Still Walking (2008)
Directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda
A family gathers together for a commemorative ritual whose nature only gradually becomes clear.
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What critics compared Still Walking to
But how dismaying to see the man who made “Still Walking”, with its rich characters and gently shifting emotional dynamics, rely on tear-jerking narrative arcs (the career-oriented father played by Masaharu Fukuyama learns to accept his underachieving non-biological son), trite clash-of-the-classes schtick (one of the families is bourgeois, the other working-class), and perhaps the most overused piece of classic music in film history (Bach’s “Goldberg Variations”).
His most memorable dramas always seem to be built around families: Maborosi (a wife deals with her husband's suicide); After Life (departed souls remember their loved ones); I Wish (a pair of brothers are separated but try to reconnect); Still Walking (a poignant visit to grandparents in the countryside); and the heartbreaking Nobody Knows, in which four young Tokyo kids are abandoned by their mother.
Korea-Eda combines his usual Oshima-like, microscopic eye for the fault-lines and power structures of family (see Still Walking) with a looser appreciation of how multiple families interact as groups and individuals.
Unlike Ozu-tinged Still Walking or Nobody Knows and I Wish, however, concentration is not on adult children and their parents or on children deserted by or trying to reunite their parents.