Film reviews in 500 words or fewer

Tag: Best Film

  • Grace and belonging: ‘Our Little Sister’ by Hirokazu Kore-eda (A review)

    Grace and belonging: ‘Our Little Sister’ by Hirokazu Kore-eda (A review)

    There is no doubt that Hirokazu Kore-eda has mastered both the form and substance of cinema, developing a distinct visual style that elevates his deeply humanistic storytelling. While films like Maborosi (1995) showcase his technical mastery of the cinematic form, and Nobody Knows (2004) and Monster (2023) reflect the breadth of his narrative and thematic ambition, Our Little Sister (2015) stands out as one of his most intimate, character-driven works, supremely centering on people and relationships more than plot or message.

    As with many Japanese films, the original title—Umimachi Diary—differs from its English counterpart, possibly to appeal more to Western audiences. Regardless of the reason, both titles offer rich lenses through which to understand and appreciate the film.

    With “Umimachi Diary”, (‘seaside town diary’), the film highlights the importance of rootedness not only in personhood but also in relationships. 

    The film probes how the placeness of towns and their spaces such as cafes, houses, and temples have shaped the lives and connections of the people dramatized in the movie across generations. This is exemplified in the way the supporting characters influence the sisters’ lives, especially through gestures and encounters made possible by the unique rhythms and intimacy of a seaside city like Kamakura.

    In contrast, the English title “Our Little Sister” draws attention to Suzu, the titular character who was adopted by her three half-sisters from Kamakura, after the death of their father who she cared for. In the film, Suzu was not just a character—she becomes the lens through which the inner lives of the others are poignantly revealed.

    Like a prism, Suzu reveals the true colors of the nature of the various relationships in the film: among the three sisters Sachi, Yoshino, and Chika; between them and their late, estranged father; and especially between Sachi and their distant mother. And while Suzu was not in any way asked to resolve the issues that arose because of her presence, in many different ways her life, memories, and words affirmed the humanity of those she interacted with no matter what they were facing.

    Our Little Sister has been the most moving Kore-eda film for me, getting the same impact even after many rewatches. It is in fact my most favorite film of all time, a movie I go back to for the comfort it gives me. 

    It’s beautiful in a way that it doesn’t manipulate emotions. Instead, it illuminates them. Our Little Sister shines a light on a rare kind of relationship these days—one ruled first not by love, but by grace. While I always thought Suzu to be the protagonist of this film, I realized that this story is as much as hers as it is the story of the eldest sister Sachi. Suzu is made to feel she belonged and loved not for what she might become, but for who she already is. Behind that welcome is Sachi, who, despite carrying her own burdens, offers Suzu grace. In one quiet scene, as they gaze at the beautiful sea together from a hilltop in Kamakura, this grace was in full display.

  • Contrasts, consequences: Kore-eda’s Nobody Knows (A review)

    Contrasts, consequences: Kore-eda’s Nobody Knows (A review)

    This review contains minor spoilers.

    I’ve never seen a film with an ending as excruciatingly painful as it is quietly tender, as Hirokazu Kore-eda’s 2004 childhood abandonment drama Nobody Knows. Yet even the word “drama” might be overdoing it, for this scandalous film burdens its viewers with the weight of reality in such a dignified and constrained manner.

    “Nobody knows” speaks about the fact that save for a handful of people, nobody really knew nor cared, about a very young brood after their mother went missing-in-action.

    This is in stark contrast to how the audience is burdened with the full knowledge of the brutality of parental indifference to what is supposedly the most crucial phase of human life. The result is a film that implicates the viewer with a sense of responsibility for a reality that they might never encounter in real life, made all the more devastating in its quiet, matter-of-fact portrayal.

    Kore-eda’s signature storytelling techniques work particularly well here to evoke such contrast. Harking back to his days as a documentary filmmaker, he presents the charming but messy domestic life with children using a grounded and unadorned style, almost like reportage.

    And then there’s Kore-eda’s use of mono no aware, a uniquely Japanese sensitivity to the impermanence of things, to evoke in the film a strong sense of vulnerability, frustration, and eventually, resignation. This is mainly showcased through the recurring juxtaposition of extremely tight shots of the children and inanimate objects such as toys and household implements, as if the objects mirror the children’s emotions. Together with his trademark lingering shots, Kore-eda used that visual motif to intimately portray innocence, and then later, innocent pain.

