Family drama told through the poetry of everyday life
When is a half-eaten box of cheese straws not just a half-eaten box of cheese straws? Answer: when it’s in a Hirokazu Kore-eda film. No director working today is better at finding poetry in the flotsam of everyday life – and in After the Storm even the snacks are bright with meaning, from the hamburgers and home-made water ices to the bowls of noodles hastily guzzled at grey railway station canteens.
Most of the guzzling is done by Ryota (Hiroshi Abe), a once-promising novelist eking out a living at a detective agency in a tatty northern suburb of Tokyo. He originally took the job as as research for his stillunwritten second novel, but has since settled into the cheating spouses and lost pets beat with depressing ease. It’s undignified work, but the salary it brings in helps him cover two longstanding financial commitments. One is monthly maintenance payments to his ex-wife Kyoko (Yoko Maki) and their son Shingo (Taiyo Yoshizawa). The other is his ruinous gambling habit.
In the event of a clash – if he has a promising tip for the cycle track, say – the gambling invariably takes precedence over his boy’s upkeep. But Ryota bets obsessively for the same reason he always seems to be nibbling on biscuits and sweets. He’s staving off pangs of paternal uselessness as well as hunger – just tiding things over until real, substantial nourishment arrives.
At least he has his doting elderly mother Yoshiko, played by the great Japanese character actress Kirin Kiki, to help with the food side. She’s a natural caterer and nurturer, always clattering and stirring away at some curry or hotpot – though having recently lost her husband, Ryota’s father, her mind often turns to her own mortality, as well as how much she’d love to see her son, grandson and ex-daughter-in-law reconciled for good. (Her own social life is a less pressing concern: “New friends at my age only means more funerals,” she observes.)
With a typhoon bearing down on the city, all four are finally forced to spend a long, blustery night in Ryota’s mother’s cramped apartment, during which three generations of familial hopes and regrets are slid in turn under the microscope.
Before this, though, Kore-eda shows us Ryota going about his business as both detective and parent – and just as in the workplace he is a divorcee who gathers evidence for other people’s divorces, there is a sad circularity about the way in which his memories of his father as an unreliable provider are clearly being visited on his own son in turn.
The truth of every moment in the film is grounded in its details, such as the way Ryota’s adult sister (Satomi Kobayashi) rocks automatically forward in her seat to avoid the swing of the refrigerator door in her mother’s cramped kitchenette.
This is filmmaking in the compassionate, lyrical tradition of Kore-eda’s countrymen Yasujiro Ozu and Mikio Naruse, in which even a grandmother’s cluttered apartment, piled high with junk and heirlooms, should be framed as attentively as the grand hall of a palace. No director working today observes family life with such delicacy and care, or is so unstintingly generous with what they find.