Monthly Archives: October 2016

  • La La Land

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Damien Chazelle (2016)

    Jazz pianist Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) can’t believe it when would-be actress Mia (Emma Stone) tells him she’s never seen Rebel Without a Cause.  They arrange, as their next date, to go to a screening at a Los Angeles picture house.  Mia is delayed (more of that later) and misses the start but she and Sebastian are both enjoying Rebel when the film breaks down – well, it is an old movie!  Undaunted, the couple drive out to the Griffith Observatory – located on Mount Hollywood, commanding a fine view of downtown LA, and the setting for two famous sequences in Rebel Without a Cause.  In the Observatory’s planetarium, Mia and Sebastian dance and float fantastically into the starry firmament.  This bit in La La Land looks set to become famous in its own right and Damien Chazelle’s ‘Comedy, Drama, Musical’ (the movie’s IMDB categorisation) is already an ante-post favourite for the 2017 Oscars.   The sequence at the Observatory epitomises La La Land, what’s charming critics and festival audiences about it, and why I find the film vexing.

    Sebastian and Mia are falling in love, it’s some enchanted evening on Mount Hollywood, why shouldn’t they be literally swept off their feet into a heavenly dance?  Because – in the cine-history world within which La La Land exists (it has no life beyond that world) – this is the wrong place for euphoria.  The first episode at the Observatory in Rebel Without a Cause describes a high-school trip to the planetarium, where James Dean and the other kids hear a lecture from a space scientist:  he calmly but chillingly describes how the Earth will eventually, inevitably die.  (The scientist’s voice is just getting to this when the film of Rebel goes phut in La La Land.)  The second episode is the climax to the movie:  the Sal Mineo character barricades himself inside the Observatory and, when he eventually emerges, is shot dead by the police.  The connotations of the place, as it features in Nicholas Ray’s picture, are, in other words, bleak.  Sebastian in La La Land is, in matters of jazz, nothing if not a purist; as a cinemagoer, he’s evidently less discriminating.  A movie is somewhere you go for a good time and the settings of a ‘classic’ movie – even when unhappy things occur in them – are Elysium.  More often than not, Sebastian is a miserable fellow but silver-screen stardust makes a blithe spirit of him or, at least, turns him to jelly.  Damien Chazelle probably shares his hero’s fond enthusiasm for Hollywood past but Chazelle is also canny and clever:  he knows he’s far from alone and he knows how to work the audience.

    It’s refreshing for a picture to come along that demands to be seen on a big cinema screen but isn’t an action or sci-fi blockbuster.  The last (non-animated) hit musical devised directly for the screen was Moulin Rouge! but that, as a jukebox musical, could hardly be termed ‘original’.  Against this background, it’s not surprising that Chazelle’s film is being viewed as a kind of miracle.  Its success will be welcome if it encourages the creation of other musicals; if that does happen, though, it’s to be hoped they amount to more than this formidably assured and artful recycling.  I didn’t try for a ticket for La La Land when booking for this month’s London Film Festival opened:  it was already clear from its reception at Venice and Toronto that the movie was going to be a big deal once it was released (December in the US, January in Britain) – there was nil risk of missing out on it.  Then, on the opening day of the LFF, an email arrived announcing further seats would be available for the upcoming Saturday morning screening at the Leicester Square Odeon.  I decided to apply for a ticket and am not sorry I did:  I didn’t enjoy the experience but it would have been worse seeing La La Land once the awards season is underway and it’s officially all the rage.

    Damien Chazelle wrote and directed Whiplash, only his second feature, with scary confidence:  it was only to be expected his confidence would increase in the light of Whiplash‘s success.  In an early scene in La La Land, Mia is in the bathroom of the apartment she shares with several other girls.  She wipes the steam from the bathroom mirror – not casually but in a way that draws attention to what a cute, deft detail Chazelle has devised.  The supply of curlicues like this is relentless; for this viewer, their effect was always distancing and often alienating.   This movie is very explicitly preconceived.  Chazelle has shot the musical numbers using 1950s-style CinemaScope:  in case you don’t notice this – and in order to get the audience immediately into an I-❤-movies frame of mind – the word ‘CinemaScope’ is emblazoned across the screen at the very start of the film.  La La Land is set in the present day and one of Mia’s and Sebastian’s romantic numbers is aborted by a mobile phone ringing.  It’s an apt, even charming, modern touch but Chazelle plays characteristically fast and loose with mobiles to suit his immediate needs.  When the couple’s outing to Rebel Without a Cause turns out to clash with a dinner date Mia had forgotten about and can’t get out of, she’s no more able to make quick contact with Sebastian than her counterpart in a movie musical of half a century ago would have been.  This allows her eventual escape from the restaurant and dash through the streets to the cinema to be staged in the traditional way.  (Later on, Mia, acting and romantic hopes in tatters, has returned to her family home in Boulder City, Nevada.  The phone rings in Sebastian’s LA apartment, where he’s now alone:  it’s a casting agent on the line and she wants to speak to Mia.  The agent asks Sebastian not if Mia has a mobile but to pass on a message if he sees her.  He drives to Boulder City.)

