Old Yorker

  • Like Father, Like Son

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Soshite Chichi ni Naru

    Hirokazu Kore-eda (2013)

    The separation of members of the same family.  The effect on parents of the loss of a child.  The tensions between sons and their biological fathers or stepfathers.  These are persistent themes in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s cinema – familiar from Still Walking (2008) and I Wish (2011) and, as its title suggests, central to his latest film.  This time Kore-eda has a scenario which, although not original, brings his preoccupations into sharp focus.  The key event in Like Father, Like Son – early in the movie – is the discovery that two babies were mixed up in a maternity ward six years previously and returned home to live with each other’s biological parents.  However successful or otherwise they’ve been as mothers and fathers in the intervening years, this news is bound to turn the four parents’ worlds upside down.  The set-up seems to present Kore-eda with the opportunity to explore the similarities and differences between the reactions to a family crisis of all concerned, which he did so successfully in Still Walking.   He chooses, though, to concentrate mainly on one of the fathers, the affluent, workaholic architect Ryota (Masaharu Fukuyama).  In the film’s opening sequence, Ryota and his wife Midori (Machiko Ono) sit on either side of Keita (Keita Ninomiya), the boy who’s been with them since birth.  Keita is applying for a place at a new school and the trio are interviewed together:  it’s immediately evident that Ryota is both ambitious for the boy and anxious to get compliments himself.  In the course of the film, the viewer finds out how Ryota got to be the driven, humourless man he now is.  The son of a ne’er-do-well gambler of a father (Isao Natsuyagi), Ryota is tensely determined to overcompensate.  Relatively little attention is given to his wife, who had a hard time giving birth and can’t have other children (that has naturally intensified Ryota’s attitude towards Keita) – or to Keita’s biological parents.  As might be expected, the other father is the polar opposite of Ryota:  Yudai (Lily Franky) is the warm, humorous, happy-go-lucky-verging-on-chaotic owner of a shabby electrical goods shop.  He and his wife Yukari (Yoko Maki) have two other children as well as Ryusei (Shogen Hwang), the biological child of Ryota and Midori.   Unlike I Wish, Like Father, Like Son isn’t told principally from the point of view of the children.   This works very well:  focusing on how the grown-ups respond seems to leave Keita and Ryusei more helpless to influence events, and makes their situation more distressing.

    Because there’s not such richness in the adult characters and because Ryota, although more fully detailed than the others, is defined rather narrowly, I didn’t find Like Father, Like Son as rewarding as Still Walking but it’s absorbing, the storytelling is fluent, and Kor-eda has a real gift for making episodes powerful by not making obvious dramatic highlights of them.  At first, it seems an omission that he doesn’t do more to describe the reactions of the four parents to the hospital’s shocking news but you soon realise there’s hardly time for them to take stock of how they feel.  They’re being hassled by the hospital authorities, who advise that the boys should be returned to their rightful parents before they get any older.  As a result, Kore-eda expresses much more strongly a sense of these people being borne along by an unbelievable but unstoppable turn of events.  When the two couples have decided, after much soul-searching, that Keita and Ryusei should live with their biological parents, Ryota assures Keita that his new mother and father love him very much.   ‘More than you love me?’, Keita asks and Ryota answers ‘Yes’.   That yes would normally be a heartbreaking lie in a screen story of this kind but in this case it could be true.  Ryota, although he’s demanding of Keita, can be pleasant towards the boy but he’s also frustrated that Keita isn’t perturbed by failure (at school and particularly in the boy’s piano lessons):  it’s chilling when Ryota thinks he sees a chance to fashion Ryusei in his own competitive image instead.  Ryota eventually realises that this isn’t going to work – that he’ll need to become more like the joker Yudai if Ryusei is going to accept him.  Ryota loosens up and the child does seem to become happier – Ryota and Midori even take Ryusei on the camping holiday that Keita never had with them.   It’s just when they appear to have become a happy family – lying next to each other and looking up at the stars – that Ryusei delivers the coup de grâce.   Ryota and Midori tell the boy to make a wish and ask what he wished for.  He tells them – apologising that he couldn’t help himself – that he wished he was back with Yudai and Yukari.

