"Our Little Sister" is "Still Walking" Through Some Delightful Films

Dear reading friends,

Much to my sincere surprise and pleasure, I have discovered something about babies that works very strongly to our shared advantage: they sleep a lot.

Specifically, they sleep a lot on their parents, gluing said parents to couches and other sittable surfaces, often with at best only one hand free and nothing but time to kill...

...thus creating basically perfect circumstances under which to watch movies?!  Like I'm basically being held hostage by baby naps and my only recourse is all the movies.  And this was true even before staying the hell inside was our civic duty and an overall wise, appropriately cautious thing to do.

I have thereby wildly, dare I say obscenely?, contradicted my earlier concerns about not being able to watch movies.  As long as one is okay with watching films in many many small, irregular-length segments, one can blow through quite a lot of cinema.

While I was first wading into the waters of all of the movies, I was a bit haphazard in what I would watch.  Many of my selections were just the stuff that was available on whatever streaming service I happened to be browsing.

But then, realizing that this hostage situation may be ongoing for some time (and again, ever exacerbated by the current pandemic), I decided to get more strategic.  I started digging around for curated lists of movies to work through.

At first, I defaulted to general "best movies of all time" lists, only to promptly realize that the vast majority of these "greatest" films were profoundly white- and male-centric, making them a bit tiresome.  That rigidly consistent and limited point of view leads to repetitive narratives and a narrowing-down of what movies are capable of.  There are some major exceptions to that overall tiresomeness, of course, but those lists just weren't making it feel like my suddenly abundant movie-watching time was being optimally spent.  There is so much more out there!

So instead, I very happily turned to the following lists, which I have been using as guidance in my movie feast for a few weeks now:

An overall list of the best international and art house films of all time
A list of the best independent films of the last decade (which includes international films)
A list of the best international films of the last decade
A list of the best French films of all time
A list of films shot by female cinematographers

One of the most delightful discoveries I've happened upon during this personal festival of films is the work of Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda.  I have now watched five of his movies, and I want to tell you about two of them.

Those two are:

"Aruitemo Aruitemo", or "Still Walking" (2008)

and

"Umimachi Diary", or "Our Little Sister" (2015)

A quick practical note: In this post, I'll be referring to these films using their anglicized titles.  I'm making that arguably fraught choice because, in my experience, these are the titles under which these films tend to be listed when searching from America.  I would otherwise prefer to use their original Japanese titles, but I also want to ensure that anyone in the States unfamiliar with these movies is able to find and enjoy them.  Actually, after striking out attempting to find "Aruitemo Aruitemo" and/or "Still Walking" by searching for the movie by name, I found that the most effective way to find these movies was to search for the director, which on Roku does not include the hyphen (so, "Hirokazu Koreeda").  It's obviously problematic that these adjustments are required to access his work.

And now, a little preamble that I swear is relevant: one of my favorite books is Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.  I love that book so much because of the complexity and richness of its interpersonal narrative; it is packed with so many characters whose lives you follow for years, watching them grow and change and interact.  In many ways it feels like such a quiet story, simply because its focus is expressed in its tantalizing and inviting opening sentence: Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.  Of course a psychologist would love a book setting that fact forth as its premise.

As I love Anna Karenina, so I love Hirokazu Kore-eda's "Still Walking" and "Our Little Sister".

So much of what I find intoxicating about these films is how startlingly yet blissfully authentic they feel.  Most of Kore-eda's films spend ample time in his character's homes--time that feels deeply intimate, because the homes look actually lived in.  They are not perfectly curated and decorated, but are instead a bit utilitarian and a bit cluttered, creating a pleasurable sense of trust, non-pretension, veracity, and intimacy, like you’re being invited into someone’s actual home.

"Still Walking"

"Our Little Sister"

As families stroll about their neighborhoods, either to visit a loved one’s grave site or go to the beach, you can almost feel the heat of the sun bouncing off the bleached white walls of the buildings they pass eased by the delicious breeze that flutters the leaves on the trees.

"Still Walking"

"Our Little Sister"

The dialogue, and the drama that hinges on it, is written and delivered quietly.  There are only rare moments of intense emotion, and even these are restrained--no shouting, no hysterics, no drama reliant only on volume to let you know that it's drama.  Characters make little jokes, talk about their lives, share their hopes, emotions, and memories, all with a lived-in nuance that is a lovely mirror to the lived-in environments they inhabit.

All of this provides a beautiful canvas on which Kore-eda creates studies in the tradition of Tolstoy: close, subtle, thoughtful, and surprisingly affecting studies of families.  He appears particularly interested in the changed dynamics of parenting and family relationships post-divorce, the often unspoken tensions, pain, distance, disappointments, and yet enduring affections between parents and their adult children, and the wistfulness of grief over the current or anticipated loss of aging matriarchs and patriarchs.

"Still Walking"

"Our Little Sister"

Through this complex emotional territory, there is almost an innocence to Kore-eda's films that makes them easier and gentler.  Especially in these two films, there is no nudity, violence, or vulgarity.  These stories are sustained simply on the merits of their veracity and focus on the everyday lives of families.  "Still Walking" covers only a brief overnight visit to aging parents while "Our Little Sisters" spans months, yet both films deeply endear and attach you to the people they introduce you to.

"Still Walking"

"Our Little Sister"

I am so grateful to have discovered and deeply enjoyed these films.  I gave them both a 5!

In closing, a matter of housekeeping: Because I'm so happy to have gotten to see so many movies recently AND I'm trying to ensure that I'm able to keep up with writing for this blog, I'm going to try writing very brief reviews of movies--maybe 1-3 paragraphs--so I have the chance to share my thoughts on more of them.  I'm really going to be wrestling with my perfectionism here, as this will limit my ability to say all the things and also might require a loosening of my expectations for including photos and just-so formatting (translation: I will be working on not writing only posts like this one, although I obviously enjoy writing them very much!).  This will therefore be both an opportunity to write about more films, which is exciting, but also to put my money where my mouth is with some tolerating-imperfection exposures.  Especially during this ugly and frightening era we're enduring, it's important to give ourselves permission to be a bit messy so we can focus on finding beauty and joy where it nevertheless remains.

{Heart}