554 Still Walking

[Sonmi451]

Finally caught this last night, and I basically enjoyed it very much, but I'm wondering if anyone knows if there is a story behind Ryo's voiceover at the end of the film? It felt so tacked on and unnecessary -- in stark contrast to the beautiful subtlety and nuance of the rest of the film -- that I'm curious if it was added for Western audiences. It was almost enough to ruin the film for me, but not quite.

No -- "not added for Western audiences". Japan has a long tradition of voice-overs of this sort in family dramas of this sort. Ozu doesn't do it, but Naruse does sometimes. And (IIRC) Ichikawa had one in "I Am Two" and Yamada has one in his "Twilight Samurai". Not the most common technique, but not all that rare. It didn't bother me at all. ;~}

Thank you for the quick reply. I'm basically starting my intro into Japanese cinema (neglected it for too long), so I wasn't sure. I don't necessarily have a problem with voiceover generally -- if it seems to serve a purpose other than spelling out to the audience what we should already know. I was like, "damn Kore-eda, I know they didn't end up going to the football game!". It seemed like the shot of Ryo's parents walking up the stairs would have made the perfect end-point. Still, I absolutely loved the way Kore-eda deftly portrayed the normalization of pathological behavior in a dysfunctional family. Looking forward to catching Like Father, Like Son later this week.

[Michael Kerpan]

"Like Father, Like Son" (really "And, Thus, I Become a Father") is absolutely wonderful. I love "Still Walking" more -- but I've never not loved a Kore'eda film. ;~}

I will admit that the narration in Naruse's "Mother" was a bit off-putting when I first saw it. It turned out the film was based on a contest-winning essay for school kids -- and I now assume the narration came from the winning essay. By the time I encountered the narration in later-watched Naruse films (Repast, Wanderer's Notebook), I didn't even blink. ;~}

[Mr Sausage]

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[Michael Kerpan]

This is possibly my favorite film (overall) of recent years -- and yet, I'm unsure just what I need to say about it.

Although Kore'eda is often called Ozu-esque, he claims he is more influenced by Naruse. He has also acknowledged the influence of HOU Hsiao Hsien. This film, like most of his other work, certainly shows traces of all these "influences". Nonetheless, this film has a different feel from those of his influences. Unfortunately, I cannot really describe why it seems this way.

One thing I would note is that, as far as I'm concerned, all the performances here are really close to perfect. They seem "real" -- like people I have known (some in my own family). To tell the truth, this is a movie I would rather show people (an have), than analyze.

[Michael Kerpan]

Still no talking?

Sigh!

[Sloper]

I didn’t vote for this, but am glad to have been prompted to seek it out – it’s a beautiful film. There was a lot that I missed on a first viewing, because much of the time the film puts us in a position like that of Ryo’s wife: we’re unfamiliar with the various backstories and tensions attached to this family, so there are lots of subtle touches that only make sense once you know the whole story. Ryo’s look of frustration when his parents tell the anecdote about stealing corn from the neighbour, the grandfather’s annoyance when he hears his daughter referring to ‘Grandma’s house’, Atsushi playing the piano, and so on – these things are all explained later on in the film, but on a second viewing it’s easier to keep track of the emotions bubbling under what sometimes appear to be quite neutral interactions, and to see the connections the film is drawing between them.

One key theme being explored here is the way in which the relationships within a family are dominated, not just by a sense of what has been lost, but by delusional fantasies about the way things were and are, and about what might have been, or might still be in the future. Junpei, the ‘heir’, literally exchanged his life for someone else’s when he saved Yoshio, and this sets up a recurring motif of self-displacement. Yow Yoshio, the poor bastard, can’t even live his own life properly, but is forced by Junpei’s vengeful mother to feel that he is ‘living for Junpei’ (mirroring the fact that Junpei ‘died for Yoshio’). This year, like last year, she cruelly asks him about his drama course, solely in order to remind him that he dropped out, that he is wasting the life her son died to give him. More painfully still, the camera’s insistent focus on Ryo during this sequence makes it clear that what is true for Yoshio is true for him as well. He is similarly hamstrung by his parents’ preoccupation with Junpei, and similarly unable to find a space for himself in his brother’s shadow. He tells Yoshio, in a rather desperate tone, ‘You’re twenty-five; you can be whatever you want.’ But Yoshio retorts with the bad news Ryo doesn’t want to hear: ‘No, I can see my life’s not going anywhere.’

