REP PICKS Berkeley series shines light on notable director
The great Hirokazu Koreeda, the most important Japanese director of the past 25 years, finally got an Oscar nomination this year.
“Shoplifters,” which started its run by becoming the first Japanese film to win the Palme d'Or, the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival, had no chance to win the Academy Award for best foreign-language film — it was the Year of “Roma,” after all — but it's a recognition of his rising importance.
It's also the perfect centerpiece to a modest but vital seven-film retrospective — about half his output — that begins Thursday, May 2, at the Berkeley Art Museum's Pacific Film Archive.
To watch a Kore-eda film is to experience what the Japanese call mono no aware, which translates as “the pathos of things” — an awareness of the transience and impermanence of life. His films are often about how broken families can become whole again after a death, which has usually occurred by the time the opening credits roll.
In fact, Kore-eda told me during a visit to San Francisco in 2009 that the deceased perspective is, unofficially, our guide to his movies.
“Japanese society doesn't have a God — no absolute presence,” Kore-eda said. “So a dead person becomes that absolute presence — a dead person looking over the people still alive. What would this person value, or criticize, about the way the people still alive live their lives, the decisions they make?”
The BAMPFA series starts at the beginning. “Maborosi” (7 p.m.), a quiet masterpiece from 1995 that was the filmmaker's feature directorial debut, is about a young widow who moves from the city to a small town to marry an older man so that he can support her young son. Quietly, and movingly, she learns to love this kind man and his daughter, despite the grief and love she feels for her first husband.
It's also a visually stunning feature, having been shot on 35mm film, with every shot using available, natural light. See it on a big screen, by all means.
“Maborosi” also begins another thread in Kore-eda's filmography: the remarkable resilience of children.
“Shoplifters” (7:30 p.m. Saturday, May 4; also May 19) continues that theme. It is about a family of petty crooks living on the margins of Japanese society who take in a lost child they find in the cold.
“Still Walking” (May 9) is about a fractured family gathering on the 12th anniversary of the death of the eldest son. In “Like Father, Like Son” (May 11), two families find out their sons were switched at birth. “Our Little Sister” (May 12), Kore-eda's sweetest film, is a tender, touching tale of three sisters who meet their 15-yearold half sister at their estranged father’s funeral. Though she is the product of the affair that caused their father to abandon the family, they invite her to live with them, trying, in a sense, to make a broken family whole again.
Taken together, these films are about capitalizing on the present by moving on from the past, and not worrying too much about the future, because change is inevitable and will happen in unpredictable ways.
In a sense, then, his films are about trying to get the most out of our short lives. Take Koreeda's second feature, “After Life” (7 p.m. Sunday, May 5), which has a most interesting concept. In a way station, angelic caseworkers help the recently deceased choose a memory to carry with them into eternity. They must forget everything else, except this, their happiest memory.
What memory would you take to the great beyond?
Kore-eda's work is a quest to live that memory, even in the face of seemingly impossible challenges.