Revelations writ small
The beauty of daily life suffuses this tale of an errant father trying to make up.
The modest, almost demure, films of Japanese maestro Hirokazu Koreeda have, in recent years, crept out of festival programmes and into limited general release here. In the tradition of the great Yasujiro Ozu ( Tokyo Story), he creates beguilingly simple domestic dramas that pick at the loose threads of our shared humanity.
His latest, more delicately nuanced than the recent Our Little Sister and Like Father, Like Son, stars the lanky Hiroshi Abe as Ryota, a once-celebrated novelist with writer’s block and a gambling problem. He works as a seedy private detective (doubling his money by selling wayward spouses the evidence he’s gathered on them) and mooches around his elderly mother’s house looking for items he can pawn or hassling his sister for a handout. His father’s not long dead and the dialogue is littered with hints that the apple hasn’t fallen far from the tree. Meanwhile, his ex-wife is after him for child support and is threatening to deny him access to their son if he doesn’t sort his affairs out.
Such a loser should have trouble commanding our sympathies, but Abe, whose face redefines hangdog, does it effortlessly.
“How did my life get so screwed up?” says one of the unfaithful spouses he targets, and it rings a bell. He wants to be
a father figure to his son, more than just a buyer of sports shoes, but the best wisdom he can manage is that “it’s not easy growing up to be the man you want to be”.
The action, which unfolds over the course of 24 hours or so in a small city near Tokyo, is dominated by reports of an impending typhoon, and the title offers a hint of the film’s preoccupations: it is what Ryota might survive to be, rather than what he is, that interests Koreeda.
But the film offers no grand dramatic flourishes: in keeping with its tone of rueful melancholy, its revelations are writ small, in koan-like lines such as “You can’t find happiness until you let go of something”.
As always, Koreeda is supremely attentive to the beauty of daily life: the dappled light of a park; the making of soup; the inking of a calligrapher’s stone. He watches closely, not just the world around him, but the people he places in it.
IN CINEMAS NOW