• 歩いても歩いても (Still Walking)

5/29/24 (Wed)

The title of Koreeda’s superior 2008 film is taken from Ishida Ayumi’s old pop hit “Blue Light Yokohama”. It literally means “regardless of how much [one] walks” or “despite walking and walking”, the implication here being that the person will never reach the destination. The song itself features in the film in a startling confession muttered off-handedly by the mother.

Ryota (a surprisingly good Abe Hiroshi) is returning reluctantly to his hometown in Yokohama with his new wife, a widow with a child, to attend the annual memorial service for his late elder brother. The gruff father (Harada Yoshio), a retired doctor, has unhappily had to give up hope of passing on his business after the son’s death, as Ryota has opted instead to go into art restoration. The father does his best to keep up appearances – he refuses to go on errands in public, and puts on a bright face for the sake of former patients – but his world is slipping away, as seen when ambulance workers dealing with one of his former patients simply shove him aside. Meanwhile, the talkative mother (Kiki Kirin, superb as always) prepares the meal with her daughter, who has brought her husband, a second-rate car salesman, and their two children with the intention of moving in with the grandparents.

While all appears cheerful on the surface, we learn that the late elder son Junpei died rescuing a drowning kid, a fact the parents have never reconciled themselves to. To the father, Junpei will forever be the presumed heir to the clinic, while the mother chases butterflies thinking that the son’s spirit has returned. Ryota feels disparaged in comparison to his dead sibling, who will always remain an ideal, and is dreading the visit as he has secretly lost the very job that has so displeased his father. A man who has come to pay his respects turns out to be the person that Junpei saved from the sea, now klutzy, overweight, clearly uncomfortable and without a proper job. Both parents, polite on the outside, revile him behind his back as unworthy of Junpei’s sacrifice. The father calls him a “useless piece of trash”, while the mother says outright that she invites him each year to the memorial service only to make him suffer. She states that hatred is what keeps her going, a notion that disgusts Ryota. She also looks on Ryota’s wife as “used” goods; she comments that even a divorcee would have been a better choice since she chooses to leave her husband, while the specter of a dead spouse would linger on in a widow’s mind. She asks the wife at one point if they are going to have kids of their own, but dismisses that immediately as a bad idea. The sister does her best to smooth things over, especially with the father, but the parents tire of her husband (who never carries out his promises) and hyperactive grandchildren.

All of this is delivered under a veneer of utter civility. Other than a few outbursts by the sour father, there are no big family fireworks as in Osage County or Appropriate or any major battles between characters, just a lot of simmering discontent. One critic called it a “family drama without the drama”, which nails it. The crotchety grandfather complains constantly, and the grandmother’s casual observations, intentionally or not, can be cutting, such as a throwaway line revealing that she was long aware of her husband’s infidelity. But the film ambles along at a gentle pace, covering only a day or so (excluding an unnecessary coda three years later), and the dialogue is completely natural, as if it were improvised on the spot. The characters prove multidimensional: the mother’s cruelty toward the boy rescued by her son is balanced by her own suffering as a grieving mother; Ryota’s curtness is balanced by his (not entirely unjustified) perception that he is seen as the lesser son; the grandfather’s bitterness at his frustrated ambitions are balanced by his hopes of passing his love for medicine on to Ryota’s stepson (who consequently says later that if he can’t grow up to be a piano tuner like his father, he’d like to be a doctor). Ryota’s wife tells her son that his biological father is dead but not gone: “Even when they die, people don’t really go away. Your father’s here, right inside you.” That’s true for all the characters here, who never abandon their dead dreams or frustrations.

I feel almost obligated to throw in something about Ozu here, and it’s true that the film recalls the master’s natural pacing, static camera shots, so-called pillow shots and such. Koreeda’s protests that he feels closer to Naruse are credible in terms of the characterizations. But he has really created his own world here and doesn’t need comparison with anyone.

Koreeda typically gets terrific performances out of nearly everyone. Kiki stands out as always, but kudos as well to Natsukawa Yui as Ryota’s wife and to Abe for an unusually subtle turn. This is the best of Koreeda’s films that I’ve seen, and that’s saying a lot.