    Like Father, Like Son ends with each boy returning to the couple with whom he’s spent most of his life so far and this feels like a happy ending – just as the earlier separations felt like a violation of family life.   It could be argued that Kore-eda is thereby stressing the importance of nurture over nature but, if so, the effect isn’t at all tendentious.  Kore-eda has a genuinely sensitive touch – although, on the evidence of this film at least, that sensitivity is more evident in his direction than his screenplay.  It turns out that the hospital didn’t make a mistake with the two babies:  swapping them was a deliberate act on the part of a nurse (Megumi Morisaki), who now admits that she was envious of Ryota and Midori, a couple who to her seemed to have everything.   At the time the babies were born, the nurse was struggling in her personal life to come to terms with raising a son who wasn’t her own.   This plotting is mechanical; so is a follow-up sequence in which Ryota goes to the nurse’s home to give her a hard time but ends up chastened and impressed by the nurse’s stepson’s robust defence of her.  Here too, though, the experience of the scene is persuasive enough to transcend the conception of it.  Kore-eda is also skilled at working in details which you notice immediately but the significance of which doesn’t become powerfully clear until later – such as Keita’s refusal of the gift of Ryota’s camera when the boy is going to live with Yudai and Yukari.  Kirin Kiki, as Midori’s mother, has a small part but, as usual, makes a big impression.

    23 October 2013

  • Life of Pi

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ang Lee (2012)

    I was sorry when I heard that Ang Lee was to direct Life of Pi since I like Lee and loathed the book – although I was keen to know what attracted him to Yann Martel’s novel.  According to Wikipedia, Lee’s making Life of Pi is not a case of enduring determination to bring to the screen something which became a personal passion:  he was the fourth director attached to the project, following M Night Shyamalan, Alfonso Cuarón and Jean-Pierre Jeunet.  In Lee’s hands, the material commands a respect it doesn’t deserve and the movie isn’t annoying, which is no mean feat.  But Pi Patel’s biography remains deeply uninteresting.

    The screenplay by David Magee virtually replicates the narrative structure of the novel except that the framing device – a Canadian author with writer’s block visits the middle-aged Pi who, he’s been told, can tell him a story that ‘will make you believe in God’ – doesn’t have a first-person voiceover.  The Yann Martel alter ego is played by Rafe Spall, who does creditably in a thankless role; Irrfan Khan is the older Pi.  The first part of the movie, which describes Pi’s childhood and adolescence in Pondicherry, India, where his father runs a zoo, is time-consuming (as in the original) and moves slowly.  Perhaps audiences will feel the movie really gets going only when the Patels and their zoo leave India, on a Japanese cargo ship bound for Canada.  (Those on board include Gérard Depardieu as a nasty cook.)  The ship sinks in a storm, all on board perish except for Pi and four zoo animals, and the young man’s survival-against-all-the-odds journey – on a lifeboat, across the Pacific Ocean – begins. The suspense throughout this part, the bulk of the story, is limited to the extent that we already know that Pi does survive.  We don’t expect the four animals – a zebra, an ourang-outang, a hyena and a Bengal tiger – all to do the same; certainly not the hyena (because it’s nasty), probably not the zebra (lacks personality).  The pair with the best chances are Pi’s fellow primate and the tiger which we already know has a human name, Richard Parker, that is hardly likely to be wasted.

