Hirokazu Kore-eda's Still Walking opens with two generations of a family, an elderly mother and her adult daughter, peeling vegetables for dinner. The father of the family walks past them towards the door. The daughter, seeing this, asks him to buy milk at the local store, but he ignores her and carries on. Sensing her daughter's agitation, her mother explains that "he doesn't want the neighbours to see him with a shopping bag. Even at his age, he wants to be called 'Doctor'."
A
sense of keeping up appearances is the cause of most, if not all of the
long-held issues within this family, and each one is aired during the 24 hours
they are all gathered together in the same house, commemorating the death of
the first born son fifteen years earlier. The middle son, an art restorer married
to a widowed mother of one, barely speaks to his father, who disapproves of his
life choices; the daughter tries to convince her mother that she and her loud
family should move in to their house, while her mother wants to live a peaceful
life but can't bring herself to mention it; and the son's wife feels as if she
and her child are being treated as guests and not as part of the family, just
because she and her husband haven't had children of their own yet.
Much
of this drama is left to bubble under the surface, and Kore-eda's presence is
similarly muted, unobtrusively observing the minutiae of the family's
interactions as they spend time with each other. He tends to compose his shots
from the corners of rooms, generally using a table as a focal point, and only
cutting to close-ups to accentuate the gestures of his characters. During one
particularly emotional moment around the table, the family listen to the
parents' "special, romantic song" that the father doesn't remember
but the mother listens to every day. Kore-eda cuts from a wide shot of the table
to successive close-ups of each person as the song plays: the mother sings
along, her husband makes a point of wolfing down his food, and their son and
daughter-in-law both look around anxiously, seemingly the only two people in
the room aware of the moment's awkwardness; their step-grandson struggles to
contain his laughter.
Kore-eda's
main strength as a director is how keenly attuned he is to natural behaviour,
and as these characters talk around their individual issues for the sake of the
family, his unassuming style allows his actors space to deliver the nuanced performances
required to make it work. At one point, the family takes a photograph together,
and the only person who takes it seriously is the son's wife, who smiles
steadfastly at the camera as everybody else looks disinterested. Still
Walking is a film of small,
revealing moments such as these, but from them Kore-eda has crafted a profoundly
moving portrait of a family splintered by tragedy, just as it exists in the
world, with all the complexities and dysfunction that comes with that.