    Another study in contrast can also be found in the protagonist Akira, in an award-winning portrayal by Yuya Yagira. Akira is the classic “child who grew up too soon”, learning to have that perceptive look of a mature adult at a very young age. But the most excruciating aspect of his performance is the painful conflict between irreconcilable desires: on one hand, to be a responsible oniichan to his siblings, and on the other, to live a boyhood so ordinary it’s extraordinarily out-of-reach for someone in his situation.

    There is a minor story in the film where the children get to take care of their own individual plants after a particularly happy event in their confined lives. What would’ve been a teaching moment in responsibility, something that parents would want to give their children early, quietly devolves into a symbol of decay and neglect as the physical effects of parental neglect of them becomes inescapable. 

    With this, my final thoughts go to the contrast between Akira and his mother. Not only was she absent, but in her brief appearances, she is patronizing, evasive, and emotionally manipulative. As it is, the film is already tragic, but what’s more devastating is how her irresponsibility was not just in her neglect, but in her refusal to grow up—even as her son was cruelly forced to.

  • Such lightness of being: Momoko Ando’s ‘0.5 mm’ (A review)

    Such lightness of being: Momoko Ando’s ‘0.5 mm’ (A review)

    It’s not an easy feat for a film to be lengthy, entertaining, and profound all at the same time. Yet Momoko Ando’s 2014 masterpiece 0.5mm is all three, and then some. 

    With a runtime of three hours and 18 minutes, this film is expansive not just in length but more so in its thematic ambition. 0.5mm is a singular achievement not only for Ando, who is both the film’s director and screenwriter, but also for her sister, Sakura, and her ineffable and career-defining take on the caregiver-vagabond Sawa Yamagishi. Sawa embodies a certain “lightness of being” that, contrary to the title of the famous novel, is not unbearable. This lightness extends to the whole of the film itself, so that it is both profound and outrageously funny. 

    Set, it seems, in the late 1980s to the early 90s, the film is divided into four parts: a prelude where Sawa is introduced as a caregiver of a bedridden elderly man, two acts where she would live with and care for two other elderly men, and a final act of resolution that harks back to the prelude. Throughout, Sawa’s character moves through the film with what I’d call “buoyant grace”—unattached, adaptable, and at times, mischievous. But while she is physically a drifter (and a mysterious one at that), she is not aimless.

    Sawa is not just a character—she is also a remarkable narrative device by which the film becomes an epic and complex meditation on human connection, the loneliness of the elderly, and the strange forms that kindness can take. It is through Sawa and her relationships that seemingly disparate themes such as the war nostalgia of elderly Japanese men, the collective versus the individual, the male gaze, and the kindness and seductiveness of a woman as both wife and caregiver come together and come alive.

    Among those themes, the latter two are particularly prominent. They could’ve been touchy subjects, if not for Momoko’s writing and Sakura’s acting. Their collaboration made for a deft portrayal of how a woman makes peace with society’s patronization and misogyny, subverting them to gain power that is not only seductive but more crucially, substantial, generous, and real.

    Sawa’s “feminism,” if you could call it that, is not vindictive nor activist—it’s human through and through. One recurring incident in the film highlights this. Sawa’s drift, it seems, is to catch elderly men in scandalous, reputation-wrecking moments and use these to “coerce” them to let her live with them. However, she would use the power she gains not to extort nor to persecute, but to care, quite literally. In each case except the prelude, Sawa brings and inspires order and healing in the lives of the elderly men she was involved with.

    I may have made Sawa sound extraordinary, but what lingers most is her plain, unadorned humanity. She feels like a mystery only because tenderness and generosity have become rare. 0.5mm is special for letting that quiet humanity shine.

  • Rebirth, dir. Izuru Narushima (2011)

    Rebirth, dir. Izuru Narushima (2011)

    The English title of Izuru Narushima’s 2011 film, Rebirth, suggests a shedding of the past in pursuit of a new beginning. Its Japanese title, however, hints at a subtle, metaphor-rich expression of what the film is truly about, which I will return to later.

    In this film, we meet Erina Akiyama (played by Mou Inoue), a listless university student who was abducted as an infant by her father’s former mistress. Her four-year abduction made headlines at the time. Now, she seems to be living a quiet, ordinary life—until a journalist eager to revisit that unfortunate episode seeks to resurface her story. Growing curious about that time in the distant past, Erina agrees to the journalist’s invitation to rediscover what happened then.

