbage collection place. She is now devastated. She cuts herself in the garbage collection place and lets the air out. The child that we've seen few times sees that she is wearing a watch and takes it, leaving instead her old doll.
As she is "dying", she dreams that all the people she met (all the characters of the film) come and sing "happy birthday" to her.
In reality, she's about to be picked up by the garbage truck.
We finally see all the characters continuing their ordinary life, including Hideo asleep next to his new sex doll.
Kiseki/ I Wish (2011), vaguely reminiscent of
Ozu's Good Morning (1959), deals with a simple story but the
story is wrapped into gentle metaphors (the volcano that does not erupt,
the modern trains connecting to the big city, the traditional cake threatened
by modernity, etc).
When the children speak, it ccasionally feels like a documentary, with
sudden cuts and spontaneous childish thoughts.
It never turns into fairy tale mode, despite the semi-divine intervention
of a granpa and a granma.
(The country and blues soundtrack feels oddly out of context).
A child, Koichi,
stares at a volcano from his room's window. He thens wipes away the
ash from the floor. He lives with his mother and grandparents.
At school the teacher sympathyzes with him for being the son of divorced
parents.
Koichi is still attached to his little brother Ryu, who lives with his father
in another town.
Koichi's mother works as a supermarket cashier, his father is struggling to
make a living as a musician.
Koichi hears on tv that a high-speed railway is coming to their region,
linking his town with the city where his father and brother live.
During a science class Koichi overhears two children whispering that when
two bullet trains cross each other any wish can come true.
Koichi and his little friends immediately set out to study the map.
Koichi begins to wonder if he can elicit the miracle of his parents being
reunited.
On the way home the trio notice that an old lady waiting at a railway
crossing has disappeared when the train passes by.
Koichi's grandfather drinks with three elderly friends and they discuss whether
a local cake can save the local economy from the competition that will
come with the store at the train station when the bullet train starts running
in two months time.
Grandfather takes Koichi on a ferris wheel and offers his the famous cake.
Koichi asks him why volcanos erupt and why people live near them, but
he doesn't get a convincing answer.
Grandfather has a humble job and supports them all.
Ryu reveals his older brother's secret plan to three girls who befriend him,
including a girl who wants to become an actress despite her mother advice.
When the family reunites for a dinner, however his parents start arguing
vioilently.
Grandfather keeps testing new recipes of the cake on Joichi and then serving
the cake to his three elderly friends. His friends suggest that he dyes it pink
to go with the new bullet train, but he refuses to compromise.
Schoolchildren wipe out the ashes of the volcano from the grounds of the school.
WHen Koichi overhears a child saying that his father got a ticket for the very
first run of the bullet train, he decides that his turn has come: he mobilizes
his two best friends to find money (e.g. searching for coins dropped
under vending machines and selling toys) and to draw up a plan to skip class.
The three girls instruct Ryu to phone his brother and volunteer to meet him
half way.
One day Koichi and his two friends feign illness in class and, thanks to the
complicity of the school's nurse and Koichi's grandfather, they are successfully
dismissed for the day.
Each child has a wish. One of the three wants his dog, who just died, to be
resurrected.
They board a slow train to a point where the paths of the two fast trains
currently cross.
Meanwhile Ryu and his three little girlfriends, including the aspiring actress,
board a similar train in the city.
They all meet in a town that they don't know. When one gets lost, a cop
rescues him. Then the others look for him until they find him and the cop.
They lie to the cop and the older girl pretends that she's the granddaughter
of a local woman. The local woman goes along with the lie and takes in the
seven children. They get food, beds, and directions to the buller train rails.
It turns out the old woman misses her only daughter.
At night Koichi and his brother chat it out while eating granpa's cake.
The elderly couple, who had the time of their life nursing the seven children,
even give them a ride to the magic point where the two trains speed past
each other.
They wait and they they all shout their wishes as the train flashes by.
Actually, at the last minute Koichi decided not to make any wish, and his
brother confesses that he made a different wish.
The children take their respective trains back to their respective towns.
