By Kohinoor Dasgupta
(Originally published on August 8, 2011, in my blog Draupadiarjun)
The director of Still Walking (Aruitemo aruitemo) (2008), is the acclaimed and articulate Hirokazu Kore-eda. This film has been so well liked that he has had to talk and talk about it. So we know why he made it, how we are supposed to read the characters and all the details we mustn’t miss. It’s a great wonder and relief then to find in his film a language that surpasses all the explanations. Still Walking is simply brilliant and says, 'Here I am, still open to discovery; I am still walking.’
On a memorial day for their eldest son, Junpei, the Yokoyamas have visitors. Daughter Chinami has arrived with her husband and two children. The other son, Ryo, arrives with his wife Yukari and her son (from her first marriage) Atsushi.
It’s a Saturday afternoon; in early evening Yoshio will stop by for his annual guilt payback: he was the (un)fortunate kid (he’s twenty-five now) whom Junpei died saving, more than a dozen years ago. But unlike Jason of The Rabbit Hole, Yoshio hasn’t been let off the hook by the mother of the person whose death he unintentionally caused.
Chinami and her family drive away as evening falls. Ryo, Yukari and Atsushi stay the night, and depart mid morning on Sunday.
The film begins with the scraping of a daikon and the comment "Radishes are genius”. The two women in the kitchen are sharply distinguished by attire (the costumes were designed by Kazuko Kurosawa), voice, manner and appearance. Kirin Kiki plays Toshiko, the mother. The fragile-looking You is Chinami, everything about her immediately dating and deglamorizing her mother. Even the fact that Toshiko has expended so much time and energy cooking up a grand feast dates her: few women today will do this, cooking from scratch, no semi-homemade, and paying scrupulous attention to traditional recipes - unless they are highly paid professional chefs.
Arsenic is mixed with Toshiko’s expressions of love, and making food for her family has been one of her enduring expressions of love. For nearly fifty years she’s been married to Dr. Yokoyama, who believes and publicly declares that Toshiko doesn’t have “one delicate bone in her body”. Certainly she comes across as rustic in her looks and ways as compared to her daughter and her daughter-in-law; however, people are never really that easily slotted. There’s a flower arrangement on the shoe rack that her "precious plant”-loving husband does not see. "Cut into it, cut into it!” she orders, in her unmodulated voice at Chinami, when the younger woman jabs at the cooked rice. Unobtrusively, she picks up a blossom that Satsuki, her grand-daughter, had brought home, and puts it in a glass filled with water.
Ryo finds it "creepy” to imagine that his withered mother listens to old romantic songs when she’s alone at home … as a looker-on you wonder why we so resent people, even our mothers, popping out of the neat little boxes we placed them in. It’s one of the uncomfortable moments of the reunion when Toshiko insists on listening to one such song, Blue Light Yokohama, at the dinner table, in the presence of her husband and Ryo and his family.
Toshiko has a spiteful hidden agenda, but at the time we still don’t know it. She just listens to the song and sings along and everyone is uncomfortable. But it’s not really her, is it? Some families would simply hum along with gusto, or giggle together and the moment would pass happily, and the mother wouldn’t appear odd, an outsider in her own home. The doctor, of course, stays put on his high horse about classical and more refined music, at least in public (we hear soon that he wasn’t quite so particular in private, once upon a time), and the lugubrious son has chalked up enough mental miles away from his parents to find it within himself to ease the tension. Only young Atsushi gets the innocent humor of the moment.
One of the bonuses of the DVD is an interview with the movie’s cinematographer, Yataka Yamazaki, who has decades of experience in documentary film making. He talks about how his filming takes into account things outside of the frame. As a result of the artistic collaboration between Kore-eda and Yamazaki, we get this film of perfect images, exploring the inside-outside dynamics of moments and emotions and experiences. Their work goes way beyond, say, taking into account the outdoors, while most of the family is gathered around the lunch tables indoors. At family reunions or even among friends, our sense belonging to the group is prone to waxing and waning. Now you belong, now you don’t. Only the very unimaginative have no doubts at all.
The powerful language of this film is constructed with juxtapositions of this sort. Images, body language, the interiors, people positioned like chess pieces in the frames, the gravesite, Tokyo Bay, the red train, the elderly neighbor sweeping her curbside on the day she possibly dies, the yellow butterflies that make Toshiko’s heart ache (why?), the sight of the diminutive mother and her tall, slightly stooping son, the woman almost obliterated outside her little domain, but not letting go of her spite - even after visiting Junpei’s grave - Toshiko washing her dentures while griping about her talker son-in-law, all compose a slice of life. The only scene that was jarring for me was the ambulance one.
Like the steps people keep climbing and descending in the film, generations queue up in the walk of life that never stops. During their return from Junpei’s gravesite, Toshiko and Ryo walk slowly together; ahead of them, Yukari and Atsushi mirror the same umbilical bond. The dead son occupies an unassailable perfect position in the parents’ hearts. Ryo struggles to keep up – but he does not understand that they love him too, although his reality cannot be as spectacular as Junpei’s myth. Yoshio’s ordeal attracts no one’s sympathy but Ryo’s. "His body just keeps growing. There’s no point in his being alive,” says the good doctor. Even the seemingly easy-going Chinami criticizes the young man’s appetite. Would the sight of Yoshio be less offensive to the family if he were slim or a doctor? We wonder. Can forgiveness be related to physical appearance and status? Can anyone’s life be worthless? This kind of grim humor runs through the film. Yet life, with joy, love and irony built in, seeps out of all the habitual resentments and unfairness.
"The lights of the city are so pretty Yokohama, Blue Light Yokohama I'm happy with you Please let me hear Yokohama, Blue Light Yokohama Those words of love from you I walk and walk, swaying Like a small boat in your arms I hear your footsteps coming Yokohama, Blue Light Yokohama Give me one more tender kiss I walk and walk, swaying Like a small boat in your arms The scent of your favorite cigarettes Yokohama, Blue Light Yokohama This will always be our world."
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