I’d Love To Turn You On At The Movies #173 - Still Walking (2008, dir. Hirokazu Koreeda)

Sometimes family issues don’t get resolved. Instead they get buried, simmering under the surface, peaking out at inopportune moments, and then submerging again until the next time the simmer works up to a boil. So goes the plot of Hirokazu Koreeda’s masterpiece Still Walking, which traces a day (and a little) at an annual family memorial.

As the film begins the Yokoyama family is gathering at the home of the parents (father Kyohei and mother Toshiko) in a seaside town south of Tokyo. Their son Ryota (Hiroshi Abe) and daughter Chinami (You) bring their families for the annual event, whose purpose slowly becomes clear – the family meets once a year to honor their eldest son Junpei, who drowned trying to save a child. In the early scenes, everything is lightness and camaraderie as the family makes food together, chats, and catches up, though there’s a notably curt “Oh, you’re here” from the father as Ryota and his wife and stepson arrive. Slowly, as the meaning of the event is known, the family relationships begin to become clear – Chinami and her husband hope to move into the family home, but this means the clearing out Junpei’s belongings, and the parents aren’t quite ready for that. Kyohei (played with stern demeanor 
by Yoshio Harada) hoped to leave his medical practice in the care of Junpei, and when Ryota chose to leave the pursuit to become an art restorer, Kyohei’s dreams of passing on his legacy died with them. Meanwhile the slightly comical Toshiko (played beautifully by Koreeda regular Kirin Kiki), lets out her vulnerable and wounded sides as the film progresses, letting the buried pains of several events of her past to the surface through her normally cheerful outlook.

As the early conversations keep turning to the absent Junpei, the film digs in deeper. Rather than becoming a mournful or melodramatic tract about a dead son taken too soon, it works into broader territories that all families face – jealousies and resentments, disappointments long held, strains between siblings and between the younger and older generations, and so forth. After setting up an ensemble cast, Koreeda continually pairs and groups off his characters to have conversations that deepen our understanding of their relationships. And rather than resolving everything in a dramatic wrap-up, the film does the out of the ordinary and leaves issues unresolved – Kyohei’s disappointment with Ryota’s life choices may be slightly mitigated and changed by their final scene together, but they’re not settled, moved past, or put aside.

Koreeda, as is usual for him, has exceptional insight in his writing, with the characters all so realistic, so well inhabited by the actors, that we could believe we’re watching a documentary about a family rather than a narrative film. He’s also got a brilliant touch with young actors, and though they’re not put front and center here as they are in his films like I Wish or Nobody Knows, the roles given to children here (particularly Shohei Tanaka as Ryota’s stepson Atsushi, who is given an especially poignant scene) are superb. And his camera technique and editing style are unobtrusive – allowing the actors and dialogue to unfold in a natural rhythm in front of the camera without drawing attention to themselves despite his gift for composition. He’s a humanist

filmmaker of the highest level, on par with Ozu (to whom he’s frequently compared for his films of families in generational conflict), though he’s got an additional measure of adding familial trauma and its aftermath into the mix. He’s directed eleven narrative films (and a number of documentaries as well); of the nine that I’ve seen, I’d call six of them great or better, and the rest good to very good. You can’t go wrong with Koreeda, but Still Walking might be the easiest starting point to see his powers on full display.

-          Patrick Brown