Kore-eda's Kiseki （奇跡）

Greetings from Japan! Sorry for the long absence from this blog, I hope everyone stateside will use it some next semester. I saw the latest film by Kore-eda Hirokazu, whose Maboroshi we watched last semester, and I was inspired to give a few thoughts. As Kore-eda is one of the most highly and widely regarded Asian directors on the European and American foreign film scenes, I imagine this movie might make it over to the states in some form.

The film is called Kiseki, which literally means Miracle and I think has been translated as I Wish. Like most of Kore-eda's movies, it is a relatively simple story centered more on character than plot. Goichiro and Ryunosuke are young brothers separated by thousands of miles after their parents divorce. Goichiro lives with his mother and desperately wishes to reunite the family. He hears that two people wishing upon the first two bullet trains of a new line in southern Japan passing will experience a miracle, and so he convinces his brother to meet him and wish for the four of them to be together again.

The same year that Takata Yojiro's sentimental Departures won an Academy Award and convinced dozens of Japanese moviegoers to buy property in rural Yamagata prefecture, Kore-eda's Still Walking took apart the "urbanite visits hometown" genre that has been present in Japanese cinema since before Ozu. The melancholy and humor that usually accompanies this scenario, which was done all but perfectly in Departures, is subverted by Still Walking, which forcibly removes most of the (fake) nostalgia for the rural homeland and replaces it with old wounds and indelible bitterness between parents and children. Departures is wonderful in its formula, Kore-eda's version of the old story -- reportedly based on his own fractured relationship with his father -- is a brutal emotional cage match that belongs in the same echelon as Nichols' Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. I make the comparison to muse that perhaps after the experience of making Still Walking, Kore-eda's retreat into childhood was a natural course of action.

Call Kiseki "sentimental" is tempting, particularly because of the energetic music, but nevertheless incorrect. As with Nobody Knows, Kiseki attempts to capture childhood with a realism far distant from most movies about children. Toward this end, Kore-eda improvised much of the script after casting the children, a style reminiscent of Mike Leigh. Odagiri Jo, Otsuke Nene and Abe Hiroshi turn in typically reliable performances in adult roles, but the real stars are the seven children: Go, Ryu and their five friends. Go and Ryu are played by real brothers, which is remarkable considering how different their performances are. Go is visibly melancholic, a trait expressed outwardly by the grey ash from Sakurajima that forms a thin layer over everything in his new hometown of Kagoshima. Ryu is energetic to the point of hyperactivity, resembling his carefree musician father, but bright enough underneath to understand most of the implications when his mother calls him drunk and sobbing late in the film. Where the relationship between the sibling actors comes into play is perhaps in the little moments when they are together, where with a look or a playful touch you are reminded that despite their wildly different personalities they possess a deep familial bond.

The first two-thirds of Kiseki are set in the respective worlds of Go and Ryu. Kore-eda's cinematography is typical for his films: workmanlike and effective, expressing both the miniscule beauty and grandiose ugliness of modern Japan (a technique he perfected in his last film, Air Doll). Flairs come in quasi-confessionals where each child explains what they would wish for and also wonderful, lingering tracking shots of children at play that fully capture the kind of carefree movement only possible in youth. The final act of Kiseki involves the seven children journeying to the midpoint between their two towns to wish upon the bullet trains. Here Kore-eda's camerawork returns to it's least restrained form, best exemplified by the narrative interlude of step-siblings at play in Maboroshi. The landscape is ugly on it's face, a more rural side of Japan than the childrens' hometowns that is punctured and blotched by elevated train tracks and shopping centers. But the children find beauty within this industrialized side of rural Japan, and through them so do we.

Kiseki is sweet in a way that no other Kore-eda film is, sweet in a way that only a movie populated by real children can be. It mostly rings true, particularly Go's bittersweet character arc. Kore-eda has made a "children's movie" in the spirit of The 400 Blows, Spirit of the Beehive or of course his own Nobody Knows. It inspires not false nostalgia for childhood but rather a deep melancholic satisfaction, the kind that can only be achieved by watching a child grow up just a little over two hours. Intertwined in Go and the other children are both the childlike logic that drives the plot and a fast-developing understanding of the adult world.

Note: Obviously the movie had no subtitles. Even though it was in Kansai dialect, I would estimate I could understand about 85% of the dialogue. What I missed was mostly in scenes with Go's grandfather.