nick ebisu

** Spoilers ** - beautifully laid back and layered in it's human complexity - Sakura Ando and Lily Franky lead the excellent cast as (would be) parents Nobuyo and Osamu - there's a real honesty in their portrayals as loving parents, even when it's revealed that that their circumstances are not as honest as it seems at the beginning - and the film highlights the extremely trying conditions of Japan's working class labor conditions, peppering the film with clear evidence of systemic injustice and lack of financial support for those not old enough to collect a pension - the film also condemns domestic abuse, either husband to wife (Yuri's parents and Nobuyo's first husband) or parent to child (Yuri's mother to Yuri), and presents it as diametrically opposite to creating a "good family", despite what the family looks like on the outside - Director Hirokazu Kore-eda navigates this wonderful moral grey area where you truly believe that Nobuyo and Osamu are better parents for Shota and Yuri, despite their relative inability to properly care for them according to the standards of the law - I wonder if child actors are better if they simply talk less and express more of their feelings and thoughts through subtle action, since Shota and Yuri effortlessly manage to convey a wide variety of emotions without saying too much and risk being annoying in the way that most child actors are - the film is so atmospheric and entrancing that I could watch the family go about their daily lives for hours - the bird's eye shots of Osamu and Shots playing, the wonderfully palpable loving sadness Nobuyo shows throughout, the ability of the film to make even sex work a viable vehicle for emotional connection, all wonderfully shot with a steady hand in vibrant Kodak and scored with a quiet grace - but the slices of life reveal a darkness that slowly seeps into the tranquility, culminating into a wonderfully executed tonal shift that still manages to be completely in keeping with the rest of the movie before it, albeit tinged with more melancholy - several questions remain: how exactly is grandmother Hatsue related to Osamu and Nobuyo? Why did Aki choose to live with her grandmother Hatsue instead of anyone else? Why didn't Nobuyo or Osamu ask the social workers to check on Yuri more, given that it's clear her idyllic seeming mother abuses her? - Not everything necessarily needs to be answered, but having a scene or two addressing these questions would have made the film more internally consistent with how well the other narrative threads were concluded - still, Kore-eda has made a gently masterful film, the kind Kurosawa attempted to make twice (The Lower Depths and DouDesKaDen), something of the movie equivalent to Tomoyoshi Date's Human Being