And of course, when the mother reveals her motives to Ryo later on, we realise that her desire for vengeance is fuelled by her own sense that she too has not been able to move on from her son’s death. The mother is knitting a lace shawl when she tells Ryo about this, and this bit of business must have been a contribution from the actor, Kirin Kiki: in the making-of documentary, we see her suggesting the lace decorations (which she knitted herself, years earlier) during a costume meeting. It’s an activity suggestive of great focus and patience, but we also get the sense that it’s something she’s been doing for many years, a habit she doesn’t entirely enjoy but can’t break out of.

Her entrapment isn’t simply to do with Junpei’s death, either. It also manifests, for example, in her insistence that Ryo wear the pyjamas she bought him: she can’t help looking after him as though he were a child, but didn’t buy pyjamas for Atsushi, who really is a child (note that she doesn’t regard Ryo as a ‘real parent’ yet). Even more striking is the revelation about the record she bought in 1970, which is the song she heard her husband singing when she caught him having an affair. It gives Ryo the creeps that she still plays that record, but her attachment to it is even more disturbing when we find out what it means to her. She sings along to it, remembering how her husband sang along to it in the company of another woman – the motif of self-displacement again. She holds onto that memory but never talks to her husband about it, unable to ‘move on’ from it: she was carrying Ryo on her back at the time, suggesting that it was the burden of having children that stopped her from confronting her husband. She says herself, to Ryo, that children are a good way of forestalling the possibility of divorce. For all kinds of reasons, she hasn’t really been able to ‘live’, and now devotes her energy to keeping the dead alive and preventing the living from living.

Looked at in the cold light of day, there’s something monstrous about this character, but Kiki’s breathtakingly detailed, subtle performance, and Koreeda’s sensitive direction, make for a very sympathetic portrayal overall. I was left thinking that, after all, my mother does this kind of thing as well – like Michael, I see a lot of people I know in this film! I imagine it strikes a chord with so many viewers because it’s both unflinchingly honest and unfailingly humane in its exploration of these all-too-common family dynamics. It actually has a lot in common with Summer Hours, which we were discussing around this time last year, and the mother here is not dissimilar from the one Edith Scob played in Assayas’ film. There’s something so unerringly ‘right’ about the way Kiki delivers those barbed little comments while knitting a shawl, rummaging through drawers, or bustling about the kitchen. The jibes are so off-hand as to be unanswerable. We sense that she’s not unconscious of what she’s doing – she has thought carefully about how to torture Yoshio, and really is trying to undermine Ryo’s wife – but also that her own repressed pain and frustration prevent her from really coming to terms with the cruelty she inflicts on others. In spite of everything, it’s hard not to like her and feel sorry for her.

On that note, there’s a lovely moment after she tells her husband about the record, while he’s in the bath (they’re obscured from each other’s sight by the frosted glass screen): just as he grimaces at the realisation that she found out about his affair, she casually reminds him to put his washcloth out to dry. When he does this later on, initially he pulls the cloth taut on the washing line, so that it will dry properly; then, on second thought, he angrily scrunches it back up. He’s remembering the revelation that accompanied his wife’s command, and rebelling against her ‘everything is fine’ demeanour. Scrunching up the washcloth is his way – one of many – of saying that everything is not fine or normal or tidy. His frustrations are embarrassingly overt, to the point where he can quite directly insult any member of his family, daughter-in-law included, at any moment. But the next morning, we see the washing-line again, and there’s his washcloth, pulled taut and hanging next to his wife’s: she silently tidied it up.

