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