Ryota é um escritor e chegou a publicar um romance de sucesso. Como as letras não lhe garantem subsistência, exerce o ofício de detetive particular. Pratica atividades sórdidas, como vigiar esposas infiéis e fornecer provas aos maridos traídos por ocasião dos divórcios. Ryota está separado de uma mulher adorável e tem um filho, que vê de vez em quando. Ryota também tem uma mãe idosa, que se preocupa, com certa dose de razão, com o futuro do filho. Ryota bebe e é viciado no jogo. Nada tem de exemplar. Nem tampouco de criminoso. É um homem com defeitos.
Eis aí um pequeno drama familiar, sem nada de ostensivo nem espetacular. Ele culmina quando a família desfeita se reúne na casa da matriarca para um almoço e lá passa a noite por causa de uma tormenta. O “Depois da Tempestade” do título alude ao tornado que se abate sobre a costa japonesa, produzindo destruição mas, neste caso particular, simplesmente reunindo durante uma única noite uma família que estava separada.
É um tanto difícil descrever um filme de Kore-Eda a partir da trama. Contam mais os pequenos gestos, as cenas mínimas do que um enredo. As palavras, aqui, são simplicidade e despojamento. Quem já experimentou a arte, seja fazendo-a seja fruindo-a, sabe que é muito díficil, e exige muito trabalho, atingir o simples. Fazer complicado é fácil, porque apenas reproduz as dificuldades da vida.
Pai e filho. Ryota é um escritor que tem dificuldade para pagar a pensão do garoto
O grande artista que opta pela simplicidade consegue depurar sua arte, reduzindo seu projeto a elementos mínimos, sem, no entanto, aplainar as contradições e complexidades próprias da experiência humana. O complicado está no simples, mas isso é para poucos. É para quem consegue reduzir uma figura humana a poucos traços, sem por isso aviltá-la.
Outro tipo de cineasta poderia impor grandes traços descritivos para apresentar a fascinante mãe de Ryota. Kore-Eda apenas a mostra em seu cotidiano, na maneira minuciosa como cozinha, rega as plantas do terraço, fala de suas recordações, conta como frequenta as aulas de música clássica, etc. Um cotidiano de idosa, jamais empobrecido por eufemismos do tipo “melhor idade” etc. Há nesses gestos uma profunda meditação sobre a vida, a morte, o sentido da existência (ou sua falta de sentido, se preferirem), o que sobra no presente das nossas lembranças no passado, etc.
Tudo isso colocando a velhice e a finitude humana em confronto com uma jovem família, talvez desfeita, talvez não, mas que tem, como se diz, a vida diante de si. Ryota é esse personagem da dúvida, da hesitação, que flerta um pouco com o caos, ao contrário da ex-esposa adorável, de gestos serenos, com os cabelos arrumados, sem um fio fora do lugar.
Nesse tipo de cinema tudo significa, pois o espectador intui que o casamento se desfez porque a esposa muito centrada não combinava com o caráter errático de Ryota. No entanto, como dizia Drummond, de tudo sobra um pouco. De um grande amor, sobra talvez muita coisa, mas isso ficará por conta do espectador especular.
Esse filme gentil e profundo ao mesmo tempo é também construído com leveza e humor. Em sua linguagem cinematográfica, Kore-Eda espelha esse despojamento de que fala a história. Não há plano ou movimento de câmera que seja excessivo ou ostentatório. Tudo está lá para dizer o máximo com o mínimo de recursos.
Grande arte, que se disfarça de pequena.
Fonte: http://cultura.estadao.com.br/noticias/cinema,em-depois-da-tempestade-hirokazu-kore-eda-opta-pela-simplicidade,10000084123
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Hirokazu Kore-eda: ‘They compare me to Ozu. But I’m more like Ken Loach’
The Japanese auteur talks about his Cannes-competition drama Our Little Sister, absences in families, and his TV-movie and fast-food childhood
When I meet the Japanese auteur Hirokazu Kore–eda, it is in a shady and pleasant Cannes garden, where he sits next to his interpreter, through whom questions and answers must be channelled: a set-up that creates an unmistakably courtly atmosphere of reverence – not inappropriate.
