Maborosi

Rarely do I rate films so highly, but Maborosi earned it's nine. A large part of my enjoyment of the film was due to the beautiful and subtle directing that seemed to compliment the story itself perfectly. Koreeda is a very promising Japanese director. I recommend this one to all serious movie watchers, and I await his future films.

Wow, there are some pretty extreme reviews of this film. I've read both the LOVED ITs and the HATED ITs, and I agree with both. So what's the deal? Is this the best film ever, or should it be used as a torture device at Guantanamo Bay?

All I can say is that I experienced moments of both extremes, but in the end I was unsatisfied. It begins provocatively with an interesting flashback, told very poetically through high contrast shots with deep perspective. This sets the tone very nicely and even manages to inject some suspense into the film. But the movie's downfall is excessive, gratuitous repetition in the hours that follow.

The plot develops suddenly within the first 30 mins or so. From then on, don't expect much of a story because the rest is a highly impressionistic mood-type piece with little dialogue and less action. That's not necessarily a bad thing; directors like Ming-liang Tsai (THE HOLE) have pulled it off successfully, but what irked me in this case was the gratuitous repetition. Yes, I know I said "gratuitous repetition" already. Good to see you're paying attention ;)

I counted 5 scenes (long ones) of the heroine sitting in a dark room staring out a window with a ghostly light illuminating her face. It was stirring the first time, but after a few more times it's simply redundant & anticlimactic. Another great image--used powerfully at first but losing its charm after the 3rd or 4th beating over the head--is a far shot of a body of water where our eye is drawn to the reflections of people on the surface. OK, Koreeda, we get the picture; the film is about the contrast between shadows and bright light, reality and deceptive illusion, that which we do not understand vs. that which we *think* we understand. If it were presented more concisely, I would have loved it. But did he really require 2 hours to say it? And if so, could he not have explored it more deeply, rather than leaving us with a somewhat shallow climactic monologue at the end? (I call it a 'monologue', but actually it's only 2 or 3 sentences which summarize the whole point of the film.)

In the end, my impression of MABOROSHI is much like my impression of Koreeda's later film AFTER LIFE (which I think is much better than this); the philosophy is very interesting, there are certain poetic moments that will captivate you, but when the film is over you get the feeling that you've just read a haiku. Nothing more.

And beautiful and fascinating film with a gentle lyric quality. Runs directly counter to the usual Hollywood expectations. The most emotionally packed scene is filmed in extreme longshot! You can't even see the faces of the actors but the location and the action that you can see are enough. If you want to see a standard hollywood formula, then stay away. If you like quiet and moving films shot in entirely new ways (granted the director owes much to Ozu) then get this film.

In 1998 the Japanese director Hirokazu Koreeda astonished those of us who feel passionately about the expressive power of cinema with "After Life" a film about the hereafter that I would claim to be one of the masterworks of the past decade. The effect of this was so mesmerising that for some time I completely forgot about "Maborosi" an earlier work that I had caught up with only a few days before. Although not in the same league, it is worth a look if only to trace the origins of the later piece. Just as "After Life is a meditation on life from the point of view of the dead, "Maborosi" reverses the process and meditates on death from the living's perspective. A young girl feels somehow responsible for the death of her grandmother whom she cannot persuade to return to the family home after she wanders off one day. As a young woman she again is unable to escape a feeling of guilt when her husband is unaccountably struck down and killed by a train. These events happen fairly quickly in the first third of the film. The rest is an elegiac account of her second marriage to a widower with a young daughter and their life together in a remote fishing community as far away from the cramped streets of the city as it is possible to imagine. With the baby son by her first husband now grown to a small boy the new family feels complete. And yet the woman still exists in a state of unease. Although there are no more disasters, there are continual reminders of the frailty of life. An elderly woman, not unlike her grandmother, takes a boat out in a storm but returns unharmed. On a later occasion she watches an anonymous funeral procession which seems held in longshot for an eternity. "Marobosi" which means "The Beckoning Light" - a clear reference to death - is full of the influences of other directors. There is that of Ozu in the many domestic interiors where the camera seldom moves, Angelopoulos in the many long held exterior vistas and even Hou Xiaoxian in the way the audience is made to concentrate hard to work out character reactions and situations given a minimum of verbal and visual information. One curious fact about the film is the way the characters either appear in shadow or middle distance so that their emotions are hard to recognise. In the end this effect of deliberately distancing the protagonists is the film's essential weakness. It gives a sense of detachment and uninvolvement that Koreeda was to overcome triumphantly in the marvellous "After Life".