The girl who aspires to be an actress announces to her sleeping mother that
she has decided to move to Tokyo and become an actress.
Koichi explains that he chose "the world" over his family.
Back home Ryu asks their father what is the world, and his father can't reply.
Back home Koichi makes his granpa happy by telling him that Ryu liked his cake.
The volcano is still erupting ashes over the town.
Soshite chichi ni naru/ Like Father Like Son (2013) is a melancholy
domestic drama/comedy in which Koreeda contrasts two families, and in particular
two men, who have different lifestyles and fifferent incomes.
There is a sort of doppelganger theme that intersects with class struggle
and with a philosophical discussion on fatherhood
(amd, this being Japanese society, fatherhood matters more than motherhood).
The calm and pensive film rarely turns sensational, except
when the mother is asked to separate from the boy she adopted.
The light touch and the almost documentary indifference are reminiscent of
Ozu although not quite as implacable.
Keita is the smart, well-behaved little child of a wealthy young couple.
His father is a businessman who works in a high-rise building.
His mother a devoted housewife.
They spoil the child a little bit but, altogether, they live a happy life together.
Then one day they receive a phone call from the hospital where Keita was born:
babies were switched at birth. A DNA test confirms that Keita is not their
biological son.
They are asked to meet the couple who raised their biological son,
Ryusei.
The father is a humble and lazy shopkeeper, who is aging faster than he would
if he took better care of himself. The mother is a waitress.
The couples decide that eventually they will switch children, but the process
has to be gradual, so initially each child is sent to stay with the other
couple for one day each week.
Each couple is clearly attached to each child, either because of blood or
because they raised him day by day.
Keita's father Ryota, however, has a secret plan. He talks to a friend who is an
attorney about keeping custody of both children. After all, he can give either
child a better future than the other couple would.
The upbringing actually favors the working-class couple:
Ryusei's sloppy habits conflict (and occasionally irritate) his biological parents' stiff manners, whereas
Keita gladly drops his artificial manners for his biological parents' casual manners.
In fact, the lazy working-class father spends more time with the children
(both of them) than the busy pretentious Ryota ever did with Keita.
When the couples go out together, it is the poor father who wears himself out
to play with the children, while Ryota merely watches.
Ryota's wife Midori, who feels that he blames her for not having realized she was
raising the wrong child, is also unhappy to part with Keita, and not for blood
reasons but simply because she loves him, and even toys with the idea of running
away with the child.
When Ryota finally offers money to buy the custody of both Keita and Ryusei,
the other couple is offended: they are poor but there are things that money
cannot buy. And this after the poor father has proven over and over again
with his behavior that he is a better father.
Ryota's own wife is ashamed and forces Ryota to apologize.
The two couples are reunited at the trial against the hospital.
In court they are surprised by the confession of the
young nurse who made the mistake: she did it on purpose because, as a
poor struggling working-class mother, she resented the happiness of the
rich couple.
Ryota's father is ill and summons his two sons. Ryota obeys but he is initially
arrogant because he suspects his father simply wants more money from him.
His father belongs to the same social class as Ryusei's father.
The old man advises Ryota to exchange the boys because, as they get older,
Ryusei will behave more and more like Ryota, and Keita more and more like
the other father: it is all "in the blood". But Ryota's mother thinks otherwise.
Ryota resumes his routine of working till late, even when Ryusei stays
with them (which really means that he stays with Ryota's wife).
Ryota has also become less tolerant of Keita's weaknesses.
Meanwhile the two mothers are getting closer that the two fathers are.
Ryota has made up his mind: he tells Keita that he has to move with the
other couple and call them "father" and "mother". His wife is heartbroken,
but he has not spent every single minute of those six years with the child
the way she has. They have different memories. For him it is easier to
separate himself from the child for whom he has always been half a stranger.
For her it is her entire life that goes away. And she probably also feels
that the child is a helpless victim: nobody is asking Keita what he prefers.
The two mothers hug each other, as Midori confesses that
she can't have any more children and Keita wanted a brother, so maybe Keita
will be happier with the other couple (that has two other children).
Ryota tries in vain to explain to Ryusei that he has to call him "father":
the child keeps asking "why?"