I also found Atsushi’s trajectory through the film very moving, in a very under-stated way. His scepticism about communicating with the dead goes through an ambiguous transition, until the climactic moment when he recites a sort of quasi-prayer to the night sky (or the myrtle tree?) when no one else is listening. He’s not praying to his father, because he refers to him in the third-person, and there’s no trite religious conversion here, but his choice of possible careers suggests a coming-to-terms with his connections to the living and the dead. He will be a piano-tuner, like his dad, or a doctor, like his step-grandfather, and perhaps not in imitation of him but of Ryo, who had wanted to be a doctor back when he still looked up to his father and felt capable of winning his approval. It’s a complex moment, suggesting either that Atsushi hopes for, and might achieve, a healthy relationship with his new dad, or that the same tensions will just repeat themselves; or perhaps a bit of both. Ryo’s piecing back together of his childhood essay about wanting to be like his father seems to invite an optimistic reading, implying that he can still cherish that memory, and perhaps that he won’t be as set against Atsushi’s desire to be a doctor as he claimed he would be. (By the way, it must be significant that Atsushi’s late father tuned pianos and his stepfather restores paintings – a piano doctor and a painting doctor...)

The ending is similarly ambiguous. In some ways, Ryo seems to be trapped in inherited forms of behaviour, repeating his mother’s comment when he visits Junpei’s grave, and her story about butterflies when talking to his own daughter. There’s a slightly unsettling sense that he’s closer to his ‘real’ daughter than to Atsushi, vindicating his mother’s warning from earlier on. But there’s also a sense that he and his family might be liberated from the burdens imposed by the older generation. There’s no wailing and gnashing of teeth at the graveside this time, nor any strong sense that this is anything but a pleasant family ritual. When he tells his daughter about the yellow butterflies, he also repeats his mother’s claim, ‘I wonder who told me that?’ There are probably lots of ways to read this, but I like to see it as an indication that these inherited rituals and ideas can be detached from their source and put to a different use.

The ‘Blue Light Yokohama’ record and the anniversary of Junpei’s death were, for the mother, a way of clinging to irreparable pain and loss. I think what we see at the end is Ryo and his family maintaining connections to the past, but incorporating these things into their own life. The comment about how nice it will be for Junpei’s grave to be watered is Ryo’s way of connecting to his mother, but now the comment is just a nice idea he shares with his family; the myth about yellow butterflies is not the heart-breaking story it was for Ryo’s mother, but again, a nice story Ryo shares with his daughter. (Interesting that for Atsushi, as well, the yellow butterfly provides a link to his dead parent.) So much of the film is about the damage wrought on a family by memories and legacies, but the ending suggests that these things can be gifts as well as burdens. Koreeda achieves just the right level of optimism so that the ending is poignant without being trite.

Finally, I thought the film was beautifully shot, but in a very un-showy way. One moment I particularly liked was when Ryo comments that the weather has turned cooler, so they should visit Junpei’s grave. There’s a shot of huge, verdant trees swaying in the breeze, and a music cue starts up like a breath of fresh air after the intimate but rather oppressive atmosphere inside the house; then the screen is suddenly filled by a beautiful, bright sky, in which the sun is partly hidden behind clouds. It’s a very simple moment, but a good example of how Koreeda uses imagery, editing and music to evoke the appropriate atmosphere. It’s in transitional moments like these that the film feels closest to Ozu, although on the whole it seems to me the similarities to his work are as superficial as they are obvious. As you say, Michael, I can’t quite put my finger on why that is. Interesting that Koreeda claims to owe more to Naruse. Do you think that debt shows in this film, in any specific ways?

