I Wish
Kiseki
Hirokazu Kore-eda (2011)
Hirokazu Kore-eda’s latest is hard not to like but harder still to get really interested in. Kore-eda sees good in all the people in his movies. At the same time, he’s always aware that human relationships tend to fail and his characters are often lonely or disappointed or at odds with each other. His Still Walking was praised for its ‘gentleness’ – a judgment which seemed to me not only condescending but inaccurate: the film is tough-minded as well as compassionate. I Wish – about two young brothers, separated as a result of their parents’ divoice – merits the description given to Still Walking, perhaps because Kore-eda’s kind-heartedness is even more thoroughgoing with children in the main roles. He gets fresh and rich characterisations from all concerned – especially the two real-life brothers Koki and Oshiro Maeda, who play, respectively, twelve-year-old Koichi, who lives with his mother and maternal grandparents in Kagoshima, and the younger Ryunosuke (‘Ryu’), who’s with his father in Fukuoka. Koki Maeda’s appearance kept reminding me of the Wilderness Scout in Up but he’s much more than a cartoon: the thoughtful Koichi is old enough to know how to put on a variety of masks, as the occasion requires. Several of the other children make an impression – notably Kyara Uchida, as Megumi, a teenage girl whose ambition to be an actress is constrained by her mother’s resentment about what happened to her own acting career, and Seinosuke Nagayoshi, as Makoto, one of Koichi’s schoolfriends, who is so attached to his little, aged dog Marble that, when it dies, the boy carries its corpse round in his bag and keeps hoping against hope that Marble will come back to life.
Koichi too has supernatural longings. The unlovely neighbourhood in which he now lives is in the shadow of a semi-active volcano, Sakurajima. Its ashes are part of the local atmosphere but Koichi wants Sakurajima to erupt, so that he and his mother have to be evacuated back to Fukuoka. Kagoshima and Fukuoka are stops on the line of the Bullet Train service which is about to open. Koichi imagines that, if he and Ryu meet at the midpoint of the line, at a place called Kawashiri; and if he (Koichi) wishes, at the moment the trains pass each other, for the family to be reunited, then his wish will come true. The film’s Japanese title translates as ‘miracle’: the register of the English ‘I wish’ is different. You can understand why it was chosen: it’s a more accurate description of the children’s desires generally (the laws of nature won’t require suspension in order for Megumi to succeed as an actress); and ‘miracle’ might sound portentous. Even so, ‘I wish’ has a softer and more sentimental flavour. This probably reinforced my sense that Kore-eda goes too far in obscuring the sadness of I Wish under cover of its charm.
At the crucial moment – as the trains pass – Kore-eda inserts a montage of the film’s key images up to this point. The images are not flashbacks as such but, as Tony Rayns says in his S&S review, they’re fully recognisable from earlier in I Wish. They’re beautiful both as a composition and individually (especially some pink-purple flowers, which we saw the children walking among). But the neatness of the images seems to limit their power – and to encapsulate the structure of the film as a whole. Each episode within it, while carefully and sensitively composed, is frustrating in its self-containment. The visual scheme is clever and charming – the primary colours in daylight exteriors often suggest the newly-minted world of childhood experience and contrast with the muddy interiors of the houses the kids live in yet I found this distinction more tidy than expressive. I Wish divagates geographically – fair enough for a story in which the physical distance between characters is a pivotal element. It lacks, though, the sustained tension of Still Walking – in which the action, once the characters were assembled for their unhappy family reunion, stayed rooted within and around the one house, and conveyed both the unignorable tensions and the distances between people. The best moment in I Wish, for me, occurs when Koichi and Ryu, comparing each other’s height after months of separation, stand back to back: it’s as if their bodies are pulling them towards each other while their minds, although the brothers’ faces are smiling, realise that reunion wouldn’t be a simple matter.
All the adult actors are good. They include Nene Ohtsuka as the boys’ mother; Joe Odagiri, as their father, a would-be indie rocker; and Isao Hashizume, as the grandfather whose repeated attempts to bake the sponge cake he used to enjoy are a sadly amusing take on Proust – the old man’s nostalgic commitment to the task is rather undermined by the underwhelming taste of the product. Several of the cast of Still Walking are here, in smaller roles but it’s a pleasure to see them again – Yui Natsukawa as Megumi’s mother, Kirin Kiki as the boys’ grandmother, and, especially, Hiroshi Abe, as Koichi’s school teacher.
13 February 2013