The opening scene of Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda‘s “After The Storm” is among the greatest single scenes this master of the heartswellingly humane family drama has ever put together and all it is, is a grandmother and her grown-up daughter bickering and sparring over the preparation of a meal, and gently bitching about their ne’er-do-well son/brother. It’s hard to put a finger on the precise pulse of this instantly endearing and extremely funny sequence — certainly in set-up and staging it’s nothing particularly new — but the effect is immediate and simple: “After the Storm” is a film that invites you in, and clears a space for you at the dinner table while you shuck off your shoes in the hallway.
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A lot of that sense of inclusive hospitality — a quality that all of Kore-eda’s best films share, incidentally — flows from the person of the grandmother, Yoshiko, played by Kore-eda regular Kirin Kiki (“Still Walking,” “Our Little Sister,” “Like Father Like Son“). Whether she’s bustling around cooking, dispensing pearls of wisdom amongst surprisingly cutting jabs or affecting a “sad little old lady” vibe to get her own way, she’s basically a hoot. And so it’s almost a shame that after this bright chatty bubble of an opening, we leave her for long stretches as the real plot kicks in.
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The story’s main focus is not on her, but on the black-sheep son Ryoto (Hiroshi Abe) who won an award 15 years prior for a novel he wrote, but has since then been unable to finish another, and so has taken a scruffy job in a scruffy detective agency (run by another Kore-eda talisman, Lily Franky). Ryoto is a bit of a scoundrel, though a well-meaning one, an inveterate gambler, divorced from his wife Kyoko (Yoko Maki) who is not above pilfering items from his mother’s tiny cluttered apartment to pawn to fund his habit. He is also far behind on his child support, a fact that leads Kyoko to threaten to deny him even the occasional days out he is allowed to have with his beloved son, Shingo (Taiyo Yoshizawa). The fractured family dynamic extends in both directions for Ryoto — he’s only reestablished his connection to his mother in the wake of his father’s recent death — and through Yoshiko’s amiable but spiked grumbles we come to understand that Ryoto is a classic case of the apple not falling far from the tree and then loathing the tree anyway.
There isn’t a single element in “After the Storm” that Kore-eda hasn’t explored before, but in the endless combination and recombination of his recurring concerns, occasionally he turns in a masterpiece. “After the Storm” at times brushes close, but overall doesn’t quite achieves that status. The sections spent following Ryoto at work, doing tawdry Love Hotel stakeouts and trying to play both ends during low-rent infidelity cases, feel rote and removed the film’s emotional core. That core, the father/son bond between Ryoto and his adored, sweetly serious son Shingo, and the potential for redemption that it offers for Ryoto, is also nothing new, but some fine performances and an unerring mastery of the bittersweet, defeated-by-your-own-worse-nature tone gives it special resonance nonetheless.
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The English title is a little misleading: the majority of the film happens before the storm hits, and when it comes it operates less as destabilizing incident than a potentially cleansing one, a break in the torpor of life prior before a new day dawns under clearer, if not necessarily sunnier skies. By the time the typhoon subsides and, in a charming scene, the members of the broken family run around trying to find the damp lottery tickets that the wind has blown all over the place, all these characters have come to a new understanding of their situation, made manifest in some consummate underplaying by the superb cast. Abe is terrific as Ryoto, his lean, expressive, handsome face having something of a live-action Woody from “Toy Story” about it at times. And Yoko Maki as his wife Kyoko makes spectacular use of eyes that she can seemingly switch on like headlamps, in evoking irritation but also a sad acceptance of the end of love — something Ryoto has yet to fathom.
“Why can’t men love in the present?” wonders grandmother Yoshiko at one point. And Ryoto, trapped by his own arrested development, is certainly a great example of a decent man whose idea of himself at some point eclipsed his devotion to his family, and he lost them, without even really noticing it was happening. As the jaunty whistling and music-box tinkles of the naive score make clear, this is no hard-hitting drama, though there is an undercurrent of class commentary in some of its details. But nor is it as breezily disposable as it might seem at first glance. Kore-eda is a director who by this time essentially has the adjectives “gentle” and “charming” surgically grafted to his name, but “After the Storm” for all its good-nature, is about maybe the saddest thing in the world: the simple truth that, with an enormous effort of will, we can change, but we can never go back. And so investing in others is an almost foolhardy leap of faith, with a payout as high and as terribly unlikely as that of the average lottery ticket. [B/B+]
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