After calling it the hidden gem of the box-office this weekend and lamenting the fact that we didn’t write a proper review, we thought we’d try to correct this mistake.
One of the best pictures of the year so far is not a particularly sexy or attractive film on the surface. It contains no Rorschach, special effects, star actors, furry butterflies, action, or CGI of any kind. It’s a quiet and emotionally moving little foreign film and family reunion tale from Japan that is devastating in its own simple and beautifully nuanced way.
The winner of the IFFBoston film fest audience award earlier this year, the intimate, bittersweet and carefully observed family drama ‘Still Walking” by Hirokazu Kore-eda is immensely deserving of many accolades, but we were honestly shocked, and pleasantly surprised that this quiet, low-key familial study would garner such a populist award (especially when louder, more dynamic films like “Bronson” were screening at IFFB). Maybe those in Boston really know where it’s at cinematically. Either way, we’re surely not complaining.
Centering on a modest-sized family — the proud grandpa patriarch, his docile, but knowing wife and their son and daughter with familes of their own, the central rhetorical thesis is raised rather early on when the eldest born son’s offspring asks his grandmother quizzically, “are we abnormal”?
It’s a disquieting moment. The family is bickering in their reserved Japanese way, dysfunctional like most families, but the remark disarms the audience and characters. What is a normal family? It’s a cutting moment that also raises that eternal question: will parents scar us no matter how much they care and love us and in some capacity will we always resent them? The film’s gentle surface really belies the buried trauma and its masterful the way subtext is revealed through small asides or furtive glances.
In “Still Life” — a soft and tender yet sometimes quietly brutal picture about the deep cutting wounds family can commit with the smallest words and the scars that sometimes never heal — this question is disturbing and steals your breath. It’s as if one had unequivocally proven to you that deep down, you hated your parents and it was revealed that they too hated you. No, the picture isn’t emotionally violent or mean spirited in the ways Baumbach or Solondz family dramas can be at all, but the way the movie examines familial resentment, bitterness, undying parental love, grudges and recrimination, is just all too painfully real.
Taking place within a 24-hour period, the story largely centers on Ryota (Hiroshi Abe), the now 40-something year old son and his aging and retired physician father (an imposing and flinty Yoshio Harada). The family convenes for their annual reunion that coincides with the death of Ryota’s older brother who drowned fifteen years ago attempting to save an overwhelmed boy in the sea. The joys and pleasantries of homecoming are quick to dissipate when the years of begrudement and disappointment start to raise their head. The disapproving doctor can’t hide his disappointment in his son who never went on to follow his medical-field footsteps and the stern patriarch soon reminds his son that Junpei (the sibling that died) was a wonderful doctor.
Slowly and ever-so precisely — one must highly admire the delicate Ozu-like framing and lensing, the exquisite, minimalistic mise en scene (oh yes, we’ll go there) — the story unfolds like the methodical unpeeling of onion layers and we come to understand why Ryota’s family visit is described as a rare occurrence.
Father and son have a veritable cesspool of bitterness and mixed feelings between them and wives, sisters, and mothers have their own clashing opinions and feelings. Ryota’s wife is a widow, and her mother-in-law Tishiko (Kirin Kiki) drops little disfavorable comments over the fact that they never produced their own child. Each comment is like a subtle landmine and soon, his wife Yukari (Yui Natsukawa) — and to a lesser extent his naive ten-year-old stepson (Shohei Tanaka) — begins to wonder why the family has come at all? But of course all the hushed tensions are mannered and obscure, almost imperceptible to the human eye not paying full attention. Ok, not quite, but this is a film of economic, graceful movement and refined subtly. It’s all too internalized to ever become melodrama.
Most painful to watch is the sequence where the now-25-year-old boy that Junpei saved from drowning comes to pay his respects. He is overweight, sweaty, and without real career prospects and the contempt the grandmother and father feel — our boy died for this? — is barely concealed and toxic.
Family is always a double-edged sword, rife with wonderful, formative experiences and nostalgic memories — plus the bitterness of petty lifelong issues that are sometimes impossible to conciliate. “Still Waking” knowingly boils all these mixed feelings to an intense, but near-silent simmer. A celebration of all that is loving and hurtful in familial relations, Kore-eda’s rich and textured study of the ones we love (and sometimes hate, or simply can’t come to terms with) is incandescent in its ability to illuminate the human condition, rousing deep-stirring and complex feelings that haunt long after the picture is over. Slow-moving and meditative, the picture is also entirely rewarding, deeply resonant and at times, heart wrenching. Throw it up there with “Ordinary People,” the impasse family troubles in Bergman films and of course the calm sadness of Ozu’s “Tokyo Story,” but file it neatly next to those classics.
“Still Walking” asks in the end, can we grant true forgiveness? Can we accept? And what happens when it’s too late? It’s the type of picture that may make you call a parent afterwards just to remind them that you care. Personally, we crumbled at the end of the picture. The mostly unanswerable questions unraveling us like a film hasn’t done to us in a long while. [A]
Here’s the trailer if you haven’t seen it. Whenever we get around to making a Best Films List of the Year So Far… (though we might want to get on that, uhh soon), “Still Walking” will be on it.