His own boss advises Ryota to slow down and spend more time with his family.
His wife is amazingly willing to switch sons and start behaving affectionately
to Ryusei like she did to Keita.
Ryusei is a difficult child, who disobeys all the time.
The nurse who caused the problem is willing to pay some damages. Ryota
personally walks to her house to return the money. He begins lecturing
her on how she destroys his family but is then confronted by her own son,
a little boy who seems ready to beat him up.
Ryota is unhappy and confused. He calls his parents to apologize for his
rude behavior.
Ryusei is even more unhappy: he runs away and finds a way to get back to
his old house and play with his old parents.
When Ryota walks in to pick him up, Keita does not even look at him.
It is obvious that the poor father was doing a much better job with Ryusei
and is now doing a much better job with Keita. Both children would in fact
be happy to live with the poor couple, exactly the opposite of Ryota's
original plan.
Ryota finally learned his lesson and starts playing with Ryusei like he
never did with Keita.
But now that he is human he also realizes how much he misses Keita.
Ryota and his wife bring back Ryusei to the family the child still misses.
Keita, upon seeing them, runs away, resentful that they abandoned him to
the other family. Ryota has to follow him for a long way while apologizing
over and over again. Finally Keita accepts to hug him again and they
walk back together to the store where the other children are waiting.
The poor family welcomes the rich couple and they all laugh together.
We will never know what they decide to do with the boys.
The trademark fusion of Ozu-ism and Italian neorealism is on display again
in Umi Yori Mo Mada Fukaku/ After the Storm (2016), ostensibly the
tragedy of a failed man who wants to regain his son's respect but in reality
a tender comedy of an ordinary family in which nobody is perfect except
the aging granma, and she's the one who peacefully architects a healing of
sorts.
The story seems relatively uneventful but it is actually a story of
catastrophic contradictions: the novelist (who is supposed to work with
imaginary stories) is a detective (who works on real stories),
and the detective (who is supposed to uncover the truth) fabricates
evidence; he can't get his wife back despite his daily job of documenting
other people's failed marriages; he fears that his sister is taking advantage
of their mother when he is in fact stealing from her;
etc.
The final bonding between father and child has its own thrilling aspect:
we are left wondering whether the father simply bonded with the child or
actually infected with the same gambling addiction that destroyed the lives
of father and grandfather.
The film opens with the voice of a radio broadcaster announcing that a
typhoon is about to strike the city. Daughter and mother chat about the
father/husband who just died. The old woman was married to him for 50
years and now she feels liberated. A man, Ryota, travels by commuter
train and then local bus to this apartment: he is the brother/son.
A former classmate who meets him in the street offers her condolences.
The loudspeakers of the tenement ask everybody to be on the lookout for
an old man who has gone missing.
Ryota enters his mother's apartment when the two women have already left.
He searches for valuables but instead finds a pawnbroker receipt: his father
pawned even his stamp collection. His mother arrives and guesses that he needs
money. He asks about an ancient scroll that belonged to the dead man: his
mother tells him that she threw everything in the garbage after the funeral.
Ryota expresses concern that his sister is trying to take advantage of the
old woman. His mother shows him the tangerine that he planted in high school
and that she still waters even though it doesn't yield any fruit.
He is trying to help her move it inside but breaks the window.
He gets on the phone with someone who expects him to pay back a debt.
His mother guesses. Instead he gives her money. She knows that he has no money
but she still mentions that her dream is to move to a nicer apartment.
They leave and meet the old teacher who organizes a group of people
interested in classical music. She proudly introduces Ryota as a novelist.
They briefly gossip about the professor, who has a widower, and then the mother
tells Ryota that she was followed by a butterfly. Thinking that the butterfly
was her dead husband, she told him clearly that she doesn't miss him and doesn't
want him to ever come back. They discuss Ryota's son Shingo, who plays baseball.
Then Ryota walks to the pawn shop to pawn a camera that he took from the
apartment. The pawnbroker tells him that his father borrowed money when Ryota
was being operated of a tumor, but Ryota was never operated; and his father
even asks for money to celebrate his recovery, but there never was one.
