Unimachi Diary

Hirokazu Kore-eda (2015)

The three Koda sisters – Sachi, Yoshino and Chika – live together in Kamakura, in the house in which they grew up.  They receive news of the death of their father, whom they’ve not seen in years.  They learn too that they have a younger half-sister, Suzu, the child of the father’s second marriage – which, like his first, foundered.  The girls’ mother walked out on them after she discovered that her husband was having an affair.  Their grandmother, now dead, helped run the household and raise the girls; Sachi, the eldest sister, developed a strong sense of responsibility for her younger siblings.   The trio meet fourteen-year-old Suzu for the first time at the funeral in Yamagata.  Sachi’s initial hostility towards Suzu gives way to an impulsive invitation to come back to Kamakura to live with her half-sisters.  It’s a proposal that Suzu’s stepmother, the father’s third wife and now his widow, is happy to accept.

Our Little Sister is Hirokazu Kore-eda’s latest study of proximities and distances within families; of the strength of blood ties versus other kinds of close personal connection; of commissions and omissions which have built up tensions and antipathies between family members and which, although they’re seldom openly expressed, continue to make their presence felt.  Kore-eda is gently but precisely observant.  He respects the people in his films for their tolerance – for keeping their lives going and, usually, their tempers in check.  He has integrity too.  The lack of emotional outbursts in the first part of Our Little Sister isn’t a calm before the storm:  Kore-eda doesn’t exercise restraint in order to increase the impact of eventual explosions.  This writer-director’s qualities are widely considered to be typically Japanese – he’s regarded by some critics as an inheritor of the Ozu tradition – but they’re still enough to make Kore-eda a distinctive sensibility in contemporary movies.  (He is, as far as I know, the only current Japanese director whose work is regularly accessible to Western filmgoers beyond the festival circuit.)  His movies always contain interesting things – this one is no exception.  Even so, Our Little Sister lasts 127 minutes and hardly justifies that running time.  You end up wondering whether Kore-eda needed to take quite so long maintaining self-discipline and elaborating his rather slender themes.

The physical and temperamental differences between the actresses playing Sachi, Yoshino, Chika and Suzu are very pleasing.  The characters of the two older sisters are more obviously contrasted, not least through their respective jobs.  The anxiously conscientious Sachi (Haruka Ayase) has worked for some years as a hospital nurse.  The more wilful, pleasure-seeking Yoshino (the droll, rangy Masami Nagasawa) feels constrained by her job as a bank clerk.  Both of them are promoted to senior roles.  While Yoshino gets out of the office to accompany a male colleague (Ryo Kase) on visits to local businesses, a superior tells Sachi that she would be ideal for a key role in the terminal care unit that the hospital is opening.  Their jobs converge in the development of a subplot centred on Mrs Ninomiya (Jun Fubuki), the late-middle-aged owner of a local seafood restaurant, where the sisters have been customers since childhood.  The business is now struggling and Mrs Ninomiya is dying.  There’s a resonance too between Sachi’s line of work and the revelation that Suzu (Suzu Hirose) nursed their father through his final illness.  Whereas Yoshino has had a succession of unsound boyfriends, Sachi is in an impacted relationship with a doctor at the hospital (Ryuhei Suzuki).  A paediatric cancer specialist, he’s already married, to a chronically depressed wife whom he can’t bring himself to leave.  Kaho is likeable in the underwritten role of the unsophisticated, vaguely kooky Chika, the youngest sister.  The very pretty Suzu Hirose is charming as Suzu, whose affability and smiling face conceal much of what she’s feeling.  Suzu knows that she wants to be part of a family; she’s less sure what that family is.

Although each of the main performances is good, none is surprising and that describes the film as a whole.  The characters’ relationships develop and their perceptions change but quietly – except for Sachi’s outburst at her mother (Shinobu Ohtake), when the latter puts in a surprise appearance at the girls’ grandmother’s memorial day gathering.  Before the mother returns home to Hokkaido the next day, Sachi makes a real effort to mend fences, and appears to succeed.   While there’s a lack of dramatic pyrotechnics, the use of actual ones – the girls watch a public firework, in different locations and from different emotional perspectives, before sharing sparklers together at home later that evening – is gracefully predictable.  The same goes for the motifs of homemade plum wine and cherry blossom (more than one character nearing death hangs on long enough to see the transient blooms).

The memorial day sequences in this film hardly compare with the corresponding scenes in Still Walking (which remains, by some way, Kore-eda’s finest work) but they’re engaging enough.  So too – as often in Japanese drama – are the details of domestic routine and the reactions to food and drink.  The pleasant, unremarkable music by Yoko Kanno struck me as relatively Hollywoodish.  The beautiful visual arrangement of the four sisters (they are by now a family unit) on the seashore at the end of the movie encapsulates its achievement and its limitations.  The stories of I Wish, Like Father, Like Son and now Our Little Sister give the cumulative impression that Hirokazu Kore-eda has drawn up a list of permutations of tricky family relationships and is working through them, film by film.  He does this intelligently and neatly but it’s time that he tried something different.

19 April 2016