The title of the film comes from a Japanese word that loosely translates into "illusory light". A maborosi is an inexplicable mirage that sporadically unveils itself along the waves of the sea, leading many curious sailors to their impending doom. Nobody questions where this mysterious light originates from; nobody wonders why so many men are lured by the maborosi's false promises of otherworldly beauty. The answers are patently unexplainable, leaving no feasible alternative but submissive acceptance and temperate remembrance. There are many aspects of this world whose origins are rationally indecipherable; perpetual mysteries as perplexing as the shifting of the tides or the changing of the seasons, the rising of the sun or the positioning of the stars, the birth of a son or the death of a father. The lesson of the maborosi is quite comforting in its reductive simplicity; there are some tragedies in life that cannot be readily understood or accounted for, but these setbacks should always be treated with a tacit acceptance of the unalterable past, and an unbroken willingness to overcome.

Yumiko is confronted with such a confounding loss following the unanticipated death of her husband, Ikuo, an otherwise cheerful individual occasionally prone to brief interludes of somberness and incredulity. As the film opens, we are shown passing indicators of the memories that will continue to haunt Yumiko long after her husband has departed: the stolen bicycle that the couple re-painted together, the intrusively endless loop of train-tracks that entangle the neighborhood, the dark empty hallways of a home encompassed by unfulfilled hopes and abandoned promises. These are the lingering images of a time long since passed, but never forgotten; the remaining links to a previous era divided by enigmatic fate, replacing the comforts of life's certainties with an encircling string of unanswerable inquiries. As Yumiko struggles to combat her own doubts and insecurities, her regrets and reservations, she is forced to reconcile the unaccountable cause for her grief with the prospect of an eventual regeneration of love and companionship. While Yumiko cannot escape from the memories of her past, she can still find hope in embracing an unforeseen direction, discovering solace and comfort in the arms of another man. But even the blissful serenity of the ocean's archaic blue cannot remove the painful memorials from the deepest recesses of Yumiko's imagination. The crashing of the offshore waves does not represent the progressive cleansing of the past, but the uninterrupted calamity of the storm, suggesting that Yumiko's thoughts are just as violently conflicted as the impartial forces of her surroundings.

Yumiko's struggle to assimilate her ways into an unfamiliar terrain is further compounded by the insolvable puzzle echoing throughout the barren corners of her new home, reverberating off the timeless waves of the indifferent sea. In spite of this continuous anxiety, there are many fleeting moments that would indicate a sense of personal advancement: images of a family finding comfort in each other's tragedy, reciprocally seeking to forge new identities out of an identical past. Some of the film's most memorable scenes occur with Yumiko's new found source of compassion, as Koreeda primarily focuses on the more joyful, celebratory moments of a strengthening bond between intimate strangers. However, a return visit to the city of Osaka brings back a flood of painful reminders, returning Yumiko to her previous state of inescapable depression. The journey further complicates the delicate situation unfolding within the confounding confines of her deepening psychological turmoil, exacerbating the tensity of her gradual acclimatization. Yumiko's inability to fully commit herself to her second husband is a direct consequence of her inability to comprehend the destabilizing effects of her innermost fixation; a persistent uncertainty concerning the nature of death, and a refusal to receptively acknowledge that which we cannot control.

Koreeda's transcendent depiction of the esoteric natural beauty of Yumiko's rural environment is a calculated effort to further reinforce the principle message of the film, which is simply the message of the maborosi. Why does Yumiko's husband selfishly succumb to the unfathomable temptations of the mystic light beyond the horizon? Why does the maborosi indiscriminately engulf the souls of its unwarranted victims? These are questions without answers, frustratingly enlightening reminders of the limits of our mortality, and the fragility of our most basic human certainties. The point of the film, however, is not to mock or ridicule our rational sensibilities, nor does Koreeda intend to paint an exceedingly bleak portrait of untenable despair and incomprehensible misfortune. Rather, the lesson of the maborosi is an alleviating reaffirmation of hope and anticipation, providing an acceptable resolution to an inconclusive affliction, dispensing clues to the solution of one of life's greatest riddles. The maborosi fable teaches us that closure cannot begin without acceptance, and that acceptance is ultimately earned through procession.