    I stayed for only a few minutes of the Q&A that followed the LFF screening.  I hadn’t intended to stay for any of it and was in the gents’ when I heard the gales of cheering and applause that welcomed the ‘surprise guest’ whom Damien Chazelle had promised in his introduction would be joining him on stage once the film was over.  Curiosity – as to which one of Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling had materialised – got the better of me.   (It was Gosling.)  I went back into the auditorium just in time to hear Chazelle explaining how important it was to him for the film to be ‘grounded in real people’.  This is just what La La Land is not:  it’s substantially artificial, intermittently real on the surface.  Mia and Sebastian are required components of a Hollywood price-of-fame story.  This is disguised by some naturalistic acting and a few passages of Chazelle’s dialogue, but you’re always aware of the subterfuge.

    Sebastian accepts an offer from an old friend, Keith (John Legend), to join his mainstream jazz combo.  Although he has mixed feelings about going on the road to play a type of music he doesn’t believe in, Sebastian soon finds himself earning money as he’s never done before.  He takes a one-night break from touring and comes back to LA to prepare a surprise romantic supper for Mia:  the well-written, well-played argument between them that overwhelms the occasion introduces a welcome asperity to proceedings for a few minutes.  The argument is one of the stations of the cross in this type of story, nevertheless – so too, later on, is Mia’s crucial audition, which will transform her immediately from nobody to major film actress.  The film’s catchy title perfectly captures both its geographical and its world-of-make-believe settings; and the counter to some of my objections to La La Land will be that it’s a ‘fairytale’.  But that doesn’t square with Chazelle’s professed determination to make a movie ‘grounded in real people’ – and, when he makes this claim, he’s well aware of what his leads bring to the party.

    Many of the audience for the LFF screening of La La Land looked to be in their twenties and the youthfulness of the main contributors to the film could be important in ensuring it’s a hit with this age group.  Damien Chazelle is thirty-one; Ryan Gosling, although he’s been a star for nearly a decade now, is still only in his mid-thirties; Emma Stone is twenty-seven.  For plenty of people, the modernity of the two stars – in terms of their public personas and their acting styles – will be enough to give their characters contemporary credibility.  Stone, who is being tipped for the Best Actress Oscar for her performance, is endlessly capable and likeably resourceful.  She’s especially strong in Mia’s audition sequences (there are several) and Chazelle really showcases the one that will change Mia’s life.  Ryan Gosling’s air of arrogant dissatisfaction gives Sebastian’s early scenes a semblance of grit.  His flair for comedy serves him well in sequences like the one in which Sebastian is resentfully plinking out a medley of Christmas favourites on the piano. On the whole, though, Gosling’s and Stone’s acting turns out to be perfectly attuned to the spirit of La La Land:  highly accomplished yet synthetic.  Except for Mia and Sebastian, characters tend to be dispensed with once they’ve served their often one-scene purpose. (The film seems much more indifferent to minor characters than the musicals on which it draws.)  J K Simmons has an honorary cameo as the manager of the bar where Sebastian plays the Christmas medley.  Rosemarie DeWitt is wasted as the hero’s sister.

    The dichotomy that La La Land presents between authentic and adulterated jazz – between Sebastian’s artistic idealism and Keith’s hollow commercialism – also struck me as phony.  (It reminded me of Richard Brody’s contempt for Damien Chazelle’s definition of echt jazz drumming in Whiplash:  ‘The protagonist, Andrew Neiman, [is] nineteen and idolizes Buddy Rich.  Buddy Rich?  A loud and insensitive technical whiz, a TV personality, not a major jazz inspiration …’)  The ‘bad’ jazz played by Keith’s combo didn’t sound to me like jazz at all:  I actually quite liked it.  (Not as much, though, as a supposedly hopeless rendition of A-ha’s ‘Take on Me’, early in the film, by a band hired to provide the entertainment at a Hollywood poolside party – with Sebastian on keyboards.)  The tolerability to me of Keith’s music made me wonder if the ‘good’ (boring) jazz Sebastian plays might actually be ‘bad’ to jazz aficionados.  The best of the original songs composed for the film by Justin Hurwitz achieve, through repetition, a thin wistfulness.

