Still Walking

Still Walking is an intimate movie about a family reunion. Its observations about family dynamics are the most true to life I have ever seen. The movie paints the entire gamut of emotional family experience with delicate yet powerful brush strokes but it's not a sentimental film, nor an opportunity for actors to grandstand. It's Japanese, so all the strong undercurrents of emotion are held in check by equally powerful restraint (both cultural and directorial). A brother and a sister attempting families of their own go to visit their parents in Yokohama. The parents have lost a son and the family's devastation hangs heavy in the air. You can actually feel it bearing down on your shoulders from the first frame. Anybody who has ever spent the night at the house of relatives will feel the weight of family history that this film captures so truthfully.

The parents are engulfed by their quiet, ongoing grief and the surviving children resent all the attention given to the one who is not there anymore. The movie is surprisingly mordant, touching, cruel, sad, funny: human. The mother is this wonderful woman who cooks up a storm (I so wanted to be invited to that house). She is from an older generation, which means she has been forever in the shadow of her husband the doctor, cooking and cleaning and feeding the children, but she is not a pushover, nor a saint. She is mischievous, catty and petty, prejudiced, funny, generous and cruel at the same time. She is a marvel, and the actress who plays her is astonishing.

This movie has many emotional surprises that make the audience gasp, but they are presented with a sure, light touch, never falling into easy sentiment, never shying away from human complexity. It's a film about family, and love and duty and regret and it is stunningly beautiful.

Oh, my heart. This is a quietly devastating film about family dysfunction. The elderly parents in the story are deeply sympathetic and yet also deeply flawed, caring more for their dead son than their living son or daughter, both of whom bring their families over for a mini-reunion of sorts. We gradually see the cracks in the various relationships, and that events of the distant past are still top of mind for all of them, leading to a family gathering that's civil but not joyous, all of which I could relate to. Kore-eda tells this poignant story masterfully, with restraint and simplicity, and the cast is strong from top to bottom (Kirin Kiki as the mom, and Hiroshi Abe as the son in particular).

Part of what makes the movie so good is that the characters feel so authentic, and nothing is black and white. The mother is sweet and hospitable but has a lot of negative things to say, displaying some of the rougher points of her character when she talks about putting the guy her son saved through the annual torture of visiting them, or when she says she doesn't want to be cramped by her daughter or her noisy grandkids living with her. The father, meanwhile, is gruff and emotionally distant to say the least. And yet, they also have their own stories - she sings along fondly to a song playing that reminds her of a time when life was still so full of hope, but she tells her husband she first heard it when she discovered his past infidelity, dropping quite a bomb on him when he's in the tub. The couple are still together but they bicker, and we see various uncaring behavior such as him not recognizing her housework as ever having "worked" (ha!), not helping her across the street, or her only finding out he goes off to karaoke by reading Christmas cards sent to him.

Maybe the film is just showing that this is what was "normal" for families in that generation (the word "normal" is used a few times), but also what the consequences of that are. The parents both express disappointment in so many ways, rather than embracing the people their kids turned out to be (and in turn, their spouses and kids as well). It's so sad, and so cautionary. Like the song says, the love you take is equal to the love you make - instead of the reunion making the kids want to come more often, it has the opposite effect. Sometimes someone has to take the first step or make an effort, beyond saying it will happen "one of these days," as the son puts it. Maybe that's how many grown-up kids and families are, I don't know. I felt my heart in Kore-eda's hands throughout the whole film, but rather than squeezing it mercilessly he just made it ache, and in the gentlest way possible, part of his talent.

Forty-something art restorer Yokoyama Ryota (Abe Hiroshi) reluctantly returns to his parents' home with his new wife Yukari (Natsukawa Yui) for a rare reunion. The family is holding a memorial for the eldest son who passed away 15 years ago, and Ryota has not been looking forward to the occasion. To his father (Harada Yoshio), Ryota can never compare to his late brother, and silent resentment has accumulated between father and son over the years. Likewise, Ryota's mother (Kiki Kirin) carries years of bottled frustrations and disappointments that slip out in casual, cutting remarks. Only sister Chinami (You) seems to somehow keep herself above the family drama. As the day wears on, the family runs through the simple gestures and complex emotions that keep them together and push them apart.

I very much enjoyed Nobody Knows (Dare Mo Shiranai) and After Life (Wonderful Life) immensely and found another good and engaging movie with Still Walking. Kore Eda seems to be in a small group of directors who use minimal music and other traditional movie elements in order to convey the story to the viewer. Just as talking in a low voice will elicit the heightened command of a listener, so too does Kore Eda use subtle dialogue and action to focus the viewers attention to what's going on.

