Kore-eda’s masterful touch imbues ‘Storm’ with all the drama it needs
“After the Storm,” a family drama from the Japanese writer-director Hirokazu Kore-eda, unfolds amid the sweltering heat of an unusually active Pacific typhoon season. In preparation for the 23rd rainstorm of the year, a recently widowed woman named Yoshiko (Kirin Kiki) asks her middle-aged son, Ryota (Hiroshi Abe), to move a tangerine plant on her balcony — which he does, breaking a window in the process.
Both Ryota and the plant are tall, clumsy and, as Yoshiko tells him, stubbornly slow to bear fruit. But they both have important roles to play, as this film reveals in due course. Kore-eda’s characters often speak of everyday objects — a lateblooming plant, a hot pot of stew, a scrap of handwriting — with a simplicity that, rather than seeming precious, feels like the plainest way of expressing what they mean.
“Like the director’s “Still Walking” (2009), in which Kiki and Abe also played a mother and son, the movie gently exposes a family’s past troubles and lingering regrets, finding pockets of revelation in a deceptively uneventful narrative.
At its center is Ryota, a genial screw-up whose once-promising writing career has foundered since the publication of his first novel 15 years earlier. He now works as a private detective, spying on cheating spouses and using the photographic evidence for blackmail — a sleazy racket that he claims is merely re- search for his next book.
In reality, Ryota squanders what little he earns at the racetrack, to the frustration of his ex-wife, Kyoko (Yoko Maki), who is raising their young son, Shingo (Taiyo Yoshi-zawa). Turning on his raffish charm, Ryota tries to get back into Kyoko’s good graces and spend quality time with Shingo.
“After the Storm” may seem like a minor tale, but it is the work of a filmmaker assured enough to hide his mastery in plain sight. Nothing is overemphasized, and nothing escapes his attention. Serving as his own editor, the filmmaker sets his scenes to the gentle, unforced rhythm of everyday life. His characters are so sharply drawn and inhabited that their moments of mundane togetherness — sharing a meal, playing a game, taking shelter from the rain — reveal more about who they are than seismic dramatic shifts could.
Kiki, always gifted at playing women as impish as they are wise, imbues Yoshiko with grandmotherly warmth but also the piercing sorrow of a life lived with unfulfilled longings. Maki, her soft, delicate features lined with a hard edge of disappointment, makes the practical-minded Kyoko sympa- thetic but hardly immune to criticism. (“You’re so calculating,” Ryota tells her. “No,” she replies. “It’s called planning your life.”)
Ryota is a charming slacker with a “What? Me worry?” smile, but it’s Abe’s 6-foot-2 frame that makes the character seem like an overgrown child — something Kore-eda uses to brilliant effect. For most of “After the Storm,” Ryota simply doesn’t fit in anywhere — his mother’s apartment, the bathtub or the lives of his ex-wife and son.
In “After the Storm’s” closing scene, nothing on the surface has changed, but on a deeper level, something has. The final shot is of Ryota walking away from the camera — as tall as ever but now free, at ease and with a clear reason to keep going.