Ryota learns that his father actually pawned the ancient scroll, except that
it was only a print and it was worth nothing.
So far we learned that: Ryota's father left debts behind, Ryota is a novelist
but is also broke, his wife divorced him and has a new boyfriend, and Ryota
owes her child support money.
Ryota's paying job is in a detective agency.
Ryota and his detective partner Machida, dressed business style, meet a woman at a
restaurant. A client paid to uncover her love affair. They showed her the
pictures of her with her lover and tell her that her husband will certainly
use them to get a favorable divorce... unless she pays them to replace the
pictures with fake ones. She pays the bribe/ransom and she hires them to
work for her and spy on the husband. Ryota gambles the money at the races
and loses all of it. In fact, he has to borrow some from his partner.
They report to their boss that the woman is not cheating on her husband the
client.
Later they follow the husband and see him with a girl.
Ryota's apartment is small and messy. Machida wakes up him. They drive to
the baseball field where Shingo is playing.
Ryota watches him through binoculars and sees
his ex wife with another man. He is clearly jealous.
Machida tells Ryota that his ex-wife's lover is a rich man.
They follow them to a fancy restaurant.
The child is unhappy: he loves his granma.
Ryota has to hide in the restrooms to meet his son. They briefly chat.
Ryota follows the three home. He watches his ex-wife
Kyoko, her lover and his son
with tears in his eyes. His agent offers him a stable job: writing stories
for a famous manga, stories that require gambling experience. He refuses.
He is working on a new novel. He meets his sister. She is critical of his
lifestyle: it's been 15 years since he won a literary award. The sister
is also suspicious that he gave his mother money. She also tells him that
their father begged her for money until the end. They remember their father
spending all the family's money.
Ryota's mother attends a meeting of the classical-music club.
Machina and other colleagues discuss divorce in front of him.
Ryota clearly still loves his wife. Ryota and Machida meet a guy who delivers
another set of pictures. These are hot pictures of the husband cheating on
his wife.
Ryota and a sexy colleague follow the man and document his extramarital
affair, even recording the noise of the couple from the room next to it.
The following day they deliver the evidence to the wife. She is happy that
her husband cheats on her, and doesn't seem shocked that the lover is
an old friend of hers, and pays the Ryota and Machida a lot of money.
The typhoon is approaching.
Ryota meets his ex-wife Kyoko at a used-book fair. She asks for the money
he owes her. She gives him a ultimatum. Ryota and Shingo hang out. He buys
him expensive baseball shoes to compete with his ex-wife's rich lover.
Ryota buys him lottery tickets.
The typhone is approaching.
Ryota insists to take the child to visit granma. As they walk the neighborhood,
Ryota tells Shingo stories of his own childhood, like the night that he spent
inside a playground's structure.
Ryota suspects that his sister is using their mother's pension money to pay
for her daughter's figure skating lessons.
The typhoon has started. Kyoko comes to pick up Shingo and the family of Ryota's sister waits to say hi to her. Everybody still treats her as a member of the
family, and everybody likes her a lot. Granma treats her like a daughter.
Granma cooks for her and Shingo and Ryota and then insists that Kyoko and Shingo
spend the night there because the typhoon is raging outside. Kyoko reluctantly
agrees. Shingo makes granma happy by reading his essay about her.
He wants granma to live with them. Kyoko is upset that Ryota bought lottery
tickets for her son: the last thing she wants is that Ryota turns her son
into another failure like his father and his grandfather. Granma makes the
bed for her son and his ex-wife: she deliberately wants them to sleep next
to each other. Ryota mentions the job offer and Kyoko simply sighs that she
told him countless times to take a job like that. He never did.
He asks her questions about her new boyfriend and cries when she tells him
that she already had sex with him. She guesses that he followed her.
She threatens to stop his visits to Shingo if he doesn't pay the money he
owes her. Outside the rain is now very strong.
Ryota tries to stel his mother's money but instead of the banknotes he finds
a note written by his sister "sorry, brother". His mother discusses the fact
that his father died in his sleep but now still shows up in her dreams.
