It’s time to take a look at a modern master of Japanese (and beyond) cinema with the essential Hirokazu Kore-eda films…
Often seen as the heir apparent to Yasujiro Ozu, this director may not be immediately recognised by Western audiences, but chances are you may have seen one or two of his more well-travelled films.
Hirokazu Kore-eda’s modus operandi, much like Ozu, is to tell quiet, contemplative and deeply human stories. Common themes include family dynamics, moral dilemmas, grief, class, Japanese culture, attitudes, conformity, and so much more besides.
Wherever a Kore-eda protagonist exists, it’s often within a story where several different existential factors come into play. He’s able to glide comfortably and skillfully between melodrama and a more subdued and grounded realist drama, covering stories unafraid to challenge with difficult subjects of morality.
Where Kore-eda really differs from Ozu, though, is his ability to stray from his staple cinema into quirkier cinema or darker cinema. Unafraid to go into the realms of fantasy, whilst he’s also plied his trade away from his native Japan as well.
He’s one of the greatest working directors, and is still proving that his masterful deftness has lost none of its majesty. Here are the essential Hirokazu Kore-eda films…
Maborosi
We’ll take it right back to Kore-eda’s first feature film, with Maborosi. He came out with a bang, with a striking, powerful and introspective dive into grief and its offshoots. Among critics and cineastes, Kore-eda gained attention from the get-go, with the film being nominated for the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.
A young woman (Makiko Esumi) with a newborn is left shattered when her husband unexpectedly commits suicide. Years later, in a new relationship and settling into a new place, that unresolved grief returns as she struggles to contend with rationalising why her late husband took his own life. Aside from being beautifully shot and carefully unobtrusive in lensing the protagonist, Kore-eda lays the groundwork for much of his career to come. Show, not tell. His films are often quiet, considered and thanks to his directorial deftness, utterly compelling with powerful emotional payoffs.
After Life
Kore-eda’s next feature was an about-turn. It still dealt with human emotion and the power of connection (and its severing), but with a more philosophical and poignant fantasy.
As the title suggests, the film is about the afterlife, depicting a rather unassumingly dour (and stereotypical) office backdrop where the recently deceased are tasked with choosing one memory from their life that will stay with them for eternity.
The film evokes a deep response from the viewer in turn, as we inevitably start pondering that question during and immediately after this serene and quietly affecting film ends. The story, in fact, focuses more on the two counsellors tasked with overseeing this procedure, and their growing responses to each case become just as fascinating as those souls looking back at their memories. The fact that some of the interviewees were giving real, unscripted answers only adds to the film’s emotional resonance.
Nobody Knows
By this point in his career, it was difficult to pin down what Kore-eda’s speciality was. Aside from the aforementioned, he’d made Distance, which looked at some darker subject matter whilst revisiting grief as a theme (but a more shared, communal sense of it). Nobody Knows turned its attention to forgotten outliers in society and neglected children.
A single mother leaves her children (who have different fathers) alone for extended periods to fend for themselves. 12-year-old boy Akira is burdened with the weight of responsibility, with a particularly young sibling. They’re left without enough money in an increasingly squalid flat. If it all sounds grim, it is at times, and yet Kore-eda’s skill in telling a heartbreaking, dramatic story, ingrained with some level of depressing truth (that’s universal), is that he’s able to still show the play and joy children are capable of giving themselves to, to forget the desperate poverty awaiting them. For a film so crushing, it has lighter moments, until Kore-eda inevitably sweeps the rug from under you with something that feels so heartbreakingly inevitable (and all the more so, as it’s based on a true case). As he’d prove repeatedly, no one can elicit such incredible child performances each and every time as Kore-eda.
Air Doll
Often seen as a lesser film in Kore-eda’s career, Air Doll is a whimsical, quirky and satirical film that still manages to fit in some deeper existential questions. Korean star Doona Bae plays a lonely man’s sex doll, which comes to life and becomes self-aware.
Soon she starts to experience the wonder and whimsy of life, and grows to question her place in the world. It may not hit the emotional depths of Kore-eda’s greatest works, but it’s good to see him conjure a lighter and more playful story than usual, whilst Bae is atypically mesmeric. Mannequin this is not, with a lot more than just hot air beneath the surface.
Still Walking
This is pure Ozu right here, with Kore-eda conveying the quiet complexity of family dysfunction and a cultural adherence to traditions above resolutions. Subtly observational and authentic, but skillfully melodramatic.
Kore-eda’s drama is organic, often striking the perfect balance each film (and character) requires. This type of Ozu-esque family drama is perhaps the path most well trodden by Kore-eda, and like the master, he can drift equally comfortably between heart-wrenching or life-affirming films with ease. Like few others, he can meld the two poles in a single film to beautifully affirm the nature of life’s ups and downs.
The Third Murder
This might rank as one of Kore-eda’s more underrated films and something that feels more at home in the wheelhouse of Kiyoshi Kurosawa. The Third Murder is a gripping and occasionally intense crime drama about a man (Koji Yakusho) convicted of killing a factory president.
Somewhere between Memories of Murder and Primal Fear, it’s not so much a whodunit as a did he do it/why. Yakusho’s character journey is mesmerising, and his enigma challenges the lawyer tasked with uncovering the reasoning and truth behind the murder, which could determine whether or not a death sentence will result. The more the case unfolds, the more we realise it’s less a procedural piece, and more an intense character study about the guilty man, and the lawyer driven to find answers to perhaps the unanswerable.
Shoplifters
Back to a film on family dynamics, which takes a deeper look into the nature and meaning of family. As with some of his previous works, Kore-eda offers up affable protagonists who are incredibly misguided.
On the surface, somewhat bright and breezy, this has a band of miscreants who outwardly look like a three-generational family on the margins, but are in fact a collective of outliers. Whether some have been manipulated into this life by Osamu (Lily Franky) starts to get a little clearer as the film progresses, even if his duplicity isn’t always from a place of malignance. The young stars in the film are endearing, and Sakura Ando (Godzilla: Minus One) is superb as the assigned ‘mother’ of the gang of thieves. This merry band inevitably meet harsh reality and consequence, and the film will hit you in the feels like you’ve taken a haymaker from prime, Tyson. It’s a masterpiece.
Kore-eda also made an effective, almost demi-follow-up, with his Korean-made Broker (which saw him re-team with Doona Bae). It’s also excellent with similarly morally obtuse themes and affable rogues (headed by Song Kang-ho).
Monster
The most recent film in Kore-eda’s CV saw another shift that melded some of his previous themes and topics into a beautifully constructed Rashomon-esque film about differing perspectives. It begins with a troubled young child whose erratic behaviour leads to an eventual ‘confession’ to his worried single mother (Sakura Ando, again) that he’s been physically assaulted and verbally abused by his teacher.
As she strives for answers and action, she’s met with frustrating cultural evasiveness, systemic failures of the education system and a potentially disturbing truth that her son is hiding a darker side. As Kore-eda shifts through his three acts, showing us different sides each time, uncovering more, he looks deeper into social constructs/attitudes and traditional values, gender dynamics and much more. This film gets better with every viewing, so rich in commentary but at its heart, powered by compelling characters, deft writing (again, show don’t tell) and immense performances from Ando and the two youngsters in particular. It should also be noted that Ruichi Sakamoto’s score, one of his last before his untimely death, is as masterful as Kore-eda’s film. It’s a beautiful work.
Monster simply reinforces that few filmmakers have the power to hit the bitter and sweet so powerfully within the same film, as Hirokazu Kore-eda.
What’s your favourite Hirokazu Kore-eda film? Let us know on our social channels @FlickeringMyth…
Tom Jolliffe