We meet after the premiere of his latest film, Our Little Sister. It is a drama of sweetness and delicacy derived from the manga Umimachi Diary by Akimi Yoshida, about three adult sisters who have lived together in a house belonging to their grandmother after their parents’ divorce, and who agree to take responsibility for their 13-year-old half-sister after their father’s death.
This is another of the heartfelt, painful “family dramas” in which Kore-eda now seems to specialise – such as the baby-swap film Like Father, Like Son (2013), I Wish (2011), in which two young siblings live apart after their parents’ marital breakdown, Still Walking (2008), in which a family is tormented by the loss of a son killed saving another boy from drowning and, indeed, Nobody Knows (2004), in which a 12-year-old kid has to look after his younger siblings when their mother walks out. The pathos and poignancy has led Kore-eda to be compared to the great master Yasujiro Ozu. I have loved Kore-eda’s work since I saw his strange cult movie After Life (1998), about an imaginary place in which we can choose our happiest memory, and live in it for ever after we die.
I ask Kore-eda about the importance of absences in families: the painful gaps. “I loved making a story about this,” he replies. “It is important to have a story about a family with some family members missing. But someone else is there, trying to take over the role of parents. They try to reconstruct that family bond. I love that sort of story. It affects me a lot.”
He goes on to explain that creating and filling gaps is what families are all about: “In the last 15 years, I lost my father, I lost my mother and I have a daughter. I have become a father. So I have realised that we always try to get ‘in between’. Something is missing, so we always try to take over. From the older generation to the next generation.”
I ask about his own family, and his siblings – two older sisters growing up in 60s and 70s Tokyo. Did his parents like cinema? Kore-eda’s eyes light up. “My mother loved films! She adored Ingrid Bergman, Joan Fontaine, Vivien Leigh. We couldn’t afford to go together to the cinema, but she was always watching their movies on TV. She stopped all family business or discussions to watch these movies. We would watch together. So I adored film – like her.”
I ventured to say that his mother must have been delighted when he told her that he wanted to be a movie director. At this idea, Kore-eda laughs and shakes his head. “No. My mother was really against it when I said I wanted to make films. She said that I should be a civil servant. Because that was safe, and it had security. But my mother was always very proud of my movies, and would give videocassettes of them to all the neighbours.”
And how about his father, I ask. Kore-eda’s smile is replaced with a sombre expression. “My father did not have a lot of security in his life. He did odd jobs. He had a real struggle to make money. He lost a lot of time in his 20s, after the war, because he was sent to a forced-labour camp in Siberia.” Kore-eda’s father was a soldier in the Kwantung army in the Japanese puppet state of Manchuria, defeated by Soviet forces in August 1945, a catastrophe for Japan that, almost as much as Hiroshima, hastened the surrender. Despite this formal capitulation, the Soviets treated captured troops as PoWs rather than civilian internees: Kore-eda Sr was one of approximately 500,000 men sent to labour camps. About a tenth of them died out there, and they were not all finally released until the early 1950s. “When he was drunk,” says Kore-eda quietly, “he would always tell us how horrible the Russians were.”
I ask how he reacts to being compared to Yasujiro Ozu. “I of course take it as a compliment,” he replies carefully. “I try to say thank you. But I think that my work is more like Mikio Naruse [the Japanese director of sombre working-class dramas] – and Ken Loach.”
I can’t resist asking about After Life, and how perplexingly difficult I found it to think of a truly “heavenly” memory in which I might want to spend eternity. Kore-eda smiles and shakes his head a little: “If you can’t choose, it means that you are still alive. Choose, and you’re dead.”
I mention that my favourite line in his works is said by the amiable slacker dad in I Wish: “Not everything has to be significant. Imagine if everything had meaning. You would choke!” It’s a sublime aesthetic credo. Is he aware of attaching significance to detail in his films?
“Details are important in a very small and subtle way,” he says. “In Our Little Sister, food is important: for example, when the women speak about the plum wine and the white fish.”