    From the outset, the theme of motherhood is very prominent in the film, showing its pains and longings. Here, motherhood is denied, borrowed, and—perhaps most powerfully—chosen. Yet motherhood is but a part of a larger, more central theme, one that also captures the emotional–and eventually, the narrative–core of the film—self-discovery. 

    Since Freud, we have tended to think that our adult psychologies are invariably shaped by our childhood experiences and traumas. In Rebirth, we would think that Erina’s actual abduction or even her relationship with her “abductive” mother (played by Hiromi Nagasaku) would’ve made an enormous impact on her life. However, the film resists resting solely on this notion.

    Rebirth emphasizes the outsized importance of the seldom-explored attachment to places and the memories of things that happened in them, whether good or ill. 

    This is where the visual storytelling of the film shines, as it proceeds to reveal Erina’s understanding of and feelings toward specific people, including herself, in its portrayal of places. We see the lonely townhouses in the uptown district where her parents’ house is, the enigmatic “shelter” where she and her abductor hid and stayed, and finally an island community of warmth and fulfilment that would later speak profoundly to Erina’s sense of being and identity. 

    Interspersed with flashbacks of sunlit scenes of a childhood lived in full on that island—joyous, vivid, but now, distant—Erina finds a reckoning in the present. Not against her abductor, nor her parents who resented how she grew up “absent”, but against a self that in every sense except the physical, in the throes of “death” and emptiness.

    The film’s Japanese title, ‘Youkame no semi’, can be translated to “the eighth-day cicada”. It draws from the belief that cicadas live only seven days, after which they die together. While scientifically incorrect, it has been used as a metaphor for the shortness of life, shearing it of meaning. But the film quietly asks: what if one cicada decides not to die, and lives on for an eighth day—or longer? In the film, Erina not only decides to live but also to pay forward a life that has found new meaning and beauty.

  • The Insect Woman, dir. Shohei Imamura (1963)

    The Insect Woman, dir. Shohei Imamura (1963)

    “Ma, what other way is there?”

    There is just so much to unpack from that remarkable line from another of Shohei Imamura’s masterpieces, the taboo-revelling The Insect Woman (1964), that I believe it represents both the narrative-thematic and emotional cores of the film. Imamura delivered through this film with his deftness not only with the black-and-white format but also with cinema’s unique language–editing. By combining masterful editing through the effective use of stills and a callback to the Japanese cinematic tradition of benshi, Imamura was able to showcase a masterpiece that not only unfolds in the viewers’ screens, but more importantly, in the fertile imaginations of their minds.

    On the surface, The Insect Woman is a tale of survival and rising through the ranks, only to be met by the harsh realities of life after war and an unequal society. Sachiko Hidari is remarkable as the protagonist Tome, who played with such ease and depth the life of a farm girl-turned-prostitution madam in the fast-changing Tokyo of the 50s and the 60s. Tome’s life, as well as the lives of those around her—her daughter, her friends, even her lover and her family back in rural Tohoku—represent the life of insects, with its endless cycle of birth, growth, transformation, and death.

    But is it just their lives though? We can answer this by looking more closely at the transliteration of the film’s Japanese title, “Entomological Chronicles of Japan.” To Imamura, Tome’s life is but a representation of the Japanese people and indeed, of Japan itself. Or is Japan really the “insect woman”?

    From the tailend of the Taisho period to the nascent years of the post-war Japanese economic miracle, the movie contends that nothing has really changed; everything but a part of a cycle. The sincerity of the religious is always undermined by the greedy. Women’s achievements are always treated as lesser and more easily dismissible. And sex, for good or for ill, is always a potent tool and path that women can wield to achieve a better life. Life is a bitch, Tome decried in the film, and bitching and being bitched on, whether literally or figuratively, is a constant throughout the film. The external circumstances might be in constant flux, but the substance of the Japanese psyche remains the same, a powerful thesis to make in a country that is proud of its newfound pacifism manufactured less than two decades removed from its imperialistic adventures. 

    That life is just a cycle of predictable phases, like that of an insect, can be downright nihilistic in its reductionism, especially in the face of human striving and objective progress. But therein also lies the power to be able to turn certainty on its head—by knowing how it goes, one can crack the code towards change.

    As it will be revealed in the end, The Insect Woman shows that in a sense, what seems to be the only way can also be the way out.