    The film comprises five sections.  The first four are consecutive seasons, from winter one year to autumn the next. The final section is winter five years later. Mia:  now an international movie star, makes a trip back to LA with her (non-Sebastian) husband and infant daughter.  A traffic jam, a brief echo of the one that supplies La La Land ‘s bombastic and gruesome opening number, prevents her getting to a film premiere.  She and her husband decide to get a drink and have dinner instead and find themselves in the crepuscular basement of ‘Seb’s’, the jazz bar that Sebastian always longed for:  the sign on the entrance has the logo that Mia designed for the club of his dreams when dreams were all the couple had.  As he takes to the stage, Sebastian catches sight of Mia in the audience.  It’s only their eyes that meet but this is enough to generate a pyrotechnical what-might-have-been episode:  a high-speed summary of the relationship that could have developed if one of their first brief encounters had gone differently.  Then ‘reality’ resumes; Mia walks out of the club and Sebastian’s life forever.  Both have got what they wanted professionally but not the person they love.  (In order to make the position emphatically clear, Mia has married a pointlessly handsome suit (Tom Everett Scott).)

    There’s a potentially interesting element to the love story:  what happens when a relationship, dependent in large part on a couple’s assumption that they’ll continue to be frustrated in their ambitions, is threatened by unexpected success?  Damien Chazelle chooses not to explore this theme, however.  Success is merely useful to him as a device for driving the lovers apart: first when Sebastian is on the road with Keith’s combo while Mia is preparing her one-woman stage show that hardly anyone goes to see (except for a big-time talent-spotter); then once Mia goes to shoot a movie in Paris.  The endless touring with the band that causes the dinner-table showdown between Sebastian and Mia comes to an abrupt end – he’s around to take the crucial phone call from the agent, to travel to Boulder City on consecutive days, etc.  As soon as there’s a sniff of instant fame for Mia in the air, Sebastian is ready to revert to playing the kind of pure, uncommercial music he really wants to play.  He, in effect, passes the baton of success to Mia – so that it can continue getting in the way of their happiness together.

    The ending of La La Land isn’t the only thing in it that recalls Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York (1977).  Rooted, like Chazelle’s film, in love for both the physical reality and the mythology of the city of the title, New York, New York charted the relationship between an obsessive, avant-garde tenor-sax player (Robert De Niro) and a popular big-band singer (Liza Minnelli).  Scorsese set out to juxtapose, and explore the tensions between, the stylised features of movie musicals of the period in which he set his story (it begins on V-J Day) and what Pauline Kael called the ‘dark side that was left out of the old cliché plots’.  The latter aspect took the form of an ‘improvisational, Cassavetes-like psychodrama … between the stars’ (Kael again).  Although New York, New York went wrong, Scorsese’s passionate struggle to bring the conflicting elements of the piece to life was admirable and the contrasts between De Niro and Minnelli were fascinating:  their presences and performing styles reflected both the musical idioms at odds with each other in the story and the incompatibility of the protagonists in marriage.

    New York, New York’s serious attempt to dramatise the complexities of success in the world of popular music and cinema of the era in which it was set is light years away from La La Land.  The Wikipedia article on the latter seems right enough in citing as main inspirations two screen musicals from the 1960s:  Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort.  The article seems righter still when it goes on to say ‘especially the latter’.  While The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is individual and charming, The Young Girls of Rochefort purports to be a homage to Hollywood musicals:  the casting of Gene Kelly in a key role was designed to prove what Demy was after but the resulting movie was both flimsy and flabby.   Damien Chazelle’s film – a homage to a homage that was inauthentic in the first place – is an altogether sharper piece of work than Jacques Demy’s but the thoroughgoing tricksiness of La La Land makes it less entrancing than enraging.