[domino harvey]

I like to think that Sloper just dashed that off in the twenty-four minutes since Michael made his post! This is a great film, primarily for how it captures the feeling of time spent at a family gathering. One of the intangible things I always associate with this film is that it understands and relays what an empty room at your grandparents' feels like, and it's like capturing a shared universal memory on film. As I said in the film's dedicated thread, it's a shame that the very people who think they have an aversion to subtitled films would be the ones to get the most out of this film!

[Michael Kerpan]

sloper -- reading your elegant and thoughtful post made me mist up!

I always intuited that the epilogue was an excellent close -- despite all sorts of criticism aimed at it -- and now you have (probably) explained WHY I felt the way I did. It is a recapitulation of a motif formerly in a minor key in the corresponding major key.

domino -- you are absolutely right. This is a Japanese movie (of which sort there are many) that might well find a reasonably wide audience with the sort of folks who typically avoid subtitled films. Flagrantly arty films (or ones that can be marketed as such -- like Ozu's , despite the fact that he made films for ordinary audiences) sell in the West, and genre films also can be sold -- but "ordinary" films of the sort Kore'eda now makes don't appeal to either of these markets for subbed Japanese films (Maborosi and After Life were okay -- as they seemed arty enough) and the kind of audience that would enjoy this (or something like Somai's superb Moving) simply don't watch "foreign films" (I have a sister who would love this -- but for the fact that she won't even consider watching a film using Japanese).

[Michael Kerpan]

Last chance to weigh in! Happy 5th!

[Sloper]

I always intuited that the epilogue was an excellent close -- despite all sorts of criticism aimed at it -- and now you have (probably) explained WHY I felt the way I did. It is a recapitulation of a motif formerly in a minor key in the corresponding major key.

That's a good way to put it. I have to say that I didn't much like the voice-over that covers the transition into the epilogue - it would have been subtler and more moving to just leave us with that empty shot of the steps, then let us figure out that the parents had died in between that scene and the next one. But this didn't bother me as much on a second viewing.

This is a great film, primarily for how it captures the feeling of time spent at a family gathering. One of the intangible things I always associate with this film is that it understands and relays what an empty room at your grandparents' feels like, and it's like capturing a shared universal memory on film.

Yes, and this is especially true of the way the film portrays the experience of Ryo's wife. I love the scene where she's being interrogated about Ryo's salary, and having to politely fend off these questions; and then later when Ryo finds her sheepishly hiding out in an empty room... It's such an authentic representation of that 'visit to the in-laws' experience.

The way she reacts to the mother and father's stinging comments is also perfectly observed: there's a great moment when the mother is figuring out which kimonos to give her daughter-in-law, and she makes that horrendous remark about how it would be unwise to have another child with Atsushi around. We see the daughter-in-law's wounded, almost disbelieving expression, then we cut to her perspective (more or less - another point of contact with Ozu here?) and see the mother-in-law from behind, rummaging through the drawer. Something about this image really captures how it feels to navigate this kind of relationship. It doesn't happen through an overtly dramatic, noisy confrontation, but through the most mundane, domestic gestures. The suppressed hostility, the refusal to communicate, the act of material generosity to compensate for it all, the absorption in accumulated objects from the past, all rings so true. And again, in a sense it's a very painful moment, but the complex emotions we share with the daughter-in-law are not simply ones of anger and bitterness; there's also a kind of resigned tolerance there. This is just how it is with the in-laws, in their rather stifling house. We know, as we watch this scene from her perspective, that the daughter-in-law isn't going to respond or fight back - and that, in the long run, that's probably for the best.

[FrauBlucher]

Just watched the Kore-eda interview from the bluray. Interesting that he pretty immediately regretted the VO at the end. As much as it doesn't bother me it does come out of no where. Any thoughts on this?

I watched it again just recently and I can't say it lost it's effect. I can't disagree with many of the posts in this thread about the film. Sloper's take is exemplary. And Domino's observations comparing the families rituals to his own families is probably in the majority of what this film means to a family dynamic. I see the same in my family. It's a very universally human take