Hirokazu Kore-eda is one of the few filmmakers in the world who’s not afraid of either beauty, happiness or the full range of human feeling. He avoids cynicism, yet at the same time, he never goes for the saccharine or falls into cheap nostalgia. The result in his latest film, Our Little Sister, is a picture of four sisters that feels inclusive and confident. From the surprising opening shot of the second sister’s bare foot – she’s asleep in bed with her boyfriend – you know that you’re in the hands of a masterful director.
Three sisters live in their grandmother’s home. It’s a welcoming wooden house in a traditional Japanese style that sits outside the unidentified city, surrounded by trees and plants. Kore-eda films the interiors in the spare, elegant style of the great YasujiroOzu – the camera low to the floor, the sisters sitting on pillows, and no face-on close-up’s, which Ozu found rude and confrontational. Kore-eda shoots symmetrical, elegantly still images. It feels organic and connected to the past, but not enslaved to the past.
The young women have jobs in town – the oldest is a nurse, the next a bank teller, the youngest sells shoes in a sporting goods store. The three learn that their father – long estranged from them – has died, and that they have a half-sister, Suzu, who is 15 and still wearing middy blouses, knee socks and skirts. She comes to live with them, and life changes for all four. But the changes are modest – Kore-eda is not interested in cataclysms. Like Ozu, Kore-eda observes the quiet shifts when in the course of things something happens within a family. There’s no alien abduction, no robbery, no terrorist attack – just the death of a father and the appearance of a new young girl.
Our Little Sister isn’t about the clash of the modern and the traditional; it’s more about the continuation between past and present, and the enduring fact of change. HirokazuKore-eda works out of the spare traditional style of Ozu – he loves the unhurried camera, the balance of objects, and the trains that run near the house. At the same time, the situations, the locations and the emotional quandaries are of the world now, not Ozu’s world then. The father and the mother of these children divorced – an event less known in the past. The father went one way and the mother another, and slowly you come to understand the power of the fact that the three older sisters were abandoned by both parents, and they’ve raised themselves in this place. Resentment flows below the surface of their lives. In the manners of their society, deeper feelings are kept for rare moments.
Kore-eda is an observant filmmaker, and a great director of young actors. At Suzu’s school, the kids stand in front of big posters hung on the wall with information about classes. The teenagers have all the twitchy, goofy mannerisms of kids on the first day of school. Suzu is interested in a young boy with spiky, unruly hair and a face possessed by his first taste of desire, and he dithers without the foggiest idea of what to do with it or how to express it. Kore-eda has the sisters glide imperceptibly into formal compositions that make you think of Cezanne and Picasso.
The real joy – and the heart – of Our Little Sister, though, is Suzu Hirose, the radiant actress who plays the little sister. In a soccer game, she runs with intense determination. She comes out of a shower, wrapped in a pure white towel. With her back to the camera she walks deliberately to the porch of the house, turns on a fan and opens the towel to feel the air on her body. When the second sister – who is no prude – comes along and hustles Suzu back indoors, Suzu turns and smiles with the look of someone completely satisfied with herself, unafraid and just uninhibited enough to glory in this moment.
