In short: Our Little Sister (2015)

Original title: Umimachi Diary

Hirokazu Koreeda (often written as Kore-eda, but I would prefer not to) is one of the masters of contemporary Japanese cinema any way you look at it. He is a director steeped in the Japanese tradition – think Ozu, his peers and what followed - of calm, subtle, and artfully staged films that treat themes which should be all rights be over the top and melodramatic, but come to a delicate, complex and human life without following modern ideas of how to treat a plot. Quite a few critics – from the West as well as from Japan - love to set this sort of thing up as a big difference between Japanese and “Western” filmmaking as a whole, an idea that to my eyes seems to ignore the whole history of Japanese popular cinema, which follows very much the same rules as the Hollywood model. But I digress.

Koreeda’s films, basically all focused on family relations and absent parents in one way or another, move in ways and at a pace all of their own, demanding patience and concentration from their viewers. That focus they repay in slowly enfolding movements of deep humanity, compassion, and an ability to actually teach you something about people, their ways of life and a way of looking at them without any didacticism whatsoever.

Our Little Sister, about three sisters who take in their teenage half-sister after the death of their estranged father, their relations, and all the unspoken things – not all of them bad – between them might be Koreeda’s most Koreeda film. There’s particularly little plot here; the film instead moves through a series of intimately observed scenes that make a lot of other examples of “observational” cinema look boring and empty thanks to the director’s ability to not just look at characters’ lives but make us understand it through editing choices, camera work, great, subtle acting (Haruka Ayase, Masami Nagasawa, Kaho and Suzu Hirose are incredibly perfect here as individual actresses as as well as an ensemble) and something rather less technical – call it a vibe, call it soul, call it a direct line to the ineffable.

That I’m ending up on these latter terms I find particularly interesting in the context of talking about a filmmaker and films this naturalistic – apparently, feelings of transcendence really can be invoked by a piece of art that never leaves the natural, realist world.