The dead man is still alive in his own way.
She thinks that someone who suffers for a long time before dying is less
likely to show up in dreams.
She is not sure which one is better for the living and wants her son to choose:
would he prefer that she dies in her sleep and then show up in his dreams,
or that she dies after a long illness? He picks the latter.
She gives a philosophical speech about happiness and tells him to write it
in his novel.
The typhoon keeps everybody awake in the small apartment. Ryota and SHingo
decide to go for a walk in the dark under the rain. They take shelter inside
the playground structure, reenacting the episode that created a bond between
Ryota and his father. Kyoko does not stop them. After a few minutes she joins
them. Shingo loses the lottery tickets in the wind and the three of them run
in the storm to pick them up. Kyoko still tells Ryota that she has made up
her mind to move on, and he replies that he understood.
The following morning they part. Ryota pawns an inkstone for calligraphy
that he found at his mother's place. This one is indeed worth the money
that he needs. The pawnbroker also tells him that his father was very proud
of his novel and asks him to autograph the copy his father gave him.
The family takes the train together one more time.
Sandome no Satsujin/ The Third Murder (2017), shot by Mikiya Takimoto,
is a mystery thriller that hides the truth until the end. We know the killer from the very first second, but the truth keeps shifting until it becomes something
completely different. The final truth is actually a lie but it has an ethical reason to be accepted as truth, so that truth and ethics don't necessarily go along.
And so the film because a philosophical treaty on truth and ethics. The vicious psychopath turns out to be the hero, and the whole justice system turns out to be a bureaucratic joke.
We see Misumi, a middle-age man, bludgeon a man to death and set him on fire.
We then see three lawyers discussing his case: accused of
robbery and murder, he is certain to be sentenced to death.
The original defense lawyer, Settsu, hired fellow lawyer Shigemori hoping
that he can find a way to avoid the death penalty.
Misumi has a criminal record: he has spent 30 years in prison for a double murder.
Besides, he has confessed to committing the crime.
Shigemori see a girl with a bad leg at the scene of the crime.
Shigemori is not convinced by Misumi's version of the story.
It makes no sense that he killed to steal the man's wallet.
Later, Shigemori delivers a letter of apologies by Misumi to the victim's widow.
She tears it into pieces.
The victim was Misumi's boss, owner of a factory.
Misumi had just been fired by the victim and claims that he needed money.
His assistant investigates the factory and finds out that many employees are former convicts who are underpaid.
Meanwhile, Shigemori has to rescue his own daughter who has been caught committing a small crime.
Shigemori is an absent father who has long neglected her daughter for his job.
The lawyers are surprised when Misumi grants an interview to a magazine which
tells a completely different story: he now claims that he was hired by the
victim's widow to commit the murder and that the widow promised him a cut on
the life insurance. The only "proof" is a payment made by the widow to Misumi
just before the murder, which
Shigemori interprets it as a deposit.
Shigemori's elderly father comes to visit. He is a retired judge and, by accident, the very judge who decided the sentence for Misumi 30 years earlier: he now regrets that he didn't sentence him to death.
Shigemori is intrigued by Sakie, the victims daughter with a limp.
Shigemori decides to interview
Misumi's daughter in case she can provide help at the trial, but she refuses to
meet with him and her friends tell
Shigemori that she wishes her father dead.
Shigemori confronts Sakie: he has guessed that they were friends and speculates
that Misumi probably saw in Sakie his own daughter.
Shigemori confronts Sakie's mother with the theory that she and Misumi were in a secret relationship but she denies it angrily.
We see that Sakie talks to her mother about
the payment that she made to Misumi: it was for illegally mislabeling food,
something that would ruin the reputation of the factory and therefore the mother would rather not confess in public.
Shigemori prepares Misumi for the trial, asking him to claim that he didn't
intend to steal the victim's wallet, and that the wife organized the murder
to cash the life insurance. Misumi agrees but then asks
Shigemori if he (Shigemori) believes the story, or if it's just a stratagem
to avoid the death penalty and he (Shigemori) doesn't really care for the truth.
