Dans un jardin qu'on dirait éternel

This movie is about accidentally finding out your passion in life, without knowing it. Sometimes you just do things because you want to try something new, and eventually it becomes your passion. This is a slow movie, but it does have some good acting and a few emotional scenes.

It is about a girl who finishes school but her perception of reality is false. She cannot find a job, her boyfriend leaves her, and she find slight happiness in the process of making and serving tea.

There are mostly actresses in this movie (I think there are only 2 - 3 actors). At least 80% of the movie takes place in the tea room, but because of the story it works. The story does move pretty fast, for example one scene takes place in a day, then the next scene just fast forwards a year later. It covers about 25 years of our main lady's life in under 2 hours, but that is not the important part. It is about how fast time moves, and how things change over time.

Anyways, it is a good film and we get to see a legendary Japanese actress one more time before her death.

8/10

This is a movie in which life is a bowl of green tea. The Japanese tea ceremony becomes a philosophical and ritualistic approach to honor, to respect, to become harmonious and exacting as a mirrored counter part of the cyclical and seasonal changes in life where things are repetitive and yet imperceptibly different as time goes by. There is a moment in the film in which the camera seemingly detached itself from the story and zooms into the level of pulsating cells of a leaf. That out of context moment is exactly what this film is about. Life!

This was so relaxing, peaceful a graceful, yet carried some strong messages. Beautifully executed and directed. I will probably watch this again. Maybe even more than once more.

Nichi Nichi Kore Kojitsu - Every day a good day. (100 minutes)

One Japanese college student - Noriko, who was about to graduate the following year, has always been viewed as dull and having little achievements in life, was once recommended by her mother to attend Chado class, learning about the traditional tea ceremony, not knowing that it would benefit a great deal and account for her sanctuary to pursue happiness one day.

The movie quite actually portrayed different areas of life throughout her bad days and her good days without focusing on them in accordance with the way of tea, but it unfolded them one event at a time for us to sense its purpose and to figure out how to polish self-awareness towards self-fulfilment.

Chado is a complex series of movements you can absorb very little from it if you overanalyze or to the contrary, overlook, too often. It's hard to learn by heart if your mind keeps asking why. Merely like how we form our perception, as a watcher, we would look at this tea drinking experience from the harmonious balance conducted between guest, host and natural surroundings; from accompanying elements such as the bowls, the sweets, or the wooden tea room's ink painting; but most satisfying above all, from the stillness in the nick of time between passing and arriving seasons. We would enjoy it to the fullest if we centralize ourselves in it.

It took Noriko 24 years later to genuinely understand the meaning of "Every day is a good day" but she was eventually able to have realized her dream.

A lot of Japanese film makers make their 'Ozu' film, and thematically this certainly fits the Ozu mould, although perhaps wisely the film maker here doesn't try to copy the Ozu style.

The film is quite simple - it follows a young woman as she finds meaning through her weekly saturday classes on the tea ceremony. Over the years she gradually comes to appreciate the deeper meaning behind the ceremony. And that really is it. But what could be a somewhat boring film is anything but - the lovely performances and nice pacing brings us into the lives of the women who love the ceremony and it becomes all very moving, and not a little enlightening.

It is also, sadly, the last film by the great actress Kirin Kiki, but what a lovely last performance she gave us.