    The events on the lifeboat make for a tedious read.  Most of the reviews of the film I’ve seen and heard suggest that Ang Lee has done a brilliant job of bringing life on and around the craft to the screen, and making it exciting.  In visual terms, this praise is fair enough.  The animals are, most of the time, CGI creatures rather than the real thing.  They’re highly convincing, and the red-in-tooth-and-claw fights between them on the lifeboat are startlingly strong.  The following sequences, during which Pi and Richard Parker (by now the sole non-human survivor) develop an uneasy modus vivendi, are engaging too.  As far as I’m concerned, so is everything else involving Richard Parker.  The only parts of the film I found emotionally affecting were when the tiger was ailing and his final exit – a rear view of his worryingly skinny backend – into an island jungle.  These bits mattered to me not because of the 3D imagery (as usual, the 3D glasses darkened the picture – I can’t believe this is what the director intended) or because the scenes were especially imaginative but because Richard Parker is a big cat.  Perhaps it is the 3D that takes Life of Pi to a different level for people who enjoy the film; it certainly isn’t the human drama.  Suraj Sharma is a fine (pictorial) camera subject and he plays Pi conscientiously but there’s nothing he can do to make this survival story unlike any other that’s made it to the screen before.  Reviewers are lauding the magical beauty of the images that Ang Lee and his cinematographer Claudio Miranda have created but just the same kind of language is used about David Attenborough etc natural world programmes on television.  (The shots of the inhabitants of the Patels’ zoo in Pondicherry during the opening credits are amusing and seem to capture the essence of each animal shown; but these too do no more than evoke high-class wildlife TV documentary.)    The pleasant music in the film is by Mychael Danna.

    Pi Patel has a strong religious disposition.  As a boy (played by Ayush Tandon), Pi becomes interested in Christianity and Islam, as well as the Hindu faith of his native culture  – a faith which seems not to be a governing force in the lives of Pi’s rationalist father (Adil Hussain, who’s excellent) and botanist mother (Tabu).  Whatever impact Pi’s story may or may not have on the beliefs of the blocked writer, it isn’t clear how the shipwreck affects Pi’s own.  (During his time at sea, I think Vishnu is the only deity whom Pi invokes specifically.)  He went to sea a believer and returns to dry land as one, without much evidence of spiritual struggle or questioning in the meantime.  Religious references and details seem to be enough for many people to find a religious ‘dimension’ in Life of Pi (including people who don’t like the story as a consequence).

    It’s received wisdom too that Pi is ‘about’ storytelling – that we’re not sure how much of Pi’s account of what happened on the lifeboat is true.  (If his story is invented to a greater degree than anything in a work of fiction is invented, this makes Yann Martel’s novel even more infuriating.) The supposed proof of the importance of this theme is that Pi, once his odyssey is over, offers a different story – one more believable to the Japanese owners of the ship that sank and who interrogate him.  Pi tells them he was shipwrecked with four human beings rather than four animals.   Which of the accounts is the true one (is either of them true?)?  These aren’t competing narratives throughout the story, however; the human quartet option is merely tacked on.  This is all that Martel does (and Magee and Lee, faithful to the book, do) to substantiate the storytelling theme.  Martel also takes the opportunity to fuse this weedy post-modernism with the shallow spirituality of the book.  Pi asks which version of the two stories the writer prefers when the latter chooses the Richard Parker version, Pi replies, ‘And so it is with God’.  I don’t understand what this means and am not inclined to believe it’s because it’s too deep for me.

    The naming of the principals in the story has the same quality of being instantly effective but meaningless once you think about it.  Pi’s uncle had a passion for swimming and swam in different pools in different countries.  His nephew is named for the uncle’s all-time favourite pool – the Piscine Molitor in Paris.  The forename is abbreviated when its owner gets fed up with his schoolmates calling him Pissing Patel – but would Indian boys naturally use English profanities?  We’re told that the tiger was captured by a hunter, who gave the animal the name ‘Thirsty’; that the hunter was called Richard Parker; that the paperwork got mixed up so the two identities were switched.  It seems no one found it surprising that the human being in the transaction had just the one name of Thirsty.   Yann Martel is as cavalier in his use of these details as he’s superficial in his coverage of the book’s big ideas.  After Sally and I had read Life of Pi, one of our friends borrowed the book.  When she returned it, she explained that it was looking the worse for wear because she dropped it in the bath while she was reading.  I would usually have been infuriated by that but in this case it didn’t seem to matter.  The idea of this particular book getting into deep water is obviously apt anyway.

    23 December 2012

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