like father, like son

If we’re brutally honest, our children are both a pride and a disappointment. Every parent can recall glowing with pleasure and (honesty!) a touch of conceit at an offspring’s achievement. But there are also moments when we witness behaviour that makes us wonder: Is that child really mine?

The Japanese film Like Father, Like Son, which won the Jury Prize at last year’s Cannes film festival, asks the question and answers it too: No. Ryota Nonomiya (Masaharu Fukuyama) and his wife, Midori, receive a call from the hospital where she gave birth to their son, Keita, six years earlier. “I hope it’s nothing messy,” says the father cynically.

It is. Like a cheesy TV movie or out-of-plotlines soap opera, the hospital informs them that their child was switched at birth with another. The boy they’ve been raising — and teaching to play the piano, and sending to cram school to make sure he starts Grade 1 on the fast track — is not their biological son.

Ryota doesn’t take the news well. “Now it all makes sense,” he says, a line that will come back to bite him. He puts the blame squarely on the hospital, while Midori comes down hardest on herself. True, she was weak and confused after the difficult birth, but how could she not have noticed such an elementary change?

Clearly, they and the family on the other side of the switch have a decision to make. A meeting is arranged, and Ryota’s back is up almost immediately, because the other family is, well, different.

Not Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger different, mind you. But Yudai, the

It can’t help but make a parent think: What if it happened to me?

father, has clearly taken a path less travelled than hard-driven architect Ryota. Rumpled of hair and clothes, he drives a boxy clunker, works as a shopkeeper and shows an unseemly interest in the possibility of a monetary payout from the hospital for its mistake. He says his motto is “put off to tomorrow whatever you can,” and he’s joking, but not really.

There are other differences. Ryota and Midori live in the gleaming urban centre of Tokyo, while Yudai and Yukari are in a grubby bedroom suburb. The film even shows the couples’ cars passing under hydro lines, as though signaling a border crossing, on their way from one region to the other. Keita has been raised as a pampered only child, while his opposite, Ryusei, is one of three children in a far more chaotic household.

Like Father, Like Son was written and directed by Hirokazu Koreeda, whose beautiful 1998 film After Life imagined a post-mortal waystation where human souls pick one memory of their existence to take with them into eternity. This one has the potential to sink into melodrama — even the parents in the film remark on the cliché quality of their predicament — but the director never lets things wallow.

Indeed, the film does nothing to judge its characters, other than to present them in opposition to one another. (Although it’s instructive that we meet Ryota first.) It lets us judge — and then feel bad for being judgmental. This is a movie that can’t help but make a parent think: What if it happened to me?

Ryota and Yudai are clearly very different kinds of fathers. The former is pragmatic to a fault, worrying that his son may be too kind to his fault. Loving but distant and constantly overworked, the best you can hope for him, character-wise, is that someday he’ll look back and regret that he didn’t spend more time with his son. Yudai is more likely to get down on the floor and play with the kids, but that doesn’t necessarily make him a superior role model or the best provider.

A weird schism opens when Ryota’s boss says, almost casually: “Why not raise both?” The idea eats away at Ryota, even as the two families meet and the boys begin to spend time with each other’s parents, as a prelude to possibly switching them back to where they presumably belong.

The film presents a fascinating take on the nature-versusnurture debate, with a weird real-life coda. Steven Spielberg saw it at Cannes when he served as president of the jury, and now DreamWorks has an English-language remake in the works. Can a great movie be brought up again outside the culture that created it? Or will its foster parents ruin what made it special? Either way, see this one. ΔΔΔ½