Koreeda Hirokazu stands uniquely as Japan’s most regarded filmmaker of his generation.
International festival plaudits such as his prizes at Cannes for his child-swapping drama Like Father, Like Son in 2013 and again in 2018 for the much grimier domestic shenanigans of Shoplifters have been equally matched by box-office success in his homeland. His subtle, humanistic portraits of modern-day family life have inevitably drawn comparisons with that celebrated master from the classical age of cinema, Ozu Yasujiro, although his style and method are very different. What they share is a determination to scrutinise the concept of the modern family, in all its forms and makeups, and its place within contemporary society.
After Life (1998)
Beginning his career in television documentary, Koreeda was part of a select group of Japanese filmmakers that included Kawase Naomi and Aoyama Shinji who emerged to international attention in the late 1990s as part of a renaissance in the kind of ambitious, auteur-driven arthouse cinema little seen in Japan for decades.
Following his debut Maborosi (1995), his second feature After Life is his most formally daring: part-improvised and blurring the boundaries between drama and documentary. It portrays a group of newly deceased people who find themselves in a starkly depicted halfway house between the worlds of the living and the dead. Once there, they are given a week to choose their favourite memory, which will be reconstructed for them to experience over and over again for eternity in the next life, in order that their souls can be fully laid to rest. With an intellectual density and thematic inventiveness, Koreeda explores the relationship between memory and personal identity in a self-reflexive but also highly moving manner that highlights the inherent problems in constructing fiction from reality.
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Nobody Knows (2004)
Koreeda’s films in the 2000s bore the hallmarks of a director who embarked on a radically different aesthetic tack with each new project, as if wiping the slate clean and starting afresh each time in search of new film forms best suited to conveying his ideas. One lesser mentioned work from this period is Air Doll (2009), a magical-realist Pinocchio-like fable about an inflatable sex doll that comes to life, which may appear to be an uncharacteristic attempt to branch into the mainstream but would be better understood as part of Koreeda’s wider exploration of different forms of cinematic expression.
Nobody Knows, made prior to this film, is undoubtedly the masterpiece from this period, a bleak and heart-rending documentary-style child’s-eye depiction of four half-siblings left to fend for themselves when their self-absorbed mother flits off for months on end, abandoning them to develop their own domestic routines and survival mechanisms. It played in competition in Cannes in 2004, where its 14-year-old lead Yuya Yagira won the award for Best Actor.
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Still Walking (2009)
The jewel in the crown of Koreeda’s filmography, Still Walking is a bittersweet and naturalistic portrayal of a middle-class family’s annual get-together to commemorate the death of its favourite son, unfolding almost in real time as three generations assemble at the home of a gruff retired doctor and his superficially chirpy wife.
Made just after the death of Koreeda’s own parents, this partly autobiographical work marked the point at which the family became more central to Koreeda’s obsessions. It also highlights how the domestic configurations depicted in his films are often organised or are broken up and restructured around dead, departed or otherwise missing relations. The surviving son (who is hinted to be a stand-in for the director himself) turns up with his new partner, a recent widow, and her young son whom he treats as his own. The low-key approach makes for sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes wincingly funny viewing, with the gathering marked by gritted teeth and barbed asides as the assembled members trade memories and occasionally slip their masks of restraint. Nevertheless, the overall effect is undeniably cathartic.
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Like Father, Like Son (2013)
If I Wish (2011), a sunny story about two young brothers separated by the divorce of their parents and their attempts to reunite, seemed like a move to mainstream territory for Koreeda, then the results certainly paid off with Like Father, Like Son, which landed the director with his biggest commercial success up till then. This film also focused on two young boys, this time switched at birth and raised in very different families, with very different parenting styles and very different expectations.
The high-concept setup, based on a real-life case of baby-switching, feels like the stuff of daytime TV, and indeed, the unobtrusive camera set-ups and clean camerawork lend the director’s first wholly digitally-shot feature the low-key intimacy of small-screen drama. Nevertheless, the rigorous intellectual handling of this unlikely “what if” scenario and the characteristically high level of the performances makes for a highly watchable drama that provides a starting point to discussions around the nature-versus-nurture debate, the true meaning of family and parenthood, and what parents can learn from their offspring. With characteristic subtlety, Koreeda merely nudges the viewer towards their own conclusions.
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Our Little Sister (2015)
Adapted from a manga by Yoshida Akimi, Our Little Sister tracks the stories of the three young women of the Koda family after they take the 14-year-old half-sister they first meet at their estranged father’s funeral into their home. It initially seems like a light and breezy work, but like his subsequent After the Storm (2016), reveals itself as one of Koreeda’s richest, most even and rewarding works upon closer viewing.
The story unfolds at an unhurried pace, without resorting to overt conflict and sweeping narrative arcs, against the backdrop of the changing seasons of cherry blossoms and summer rains, while low camera angles abound in the interiors of the traditional wooden home. Ozu comparisons are particularly tempting given the coastal town setting: close to the ancient capital of Kamakura where the master director lived out his final years. And yet the film explores similar concerns to much of Koreeda’s oeuvre: the investigation into repressed, misplaced or shared memories and the motifs of absent parents and restructured families units. Our Little Sister provides as good a starting point as any to this fabulous director’s work.
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This story was written by Jasper Sharp, a writer and curator specializing in Japanese cinema and the co-editor of the website Midnight Eye.