OF FLESH AND BLOOD
1995-2008 OUT 15 JULY BD EXTRAS Commenaries, Interview, Booklet, more TBC
In Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After Life (1998), newly dead arrivals at a dusty limbo get to select one memory to take into eternity. A gentle fable of death as an everyday business emerges, rooted with tender acuity in the minor-key moments and connections that comprise a life. Even before its playful meta-riffs on docu-style DIY filmmaking unfold, After Life (★★★★★ )ΗΗΗΗΗ gracefully frames Kore-eda as Japanese cinema’s foremost modern humanist tone poet, a standing reflected across this four-film boxset.
He followed his early docs with 1995’s Maborosi (★★★★), a nearhallucinatory tale of a widowed mother haunted by thoughts of death. It burns slow, but the mystique patiently accrued by the wide-angle images earns the cathartic climax its elevating power.
Although Kore-eda’s films span genres, he’s best known for family portraits such as 2018’s Shoplifters
(not included). In 2004’s Nobody Knows (★★★★), daily routines – brushing teeth, making food – assume a significance
for a family of abandoned kids. When tragedy hits, its impact is all the more piercing for the understatement.
Finally, 2008’s Still Walking (★★★★) probes feelings sparked by a family reunion 12 years after an awful loss. As Kore-eda braids tiny details with unspoken regrets, melodrama is out. Don’t expect indoor fireworks: just an acutely devastating sense of how lives accumulate meaning, from a director working in a consistently rarefied register. Kevin Harley