The trial is not going well for Misumi, but suddenly Sakie tells Shigemori and his team that Misumi killed her father to avenge his father's abusing her.
The father raped her repeatedly and she had told Misumi.
We sees both Sakye and Misumi at the crime scene staring at the corpse that is burning.
Shigemori is puzzled why Misumi didn't say so from the beginning and interviews him in prison.
Misumi claims that Sakie lied.
Shigemori is puzzled that Sakie would lie to save Misumi.
And then Misumi completely changes his version: he now claims that he didn't
kill Sakie's father. He claims that he was told to confess in order to avoid the death penalty. Misumi now claims that he was never at the crime scene.
The money that the wife sent him was for fake labels (which reveals to
Shigemori another dirty side of the victim), not for murdering her husband.
Shigemori has a hard time to believe this new version, that Misumi would be so naive to incriminate himself knowing that at a minimum he would spend the rest of his life in prison, but Misumi sounds so sincere that eventually
Shigemori believes him.
Shigemori's team is against pleading not guilty because that would increase
the chances of the death penalty.
Shigemori sticks to the word he gave to Misumi and goes against the advice of his own team. Misumi asks Sakie not to testify about her father's abuses.
When the trial resumes, Misumi pleads not guilty and tells the judge he confessed only because under pressure from
the prosecutor and his own initial attorney.
As predicted by the team, the judge sentences Misumi to the death penalty, considering him not only guilty but also unrepented.
Sakie coldly remarks that nobody told the truth, and nobody cares.
Shigemori visits Misumi in prison and Misumi seems happy of the outcome.
Shigemori now guesses that Misumi
denied committing the murder to avoid that Sakie had to discuss publicly
the secret of her father abusing her.
Misumi guesses that
Shigemori knew the truth but went along with Misumi's suicidal version for the
very same reason: to spare Sakie.
Misumi finally reveals why he's happy: all his life he felt that he should not have been born because he only caused pain to the people around him, but now he
feels that he finally helped someone (Sakie) and therefore it was worth that he was born.
Shigemori leaves the prison and stops to stare at the sky, remembering something that Misumi told him, that perhaps there is someone up there who plays with the lives of humans.
Manbiki Kazoku/ Shoplifters (2018)
borrows from Italian neorealism and Charles Dickens but it is set firmly in the era of the crisis of the family. Its moral sociopolitical foundation is ambiguous: the "parents" exploit children to make money, but those children have been abandoned or abused by the wealthy middle-class parents. In the first scene the domestic life of this family looks quite ordinary, at least for families that live in slums. Initially, the dissonance is about poverty in a rich country like 2018 Japan. But soon one realizes that the film depicts a disordered domestic life, and the real dissonance lies in the fact that this family is not a family but a puzzle of familial tragedies. The children are both kidnapped children and betrayed children, betrayed by their biological parents and kidnapped by this thieving adoptive family. What superficially is a fairy tale of the gutters, confined to a bizarre family that represents the exception rather than the rule of this wealthy society, reveals itself to be a bleak fresco of urban alienation that affects the whole society.
An adult, Osamu, and a boy, Shota, shoplift inside a grocery store.
On the way home they spot a runaway little girl, Juri, and take her home
with them. She is frail and full of scars. Osamu and his wife Nobuyo
think of returning her to her family but upon approaching the home they
hear screams, and they take the little girl back to her home.
Juri tells them that she got the scars because she fell.
Osamu is a construction worker, his wife Nobuyo works in a textile factory
and occasionally steal little objects.
Clearly, Shota is not going to school, but only employed by Osamu for shoplifting.
Their "daughter" Aki is a young woman who works at a hostess club.
They live in a shack owned by "granma" Hatsue. A friend is trying to convince
her to sell. Granman has the best income: a steady pension.
Shota takes little girl Juri to steal in the grocery store.
One day Osamu comes home injured: he therefore loses his job.
Osamu on crutches takes the children to shoplifting.
Osamu takes Shota to steal from a car, and reminds him
how they found him locked in a car (therefore they kidnapped him).