    8 October 2016

  • After the Storm

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Umi yori mo mada fukaku

    Hirokazu Kore-eda (2016)

    The first scene of After the Storm features two women – one in her seventies, the other in her forties – in a small kitchen.  The radio news reports the approach of a typhoon, the latest in an unusually heavy storm season.  ‘Janet Lynn,’ says the older woman, to herself as much as to her companion.  ‘I’ve remembered – that was her name:  Janet Lynn.  She fell on her butt but she still got perfect marks’.  The younger woman looks slightly puzzled but I understood.  The American figure skater Janet Lynn was always better at interpreting the music than she was at jumps and spins.  In the free-skating climax to the 1972 Olympic final, a flying sit spin went so wrong that Lynn ended up sitting on the ice.  One of the judges still scored her 6.0 for artistic impression. (She won the bronze medal overall.)  The 1972 Winter Olympics were held in Sapporo: this elderly Japanese woman’s dredging up from her memory the name of Janet Lynn gives the opening of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s latest a very particular reality that immediately drew me in.  (I was also a bit pleased with myself for getting the reference – and to think that few others in the audience for this London Film Festival screening of After the Storm would do so.)

    The two women – mother and daughter – are in an upper-floor apartment in a housing project in Kiyose, a small town on the outskirts of Tokyo.   The mother, Yoshiko (Kirin Kiki), lives alone there now but the place was the family home for years.  Janet Lynn’s relevance to the conversation is that the daughter needs money to help pay for figure-skating lessons for her daughter.  Later the same day, Yoshiko receives a visit from her other child, her son Ryota (Hiroshi Abe).   On his way to the apartment block, Ryota tells one of Yoshiko’s neighbours, who recognises him, that he’s there to help sort out the estate of his recently deceased father.  This is true at one level but Ryota is also, and more urgently, in search of funds.  Fifteen years ago, his first novel was published and won a prize.  A follow-up hasn’t materialised yet – though Ryota still reckons himself a writer and tells his mother that his current work in a private detective agency is by way of research for the next novel.  Ryota’s gambling habit more than consumes the money he earns from detective work:  he’s in debt and in arrears with the child support he pays his ex-wife Kyoko (Yōko Maki) for their pre-adolescent son Shingo (Taiyô Yoshizawa).

    The early scenes between Yoshiko and her children raise hopes that After the Storm will stand comparison with Kore-eda’s best film, Still Walking.  Janet Lynn is just the first in an accumulation of small, convincing familial and domestic details that make the characters unusually real, and the viewer want to know more about them.  The daughter (Satomi Kobayashi, who’s excellent) gets impatient with Yoshiko’s mispronunciation of the ‘figure’ in ‘figure skating’.  When Yoshiko gives Ryota some kind of homemade iced dessert that’s seen better days, he complains it’s ‘got that refrigerator taste’.  ‘Scrape off the top,’ his mother advises, ‘it’ll be all right underneath.’  While this isn’t to be interpreted as a metaphor of the difference between what people are like on the surface and deep down, Kore-eda does weave in the odd aperçu illustrating culinary and human similarity.   As she cooks, Yoshiko tells her daughter that ‘a stew needs time for the flavours to sink in – so do people’.  What’s satisfying about Kore-eda’s use of a remark like this is that the characters acknowledge and deflate its sententiousness, and, in doing so, tell us more about themselves.  The daughter replies to the effect that her husband of some years evidently still hasn’t had time enough to give flavour to their marriage.

    Once Kore-eda moves the action outside Yoshiko’s small flat, After the Storm also begins to wander.  In Still Walking and in each of his last three films (I Wish, Like Father, Like Son and Our Little Sister), Kore-eda wrote a family scenario that supplied a robust structure to the story (although this was limiting too in the most recent pictures).  His dramatisation of Ryota’s professional and personal life is something of a new departure and, for much of the time, not a successful one.  Kore-eda is so interested in relationships within a family that his heart doesn’t seem to be in the sequences describing Ryota’s gambling addiction or detective work.  These have the quality less of real life than of recollections of other films about gamblers and gumshoes.  Each of Ryota’s agency colleagues and clients is well enough played – the reliable Lily Franky (as the agency boss) and Sōsuke Ikematsu (as Ryota’s youthful work partner) are particularly good – but these characters are, by Kore-eda’s standards, unusually thin.  It’s no coincidence that the strongest private detective episode sees Ryota spying on Kyoko and her new, financially solvent boyfriend.

