The problems are too deep to be "resolved" by plot. "Still walking" (in Japanese "Aruitemo aruitemo," words from a song which appears in an unexpected way two-thirds of the way into the film, describing walking and walking with the one you love, rocking like a boat) is a delight to watch, full of beauty, with remarkable performances by the actors, especially as they interact, and especially the children. A family gathers on the anniversary of the death of the eldest son, whose passing (he died saving a child from drowning) leaves the family broken in a way it can't ever fix. They live on - they are still walking - but the unanswerable questions of how he would have lived on, and how he would have affected the others' lives, raise in their turn unanswerable questions about the lives each of the survivors' lives, a kind of barely visible question-mark over every life choice, every relationship. In the end, this film is somewhat bitterer in its reflections on the legacies of the dead among the living than some of its predecessors, but no less true. True of what? Not just the way the loss of a particular person in a particular family lives on. Kore-eda is as ambitious a film-maker in one register as he is restrained in another, and as I discussed the film with my friend D after watching it, every detail and apparently casual reference started to seem like it bore a message. I'm not sure finally what all these additional messages are about - the burden of the past, of what might have been, the present moment... might have to go see it again!
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Bittersweet
I've another film to recommend, Kore-eda Hirokazu's "Still Walking." It has been playing in NY for a few weeks, and might well play elsewhere, too, as Kore-eda has established himself as one of Japan's most interesting contemporary film makers - and perhaps the successor to Ozu. The sublimely haunting "Maborosi" (1995) is available on Netflix, as are the wonderful fable "After Life" (1999) and the devastating "Nobody Knows" (2005), the true story of four young children who lived on their own in a flat in Tokyo when their mother abandoned them, nobody in the supposedly so attentive neighborhood noticing. Kore-eda is able to capture the feel of everyday life, its textures, its islands of unspectacular beauty, its comforts, in a way which doesn't romanticize them. Life remains difficult: the comforts are real, but the pain is real, too. His abiding theme is death, and the gaps the dead leave in the lives of the living. The gentle harmonies of the everyday are shown to be powerful bulwarks, sustaining people as they live on without those they can't live without. (I'm not sure how to state the paradox here.) 
The problems are too deep to be "resolved" by plot. "Still walking" (in Japanese "Aruitemo aruitemo," words from a song which appears in an unexpected way two-thirds of the way into the film, describing walking and walking with the one you love, rocking like a boat) is a delight to watch, full of beauty, with remarkable performances by the actors, especially as they interact, and especially the children. A family gathers on the anniversary of the death of the eldest son, whose passing (he died saving a child from drowning) leaves the family broken in a way it can't ever fix. They live on - they are still walking - but the unanswerable questions of how he would have lived on, and how he would have affected the others' lives, raise in their turn unanswerable questions about the lives each of the survivors' lives, a kind of barely visible question-mark over every life choice, every relationship. In the end, this film is somewhat bitterer in its reflections on the legacies of the dead among the living than some of its predecessors, but no less true. True of what? Not just the way the loss of a particular person in a particular family lives on. Kore-eda is as ambitious a film-maker in one register as he is restrained in another, and as I discussed the film with my friend D after watching it, every detail and apparently casual reference started to seem like it bore a message. I'm not sure finally what all these additional messages are about - the burden of the past, of what might have been, the present moment... might have to go see it again!
The problems are too deep to be "resolved" by plot. "Still walking" (in Japanese "Aruitemo aruitemo," words from a song which appears in an unexpected way two-thirds of the way into the film, describing walking and walking with the one you love, rocking like a boat) is a delight to watch, full of beauty, with remarkable performances by the actors, especially as they interact, and especially the children. A family gathers on the anniversary of the death of the eldest son, whose passing (he died saving a child from drowning) leaves the family broken in a way it can't ever fix. They live on - they are still walking - but the unanswerable questions of how he would have lived on, and how he would have affected the others' lives, raise in their turn unanswerable questions about the lives each of the survivors' lives, a kind of barely visible question-mark over every life choice, every relationship. In the end, this film is somewhat bitterer in its reflections on the legacies of the dead among the living than some of its predecessors, but no less true. True of what? Not just the way the loss of a particular person in a particular family lives on. Kore-eda is as ambitious a film-maker in one register as he is restrained in another, and as I discussed the film with my friend D after watching it, every detail and apparently casual reference started to seem like it bore a message. I'm not sure finally what all these additional messages are about - the burden of the past, of what might have been, the present moment... might have to go see it again!