What food did his mother serve Kore-eda and his sisters? “We used to have prawn tempura: that was my mother’s favourite dish. But she had to go out to work, instead of my father, so she couldn’t find the time to cook nice meals. So we ate more modern food: a lot of frozen and instant food. But I never complained about it to my mother.” It occurs to me that Kore-eda is painting a picture of his home life that is rather different from the formal Ozu-esque poise of his films: the Kore-edas sitting on the couch, eating a ready meal, watching a Joan Fontaine movie on TV.
But, as Kore-eda says when talking about the incidental details in films, you always have to focus what lies beneath: “What are the characters really talking about?” he says. “Not wine or food … but family.”
Fonte: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/may/21/hirokazu-kore-director-our-little-sister-interview
Fonte: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/may/21/hirokazu-kore-director-our-little-sister-interview
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Hirokazu Koreeda is a master of cinema. One of Japan’s foremost auteurs, Koreeda is not interested in creating heroes to star in melodramatic blockbusters. Instead, he excels at capturing the lyrical and poetic elements in everyday life. Often praised for his humanist approach to cinema, Koreeda is consistently willing to provide a platform for traumatized characters, to whom the audience can relate. Here are ten Koreeda movies every film lover should see.
August Without Him (1994)
After studying Literature at Waseda University in Tokyo, Koreeda embarked on a career making documentaries for Japanese television. His background, therefore, has hugely shaped his approach to film-making. Most of Koreeda’s fictional films are rooted in true stories and personal experiences. The acting is always naturalistic, while his films are paced slowly to allow him to explore the characters’ psyche in greater detail and lucidity. The focal point of this documentary is Hirata Yukata, notable for being the first man in Japan to come out as HIV-positive. As an aspiring filmmaker, it was documentaries like August Without Him that made Koreeda realize how inauthentic his scripts were. So the medium of documentary had a profound effect on how Koreeda would later depict characters in film.
Maborosi (1995)
Maborosi is Koreeda’s first dramatic feature film, a visual lyrical poem and a contemplative reflection on loss. The central character Yumiko, is haunted by the death of her grandmother as revealed in a dream sequence at the beginning of the film. Nevertheless, she appears to be living a blissful life with her husband Ikuo. One day this is all brought to a halt by a knock on the door. The police reveal that Ikuo has committed suicide by walking on the tracks towards a moving train. So the focus of Maborosi is Yumiko’s grieving process, as she tries to fathom what caused this inexplicable suicide.
There is hardly any dialogue in Maborosi, instead the audience are immersed into her world. Yumiko’s emotions are clearly hard for her to convey coherently to us. Consequently, it is left to the incredible cinematography to reflect her state of mind. Koreeda decides to use only natural light in the film, so the scenes are often dark. The long, lingering shots of the Japanese landscape makes the world look vast and empty. Furthermore, the constant sound effects during the film convey her futile attempts to find peace. Everything is dark. There is no silence. There is no escape. Maborosi is a serene and poignant work of art.
After Life (1998)
The recently deceased find themselves in purgatory, a realm that seems to resemble a bureaucratic office. Social workers command each dead person to select a memory to keep for eternity. Once chosen, the workers transform into filmmakers, as they go about condensing the memory into a short film. Although the premise is steeped in fantasy, the film itself exudes realism and pragmatism. There are no fancy special effects, instead After Life is shot like a documentary with Koreeda using a hand-held camera. The vast majority of the film consists of interviews, whereby people with no prior acting experience were invited by Koreeda to reminisce about their own lives in front of a camera. It is an intelligent and moving film, compelling the audience to venture into their own bank of memories.
Distance (2001)
Distance, nominated for the Golden Palm award at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, focuses on the aftermath of a massacre by an apocalyptic religious cult. On the 3rd anniversary of the tragedy, four friends convene at a lake where the ashes of their loved ones are scattered. It is here where they encounter the sole survivor of the cult, who absconded just before the massacre. He gives them a tour round the religious sect’s headquarters and the characters are forced to confront their overwhelming feeling of loss as well as shame. Distance is interspersed with recollections, flashbacks and long, unbroken shots instilling a meditative tone to the proceedings. Ultimately, the film poses the question: can the characters put a distance between themselves and their loved one’s incomprehensible act of violence?