    After the Storm regains its momentum once the action returns to Yoshiko’s flat, on the night of the typhoon.  Ryota has Shingo for the day every Sunday in four and this is one such Sunday – though Kyoko is threatening it will be the last unless Ryota pays the overdue child support.   Father and son spend time in Tokyo:  Ryota buys them both lottery tickets and Shingo a pair of trainers – getting a reduction on the price by surreptitiously scuffing the shoes.   Ryota then takes Shingo to visit his grandmother and arranges for Kyoko to meet them there.  When he and Shingo first arrive, Ryota’s sister and her husband and their children are also visiting. It’s therefore a tight fit in the apartment:  each time the hospitable Yoshiko opens the door of her small fridge, the person sitting in front of it has to get their head out of the way.  By the time the sister and her brood have left and Kyoko arrives, the typhoon is gathering force.  Kyoko eventually succumbs to Yoshiko’s insistence that she and Shingo, as well as Ryota, stay the night.  Having the principals confined to barracks together for several hours provides the opportunity for them to discuss their relationships and express how they feel about their lives.  Although that is hardly unusual in a family drama, Hirokazu Kore-eda has prepared the ground for it well and the last third of the film is strong – not least because  Kore-eda maintains the characters’ humorous self-awareness as they deliver home truths.  Congratulating herself on one particular pearl of wisdom, Yoshiko suggests Ryota make a note of it for use in the forthcoming novel.  (The room he rents in town is notable mainly for its squalor but, on the wall above the debris, there’s a pin board plastered with thoughts that Ryota has committed to post-it.)

    The suspension of the characters’ normal routines brought about by the typhoon brings to mind Eliot’s advice to the seafarers of The Dry Salvages:

    ‘Here between the hither and the farther shore

    While time is withdrawn, consider the future

    And the past with an equal mind.’

    But while Ryota and Yoshiko both express their disappointments with how their lives have turned out, the son, unlike the mother, makes impromptu efforts to change things for the better.  He wants to strengthen the bond between him and Shingo.  He briefly tries to repair his relationship with Kyoko.  Ryota’s impulses are more nostalgic than constructive, however.   He and Shingo go out into the typhoon and hide together in a cave-like construction in a playground near the housing complex – the same place where Ryota liked to shelter from storms when he was a kid.

    Kirin Kiki and Hiroshi Abe also played mother and son in Still Walking.  There are several resonances between their characters in the earlier film and in this one, starting with the names:  Abe plays a Ryota again and Kiki’s Yoshiko is only an initial letter different – she was Toshiko in Still Walking.  Like that near namesake, Yoshiko, in spite of her old-lady vulnerability, is far from innocuous.  Her pessimism is more penetrating than Ryota’s because what she says is unpretentious.  Ryota isn’t insincere when he laments his uselessness as a son or the fact that he’s not yet ‘become the person I want to be’ but his self-criticism is so confused with self-pity and a sense of himself as a serious man that you take him with a pinch of salt.  He wants his mother to assure him he’s not a useless son but she doesn’t.  Compared with him, and despite appearances, Yoshiko is clear-sighted.  She’s publicly proud of Ryota – she introduces him to an elderly male neighbour (and you can tell it’s not for the first time) as ‘my son, the novelist’ – but she’s very aware of his failings.  She always wants her children’s visits to the apartment to go on as long as possible yet this isn’t out of pure maternal love:  Yoshiko is tired of living and scared of dying alone in a place that used to be filled by the family she cared for.

    As in Still Walking, Kore-eda makes potent use of an old pop song to reveal difficult truths about Kirin Kiki’s character.  In Still Walking, ‘Blue Light, Yokohama’ was a special favourite of the mother even though it was also the song she could hear playing when she discovered her husband with another woman.   A love song on the radio during the typhoon night contains the phrase ‘even deeper than the ocean’.  Yoshiko sings along wistfully before revealing – to her son – that she’s ‘never loved anyone deeper than the ocean’.  The importance to Kore-eda of that revelation is confirmed by After the Storm‘s Japanese title, which translates as ‘even deeper than the ocean’.  (The key song in Still Walking gave that film its Japanese title too.)  Another echo of Still Walking points up differences between Toshiko and Yoshiko – and the latter’s remarkable lack of sentimentality about her spendthrift late husband, from whom, it seems, Ryota inherited his fondness for gambling.  In the earlier movie, Toshiko is upset when a yellow butterfly enters the house:  she thinks it may be the soul of her dead son and she’s therefore reluctant to let the butterfly go.  In After the Storm, Yoshiko tells Ryota that a blue butterfly recently appeared on her balcony:  she took this to be the soul of her departed husband and sharply told the butterfly that, if it had paid a visit thinking to take her with it to the land of the dead, it could think again.  Kore-eda surely developed this character with Kirin Kiki in mind.  She’s superb:  her portrait of Yoshiko is highly entertaining yet emotionally raw and rich.

