A WORTHY AND POWERFUL FILM
Director Kore-eda’s After the Storm skates on edge between drama and farce
After the Storm is a deceptively simple story of family estrangement.
“After I die,” Japanese writerdirector Hirokazu Kore-eda has said of his latest feature, “if I’m taken in front of God or the Judge of the afterlife and asked, ‘What did you do down on Earth?’ I think I would first show them After the Storm.”
Now, before we go any further, I want you to imagine Michael Bay saying that to the Almighty about one of his Transformers movies; Roland Emmerich about the second Independence Day; or Uwe Boll about anything he’s ever made. Say what you will about Kore-eda; the man takes a big-picture view of his work.
After the Storm is a deceptively simple story of family estrangement. Ryota (Hiroshi Abe) is pushing 50 and trying to take stock of his life. There isn’t enough to make soup. Rumpled and shambolic, he works as a private detective, a job he’s convinced himself is research for his next novel, although there’s very little indication he’s writing one. (His notes on stickies includes such observations as “Why did my life turn out like this?”) His previous book won an award, but that was 10 years ago, and the award wasn’t even a particularly big one.
Ryota has an ex-wife on whom he’s been furtively spying (private detective work has its sleazy benefits) and an 11-year-old son named Shingo, with whom he’s desperate to have a better relationship. Getting in the way of that is his gambling addiction (in one culturally eye-opening scene, he visits a keirin track, where people bet on cycling races).
As the title suggests, the film’s plot moves toward a typhoon, which is moving toward Tokyo, forcing residents to take shelter — Ryota, his ex (Yoko Maki) and Shingo wind up spending the night together with Ryota’s mother (Kilin Kiki) at her apartment in a housing estate on the outskirts of Tokyo, ruminating over the past as well as a future that only Ryota (and maybe his mother) believes is still in the cards. Ryota was at his mother’s place earlier in the film — his father has recently passed away, and the opportunistic son did some quiet ransacking, hoping to find something worth pawning. One senses father and son weren’t too close at the end.
“He blamed all his weaknesses on the times we lived in,” his mother sighs; and then, undercutting the wisdom of the line, she adds: “I just said something really deep, didn’t I? You can use it in your next novel.” And scurries off to find a notebook to write it down.
After the Storm is a drama that skates on the very edge of comedy; it wouldn’t take more than a zephyr of a breeze to push it into the realm of farce.
But Kore-eda, whose previous family-centric works include Our Little Sister, Like Father Like Son, and Still Walking, has too much control over his subject to let that happen by accident. In just one small example, note how his characters say once what they know to be true, twice what they hope is true, and three times what they know is a lie.
It’s also recalling After Life, an early work by the director from 1998, in which the recently deceased have one week to choose a memory that they’ll take with them into eternity. Clearly, Kore-eda has been pondering the hereafter for quite some time. After the Storm makes for a worthy and powerful addition to a lifetime of thoughtprovoking films.