But now Shota suspects that maybe Osamu simply wanted to steal from that car,
not save a child abandoned in it.
Juri is getting attached to Shota.
Then one day they see Juri on TV: her parents are desperately looking for her
and she has become a big story for the press.
They cut her hair and change her name to Lin.
Granma and Nobuyo also steal new clothes for her.
Another bad news: Nobuyo's boss tells Nobuyo and a coworker that he needs to
lay off one of the two and let them decide. The coworker blackmails Nobuyo:
she has seen the little girl. Nobuyo accepts to lose the job.
Granma also makes money another way. She visits a rich couple, her stepson
and his wife, who live in a nice apartment. They give her money for Aki, who
is their daughter and they think that she emigrated to Australia, presumably
a scam concocted by granma.
Granma, Osamu, Nobuyo and the children spend a day at the beach, and granma
is happy to feel that she has a family (although it is a fake family, three
members having been de facto kidnapped). She dies later at home. The couple
quickly decide that they cannot tell the authorities and bury them under
the shack. Luckily, Aki had seen her secret code and can continue to withdraw
her pension from the ATM.
One day Shota sees Juri stealing something from the store and distracts the
owner by openly stealing something himself, making sure the owner sees him.
The owner runs after him. When he finds himself cornered, Shota jumps from
an overpass. He breaks his leg and ends up at the hospital. Interrogated, he
arouses the police's curiosity about the couple. They are arrested just when
they were trying to flee with Juri. The police identifies Juri and the news
spread to the press. The police return Juri to her parents and send Shota to
an orphanage and a school. The police tell Aki that
Osamu and Nobuyo had killed Nobuyo's abusive husband in a crime of passion.
They also tell Aki about granma's scheme to make money out of her parents.
The only one to go to prison is Nobuyo, who confesses to the murder.
When Osamu takes Shota to visit Nobuyo in prison, Nobuyo describes to the boy
the car where he was locked when they found him, so that he can track down his
parents. Shota admits to Osamu that he deliberately wanted to be caught
(in a sense, he wanted to put an end to Osamu's scheme). Nonetheless, he sounds
honestly attached to Osamu. Juri, meanwhile, is playing alone at home, and
staring out of the window.
La Verite'/ The Truth (2019) was made in France.
Beurokeo/ Broker (2022), starring Kang-ho Song and shot by
Hong Kyung-pyo, was made in Korea.
Kaibutsu/ Monster (2023),
written by Yuji Sakamoto and shot by
Ryuto Kondo, is a mediocre thriller and coming-of-age drama that could have been much better. The pretext is very old: the same story told from three different angles that ultimately turns out to be very different from what it looked at the beginning.
Saori is a single mother raising her eleven-year-old son Minato.
One night a big fire envelops a building that they can see from their apartment.
Saori works at a cleaner. A customer tells her that teacher Hori has been seen
leaving the red-light bar at the top of the building.
Saori and Minato celebrate
the birthday
of Minato's dead father, and Minato is curious about reincarnation.
Minato is weird. One night he disappears. Saori looks for him and finds him
wandering in a tunnel. As she is driving him back home, Minato jumps from the car without saying a word.
He cuts his hair and Saori notices a wound on his ear.
Pressured by Saori, Minato says that he is a monster with a pig brain, and that teacher Hori told him so. Saori concludes that Hori has been harassing and even beating up Minato and complains with the school's principal. The principal convenes a meeting at which Hori apologizes and so the other members of the board, but she can tell that noone is sincere: they are behaving like robots, repeating sentences that they are supposed to say in these cases. Hori, in particularly, doesn't feel remorseful at all. Saori is informed that the principal, a sweet old lady, has just lost her granddaughter in a terrible accident: her husband accidentally killed her. At another meeting Saori demands in vain that they take her accusations seriously. The school's official maintain a stoned attitude. Eventually, Hori snaps and tells her that it's Minato who is bullying another child. This only gets Saori even more furious.
Hori suspects that Minato is bullying little
Yori
but little
Yori
testifies that this is not true and that instead Hori is always hitting Minato.
