After the Storm -- Movie Review

After the Storm

Directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda

This film is an intimate depiction of modern life in Japan.  I've had a long interest in Japanese language and culture, so I liked it.  It was sensitively made and held my interest all the way through.  I didn't like any of the characters, however, although the ex-wife, (Yoko Maki), is very attractive.  Not a lot happens in this film.  It is very domestic, but it has substance and intensity.  The mundane details of everyday life can contain a lot of subtle drama.  The lead character is a gambler, and gamblers are destructive, unappealing people.  They are also very hard people to save.  The ex wife is rightly determined that they must move on, and the incipient reunion that is precipitated by being caught at the mother-in-law's residence when the typhoon hits does not take root. 

I would say the prospects are not good for Ryota (Hiroshi Abe) or for the fragile truce that seems to settled upon this family by the end of the film (after the storm).  What I liked about the film is that the characters are not presented in a necessarily sympathetic light.  There are no heroes and no one that you can feel altogether good about, including the grandmother, who is portrayed as a wise old counselor of sorts, who is trying to give the family one more chance at reconciliation.  But she is not very good with men, as evidenced by the fates of her husband and son, and she recognizes this, at one point admitting that she never understood her now deceased husband.  In another place she says that she has never loved anyone in her whole life.  This is why her son became a gambler, but I won't explain it.  Gamblers are people who are trying to still a small voice in the depths of their hearts that is telling them that no one will ever love them.  They can never quell it convincingly, no matter how successful they might appear to be, or in fact become.  This is why they are compelled from the depths of their hearts to continue to play games that are set up for them to lose. 

These are flawed people, struggling, confused, trying to sort out how their lives became so unlike what they expected.  They are disappointed, but at the same time, sturdy.  They understand the importance of dreams and how dreams are the internal drivers of people's lives, but external realities mold and shape and often derail these dreams.   The unconvincing aspect of this story is the portrayal of Ryota as a successful novelist.  I don't quite buy that somehow.  That doesn't seem to work in his character, but he does seem well suited to the private detective role.  I didn't follow all of the subplots regarding his detective work.  There were several people whom he followed and investigated and had dealings with, which I think were intended to mirror to some extent his own circumstances.  I lost the thread of some of this.  I got confused as to who was who, but I attribute it to my inadequacies in the language and perhaps not being familiar with the culture.  The film is in Japanese with subtitles, but sometimes the subtitles go by a little quickly.  If you're interested in Japan or the Japanese, this is a well made presentation of the everyday life dramas and concerns of Japanese people.