Drama is something extremely hard to do.  Good drama, I mean. Maybe more so than comedy. Maybe that’s only how I see it but in recent years there have been very few films that tackle drama without slipping into the shallow, predictable melodrama (Silver Linings Playbook is one of those). In film, if you want to leave a mark on the viewer, if you want him to truly feel affected by what he’s seeing, then you have to make drama feel like real life drama. Characters that go around yelling, screaming, crying, kicking furniture and repetitively shouting out swear words does not necessarily transmit the characters emotions properly. Once upon a time there was this little Japanese fellow, a man who lived his entire life as a single man and spent his days over at his mother’s place writing scripts and whatnot. This man was Yasujirō Ozu, one of the greatest filmmakers of all the time,  inventor of the ‘tatami’ shot (a type of shot in which the camera is placed at a low height, supposedly at the eye level of a person kneeling on a tatami mat) and master of silent drama. Ozu, to those who know him, was the real deal when it came to telling stories of daily life, blue collar work, boredom, rituals, routines, and so on. He brought the most powerful human emotions to the screen in a very quiet, organized way. But today I do not wish to write about Ozu, although I could write entire pages on him. Today I wish to bring to light a name that perhaps hasn’t been heard so much in the ‘pop’ mainstream cinema world of today. The name is Hirokazu Koreeda. And the movie I want to talk about is Still Walking from 2008.

Still Walking is the definition of real life. Real relationships. The setting is the small town of Yokosuka, Japan. The time frame is 24 hours in the life of a family that reunites after not seeing each other for quite some time. Toshiko and Kyohei are the parents, the eldest generation. They’re hosting the family reunion over at their place. Chinami is the daughter, who has a husband and two children. Ryota is Chinami’s brother, and he brings along his new wife, Yukari (who married him as a widow) and her son from the previous marriage. What lies beneath all the layers of family life?  The horrific death by drowning of the eldest son, Ryota’s older brother, who died while saving another boy’s life twelve years prior to this reunion. Wow, this is Brazilian telenovela material, huh? Wrong. You see, Koreeda is a director who has always had an interest in exploring relationships, their value in people’s lives, the importance of a compact family (like in his later film, Like Father, Like Son) and the teachings family members can absorb from it (like in this year’s Koreeda film, Our Little Sister). It seems as if it’s his mission to tell the truth and nothing but the truth. In Still Walking the sound of the cicadas outside, the water running from the tap in the kitchen, something boiling on the cooker, children laughing and playing under the warm sunlight, it all adds up when creating an atmosphere, which will be used in order to tell the story. Like family, this movie has many different layers and fractions. We get glimpses of the relationship between mother and daughter, mother and son, father and daughter, and most importantly father and son. Ryota suffers when he looks his father in the eye. The man who never acknowledged him for who he was, but always wished him the worst. The man who felt the wrong son had died.

And this is when Koreeda draws his inspiration from Ozu. The way he handles the painful pauses, the quiet moments of dinner time, particular characters questioning each other’s motifs without talking to one another, is incredibly subtle and yet the vibrations, the force of it can be felt just by watching what goes on on the screen. Koreeda focuses on acting, just like Ozu. He waits for the right reaction and if the actor has some tough time with it, he waits, letting the camera roll until the actor finally gets it. The moments are not cut in half like most in most movies today.  As I said, Koreeda seeks the ultimate truth. His camera is there to find it. Actors play off each other in a magnificent way and nothing feels out of place or awkward or false. It feels necessary and natural at the same time, it feels like real life. Problems are not skipped and forgotten, everything needs to stripped down and taken apart and put back into its former place. There is tension between certain characters but it is never expressed. It is there and it is felt but characters try to suppress it and this heightens the film’s emotional impact. The viewer demands justice, we live in an age where we all want the big payoff at the end, and here, we don’t get it. A family stays a family, it has its problems, its ups and downs, but it is still a family. There is death, there is disappointment, regret, frustration, embarrassment and empathy. Everything becomes part of Koreeda’s tale of life, really. Similarly to Ozu, Koreeda does not wish to make a big moral ending out of nothing. He just wants to let simplicity sink in. Every frame is soaked in simplicity and maybe that is the secret of good drama. Both directors do not reveal the whole truth to us, they expect us to work it out ourselves.  It is the viewer’s duty to be able to work things out, if we’re proper human beings, we’ll understand, says Koreeda.