Saori personally visits Yori and Yori confirms that he's good friend with Minato.
Hori is forced to confess and apologize in front of all pupils.
The local newspaper publicizes the scandal.
Hori gets fired from the school but then comes to the school trying to confront
Minato, and Minato gets injured running away from him.
A hurricane is about to hit the town. Just then Saori realizes that Minato is missing again.
Now the film returns to the night of the fire and shows the events from Hori's viewpoint.
Hori notices that Yori is being bullied by someone.
One day he arrives when Minato is throwing the belongings of the other children to the floor like in a fit of epilepsy. That's the only time when he hits (to stop him).
The principal and teachers are terrified of parents who complain all the time.
When the mother complains, Hori tries in vain to defend himself: the principal and the board force him to apologize to her.
He is dating another teacher and she tells him that people gossip that the principal lied about the death of her grandchild: she was the one driving, not her husband.
Hori, convinced that Minato is bullying Yori, visits Yori's father, but the man (who has no wife) thinks that Yori is a troublemaker and a monster with a pig's brain.
Back at school, Hori finds Yori locked in a bathroom stall, obviously by some bullies, and he sees Minato nearby.
Later a girl shows him a dead cat and tells him that she saw Minato playing with the cat.
The evidence seems overwhelming to him that Minato is bullying Yori, but the school's board makes him apologize to all the pupils.
Journalists come to talk to him and take pictures of him (hence the article in the newspaper that destroys his reputation). His girlfriend cut ties with him.
Fired from the school, Hori returns to the school to confront Minato. Minato admits to Hori that Hori never hurt him but then runs down the stairs and gets injured.
Hori contemplates killing himself.
The night of the hurricane Hori happens to find a page of Yori's old homework and realizes that Yori wrote in a secret code that the two boys are lovers.
Hori runs to Saori's house in the middle of the storm to apologize to Minato
for having suspected him, but that's when Saori just found out that Minato is missing.
The two get in the car and start looking for the kid. They find two bicycles
at the tunnel. As the wind picks up they struggle to explore the area.
They find Minato's poncho inside an abandoned railcar but no trace of the kids.
We also see the principal visiting her husband in prison and talking about the grandchild, and from the conversation it sounds indeed like he took the blame to save her job at the school.
The film returns to the night of the fire. Yori is walking home and has a
campfire starter.
We see that Yori was bullied by the other children, not by Minato.
In fact, Minato becomes friend with Yori, although he is disturbed when Yori
touches his hair like a lover.
That's why Minato cut his hair.
When the other children harass Yori in school, Minato defends him and that's when Hori caught him throwing their belongings to the floor.
They become increasingly good friends and Yori takes him to the tunnel and to
an abandoned railcar. Yori tries to start a fire in the nearby woods with his fire starter and Minato puts it off with water from a creek.
We see that the other children, not Minato, locked Yori in a bathroom stall,
and by accident Hori arrived just when Minato was about to free Yori.
Yori and Minato keep meeting at the rail car
Minato gets scared and runs away when Yori tries to kiss him. Now it's clear why the other children bully Yori all the time: he is gay.
When the other children bully Yori again, Minato is accused of being his lover, and Minato reacts by getting into a fight with Yori. Hori catches them fighting but decids not to report them. That's when Minato got a wound on the ear.
While Hori is being investigated and eventually fired for harassing Minato,
Minato is trying to see Yori again, but now Yori's father declares to Minato that Yori has been "cured" of his disease and now likes a girl. Yori, however, shouts that it is not true. Minato confesses to the principal that Hori is innocent.
She calmly confesses that she lied too, and doesn't seem interested in clearing Hori's reputation.
The evening of the hurricane, Minato enters Yori's house and finds Yori who seems to have tried to drown himself in the bathtub and apparently beaten by his father.
They bike to the tunnel and walk to the railcar to continue their romance.
They survive the hurricane in the railcar and then run wild in the forest.
It is not shown what happens to Saori and Hori (and why they couldn't see them in the railcar).
Hako no Naka no Hitsuji/ Sheep in the Box (2026) is a minor film.
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