Nobody Knows (2004)
Nobody Knows is about a four young siblings muddling through their adolescence after their single mother abruptly leaves without any warning. Based on a true story, the children are forced to fend for themselves in their cramped Tokyo apartment. It is rare in cinema in general to see a film that portrays a child’s view of the adult world with such aplomb as Koreeda does here. It is heartbreaking gritty realism, with the unobtrusive camera work allowing the story to unfold. Nobody Knows slowly and tenderly paints a devastating portrait of the children’s lives blighted by parental neglect. Koreeda’s intense and empathetic portrayal led to the main actor Yûya Yagira winning the best actor at 2004 Cannes Film Festival – at the age of 14.
Hana (2006)
A slight divergence by Koreeda here as Hana is a period drama about a young samurai in 18th century Japan. However, in typical Koreeda fashion, this is an offbeat samurai film that shuns many of the traditional elements associated with the genre. For example, there is hardly any sword fighting at all in Hana. The main character, Aoki Sozaemon, is not a stereotypical samurai. He is an amiable but meek warrior trying his best to avenge the murder of his father. However, he is not bloodthirsty and struggles with his reluctance to carry out his mission. Koreeda humanizes the samurai, as Sozaemon starts to question his true essence. Koreeda deserves great credit for his originality, making a fresh contribution to what is a well-worn genre.
Still Walking (2008)
‘Still walking, on and on. But I only sway like a little boat’.
The title of the film is lifted from the lyrics of a romantic song called Blue Light Yokohama. The lyrics, heard in the film, takes on an extra poetic meaning in the context of this tragicomedy. The audience are introduced to the Yokoyama family, who come together every year to commemorate the death of the elder son Junpei. He drowned in the sea while saving a boy over a decade ago. There is no melodrama nor hysteria in the film. Instead, it is an understated and yet touching depiction of a family shaped by a tragic event. The naturalistic performances are compelling, with every action and every line utilized to revealing the inner psyche of the characters. Hirokazu has commented on how the film – a direct response to the death of his mother – was an important stepping stone in his career. This is because he was struck by the realization that deeply personal films can actually be extremely resonant. Indeed, there is no measured sense of objectivity in this film. Its sentimental attributes help everyone relate to Still Walking.
Air Doll (2009)
Air Doll is based on the manga series Kuuki Ningyo by Yoshiie Gōda. In the film, a sex toy called Nozomi, played by Bae Doona, somehow magically comes to life. She seeks to immerse herself in new experiences, while trying to make sense of this peculiar world. Nozomi enjoys the sensation of the rain, marvels at babies and gets a job at a video store. Here she forms a relationship with co-worker Junichi. This premise is ripe for exploration on many themes such as alienation, loneliness and feminism – executed with a deft touch by master Koreeda.
I Wish (2011)
Hirokazu manages to expertly capture the essence of childhood in this charming film. Starring real life brothers, Koki and Oshiro Maeda, the two protagonists are geographically separated because of their belligerent parents. The brothers latch onto this idea that if present at the moment when two bullet trains pass each other – at very high speed – then they will be able to have their wishes granted. The brothers take refuge in this miracle, sweetly believing this will save their parent’s marriage. Thematically, the film reflects on childhood dreams and revels in their innate wide-eyed innocence. Ultimately I Wish becomes a pre-teen adventure, as the brothers embark on a pastoral journey with their friends to uncover this miracle.
Like Father, Like Son (2013)
Ryota, an affluent father, has been bringing up Keita very strictly with his wife for six years. Yet they receive incomprehensible news that Keita is not their biological son. He was accidentally mixed up with Ryusei at birth and given to the wrong parents. Consequently, two families from different social classes are forced to come together and make some difficult choices. Koreeda was influenced by his own experience of fatherhood, observing his initial lack of a strong emotional bond with his daughter when she was born. There are many interesting themes in this acclaimed film, such as the nature versus nurture argument, as the two families ponder over whether they should switch the children back. Furthermore, the film provides an intriguing commentary on Japan’s changing attitudes towards fatherhood. For example, Ryota, a detached workaholic, embodies old-fashioned conservative Japan whereby the father’s main role was to solely provide for their family. This is in contrast to the other father, Yudai, who is deeply involved in Ryusei’s life.
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