I can totally relate to the family in Still Walking because they come across as anyone's family. Literally. I felt as though I could have been watching my own family and not some Japanese family to whom I could not relate. All the elements are there from the big-city adult children coming to visit their small-town parents with their children en tow. The interplay between the fast pace of urban life and slow pace of rural life meet somewhere in the middle. Throughout, I felt as I usually do in a Kore Eda movie: a silent and invisible observer.

The premise of the movie is that the family gathers together once a year on the anniversary of the death of the eldest son who we learn had drowned saving the life of another person who himself was attempting to commit suicide by drowning in the sea. As you may know, in Japanese society, if you save the life of someone who wishes to commit suicide, you effectively are responsible for their life going forward. In this case, the person doing the saving, the eldest son, had died in the process. So we see the person who he saved return year after year to be reminded in an indebted but somewhat cruel manner that he is alive and that he will be, for the rest of the parent's of deceased lives, be required to suffer the (cultural) humility of "being alive" while their son is dead.

We also see the typical social dilemma of what to do as ones aging parents and additional interplay between the surviving son and his new, but widowed, wife and her child. We've seen the transaction a million times in other movies: mother in law has her comments and opinions, wife complains to the husband about her and her son's treatment, son has to either stand up to the parents or find some middle ground.

All in all, it's well played out and I was very pleased by this film. It's an amalgam of growth, change, sacrifice, forgiveness, and the road we all have to travel as we get older or if we have children ourselves. Oddly though, the film's title doesn't make sense until near the end of the movie.

Koreeda's Aruite Mo Aruite Mo is a consideration of family that is part homage, part vivisection. The comparisons to Ozu that have been made are fitting, the film a return to the Golden Age of Japanese film-making when a distinctly Japanese setting was employed to convey universal themes. The domestic setting, limited time-frame, and even knee-high camera placement all deliberately connote Ozu, but not so much to bow before him, as to re-invent him, to update or even evolve the form. Koreeda seems to have set out less to pay his respects to Ozu, as to surpass him.

Ryota brings his new wife and stepson home to to meet his family on the anniversary of his older brother Junpei's passing. The cycle of pettiness, accusation, pouting and recrimination soon kicks in, familiar theatre of family that will have people recalling Thanksgiving get-togethers, Hogmanany parties, Christmas fall-outs... The joy is in the details of Koreeda's observations, and the forceful animation of them by the cast. From the opening conversation between mother and daughter, playful banter on lessons never learned, wisdom refused, the tone of interdependence with tense undercurrents is set.

YOU as Chinami is more straightforward than her mis-maternal role in Nobody Knows, angling to move in with her parents by talking to her mother as a type, rather than as a person. Kirin Kiki is best known these days here in Japan for her comic outing in the Fuji film commercials. She excels there and here, sweet and doddering at one point, and yet scary, almost vicious at others, as when she reveals the depth of her loathing for Yoshio, the boy-now-man whom her son Junpei died saving from drowning. Her cool gaze upon her grandchildren is evidence of Koreeda's consummate ease in avoiding sentimentality. Hiroshi Abe holds up his end more than competently as the brooding Ryota. Recently 're-structured', he finds his conflicting roles as failed breadwinner, failed heir, struggling stepfather and less-favoured son all brought to salience in this one event. He is too proud to admit his jobless status, but not man enough to help his wife carry the bags. He reacts just as his father reacts to the shock of retirement, or his mother reacts to facing life's disappointments - by lashing out. He is a grown man in gaudy cheap pajamas bought by his mum. He competes with not one ghost, but two - his brother, and his wife's first husband. Who can shine in comparison with martyrs?

Families can be joyous and awful, and Koreeda captures that to a tee. The film seems to go on a beat too long, past a line on the bus that seems the natural ending, but then the final narration (reminiscent of Twilight Samurai) and graveside scene pull it all together poignantly. Granddad thinks they will be back at New Year - they won't. Chinami thinks her mother wants them to move in - she doesn't. Yoshio thinks he is welcome every year - he isn't. Families are destined to misunderstand each other. And yet the honouring of Junpei, the father cracking water-melons with his children, Granddad reaching out to his step-grandson - the succour of family is also portrayed here.

No one does bitter-sweet and elegiac quite like Koreeda, and in Aruite Mo Aruite Mo he achieves the quintessential mix that he was arguably striving for in After Life and Maboroshi. This is a film both comforting and challenging, that may just turn out to be Koreeda's masterpiece.