Station (1981)

Original title: Eki

The first half of the film portrays various occurrences in the life of policeman and sports shooter Eiji Mikami (Ken Takakura) that eventually come together to bring to a quiet crisis of conscience and grief.

In the second half, Mikami returns to his snowy home on Hokkaido for a family festival and to decide on quitting the police and finding some better way to live. Here, he also meets bar maid Kiriko (Chieko Baisho), another slightly lost and damaged soul with whom he might find a degree of peace and even love.

Yasuo Furuhata’s drama with mild crime movie elements Station (called so for reasons of metaphor, but also because train stations take on a central role in various decision points in Mikami’s life) is a film I found very difficult to get into. The first hour of this two hour plus movie often seems pointless, draggy, and confusingly edited. It’s not very easy to even grasp the form and structure of what’s going on – let’s not even speak of character relations and timeline – because the film jumps around in the chronological order of Mikami’s life from scene to scene, often without any visual markers suggesting that it does so; there are no attempts at making Takakura look different in any part of the timeline either. So, for quite some time, it’s rather difficult to figure out what’s even going on in the movie at all, so much so, there’s little space to understand where all of this is actually going. Many scenes only make sense in the hindsight of the second hour, when the timeline collides into a linear narrative thread and we can begin to appreciate what we’ve seen before, how it connects, and how it brought Mikami to the emotional low point he is at now.

And once he has brought his film into this calmer rhythm, Furuhata turns out to be rather great at exploring this middle-aged kind of quiet grief and regret for the things one has done and encountered in the past, for the roads not taken, for the unkindness towards others and oneself, in a manner that never becomes melodramatic or whiny but carries a depth of emotion and understanding (also of the fact that one can’t really escape oneself, ever) under the poise of small gestures and quietly spoken (or unspoken) words, and lots and lots of snow.

Takakura – one of Japan’s great actors of the small gesture in most cases – is absolutely fantastic in the role. He suggests much of the weight of the past, the small fire of awakening hope, and the depths of his sadness through tiny shifts in his body language, the telling small gesture, and the way he says his most important lines in the most incidental manner. Baisho meets him gesture by gesture, and even has to do him one better by having to also suggest an hour of backstory about her we don’t get to see, using the same methods by which Takakura shows the results of his past on his present state. It’s all wonderfully understated, yet also precise and clear (not simplistic, mind you).

This is very much a film that rewards re-watching, obviously, because once the viewer understands the whole of Station’s structure they can also appreciate all the emotional and incidental detail contained in its first half. Which to me seems to be rather a huge risk to take for a film, structurally, but it does work for Station, if you have some patience with it going in.