Still Walking

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.

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.

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.

A middle-aged brother and sister and their families visit their aging parents on the fifteenth anniversary of their brother Junpei's death from drowning while saving another boy. Relationships between generations are strained, however, and patriarch Kyohei (Yoshio Harada), a former doctor, does not hide his resentment for his surviving son Ryoto (Hiroshi Abe), an out of work art restorer. Selected as the best film at the Toronto International Film Festival in a poll of film critics and bloggers, Hirokazu Koreeda's Still Walking is a family-oriented comedy/drama about generational conflict and the consequences of loss. Unfolding in real time over a twenty-four hour period, it has been compared to Ozu's Tokyo Story in its intimate interchanges that accurately capture the way families relate to each other but lacks Ozu's warmth and subtlety.

The day is spent with routine activities such as preparing meals and playing with the small children. Kyohei remains detached and hides in his office, pretending to be occupied with medical business. He only emerges to bicker with his wife (Kiki Kinn) and play with his grandson. Ryoto, who did not look forward to the reunion, is put off by his father's disdain for his profession of art restoration and his coolness toward his new wife Yukari (Yui Natsukawa). She craves acceptance for herself and her son Atsushi (Shoehi Tanaka) from a previous marriage in which her husband died. A picture of the deceased Junpei is placed in the center of the Yokoyama family house reminding Ryoto that whatever he does, he cannot measure up to Junpei, who was to be his father's heir.

He also notices that his sister Chinami (You) has no such expectations and her life with her car-salesman husband and two children seems outside of the range of family conflicts. When the boy that Junpei rescued visits the family, sneering remarks are made about his bulky frame and lack of ambition and old resentments come to the surface. After Chinami and her family leave, it is clear that Ryoto wishes he had not agreed to spend the night but conflicts seem to soften with the passage of time. Based on a novel by the director and occasioned by the death of his mother and the discussions of his childhood they had during her last days, Still Walking has a sense of naturalism and simplicity that is endearing.

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.