    Hiroshi Abe is a major star in Japan:  since Still Walking he’s enjoyed particular success in the manga-derived sci-fi comedy Thermae Romae (2012), a huge box-office hit in Asia, and its sequel in 2014.  Ryota isn’t as fully satisfying a character as Yoshiko and Abe is a limited actor beside Kirin Kiki but he still gives a successful performance here.  He and Kiki work very well together:  there’s a real connection between them.  Having Abe in this role is an interesting piece of physical casting.  He stands out thanks to his unusual height and this gives Ryota’s ‘specialness’ a double edge:  it seems to make his failure harder to disguise.  Ryota’s emotional immaturity is also complicated by Abe’s looks:  the hangdog quality he’s cultivated for the part doesn’t conceal this actor’s natural boyishness (it’s hard to believe he’s now in his early fifties).  This is particularly effective in the scenes between Ryota and his son, especially since Taiyô Yoshizawa gives Shingo a lovely blend of innocence and gravity.  Like father, like son:  just as Ryota the gambler is a chip off the old block, so Shingo, when asked what he wants to be when he grows up, gives the answer that we’re told the boy Ryota once gave:  a public servant.  Ryota could never have tolerated the boredom of a steady job; Shingo’s sober side suggests that he might well be able to.  He’s learning from his mother the importance of responsibility:  Shingo seems to recognise that ‘a public servant’ is, whether he likes it or not, the correct answer.  He adores his father, who has a capacity for fun that Shingo’s mother lacks (the boy is as excited by his first lottery tickets as Kyoko is angered by Ryota’s purchase of them).   At the same time, Shingo already accepts the fact that he and Ryota see each other just once a month – Ryota appears to accept this only in the last few minutes of the film, on the Monday morning after the storm.

    In the end, After the Storm doesn’t come close to emulating Still Walking but that’s no disgrace.  For me, the latter is one of the best films of the last ten years and After the Storm, in spite of its weak middle third, is Hirokazu Kore-eda’s most interesting work since.  This humanist writer-director is at his best when his benignity doesn’t lead him to go soft on the characters hes created.  Part of this new film’s score, by Hanaregumi, is a rueful whistled melody:  it’s charming but anodyne.  It’s therefore somewhat misleading too:  unlike Our Little Sister, Kore-eda’s previous movie, this one isn’t anodyne (though it’s often charming).  The trailer for the film, which is available on YouTube, also presents the piece as a conventional screen story:  a man whose life is a mess gets a chance to make amends, especially through forging a new relationship with the son he rarely sees.  After the Storm is tougher, funnier and more ambiguous than the trailer implies.

    The coverage of Ryota’s various attempts to get money out of his parents is a good example of these qualities and of Kore-eda’s approach as a whole.  When Ryota visits her apartment at the start of the film, Yoshiko is out and he lets himself in.  He roots around the place, rather as a down and out might root in a litter bin.  He helps himself to a rice cake on his father’s memorial and to some unscratched lottery tickets.  On the night of the storm, when he thinks everyone’s asleep, Ryota goes to where he knows his mother hides her bank book.  He finds in its place a note ‘Too bad, brother’, signed by his sister.  The morning after the typhoon, Ryota goes for a second time to the pawn shop where his late father was a regular customer.  Ryota discovers not only that one of the objects the old man pawned there is seriously valuable but that the father he didn’t get on with – and who had no interest in his son’s literary ambitions – also lodged with the shop a first edition of Ryota’s novel, telling the pawnbroker it would be worth a fortune one day.  Kore-eda doesn’t reduce these things to a single meaning:  Ryota isn’t a scumbag because he’s virtually a thief; the revelations at the pawn shop don’t make for a straightforwardly happy or poignant ending.  Human relationships are more complicated than that.  This is no more a radical insight than what Yoshiko says about a good stew.  But Hirokazu Kore-eda and his main actors make the characters in After the Storm absorbing – and what happens to them matter.   The film’s cinematography (by Yutaka Yamasaki) and editing (by Kore-eda himself) are admirably and appropriately unobtrusive.

    6 October 2016

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