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