This film is the official submission from Japan to the 91st Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film. It won the Palme d'Or at the 71st Cannes Film Festival where it premiered. It's critically acclaimed. In fact, it's in the top ten of highest rated movies, according to Metacritic. It's been showing up at several award shows, including being nominated at the 76th Golden Globes. It made the Academy's December shortlist and most likely will get the nomination come January. Japan has a long tradition of being recognized by the Academy going all the way back to Akira Kurosawa's
Rashômon (1951). The country's last appearance at the Oscars was exactly ten years ago at the 81st Academy Awards when Yōjirō Takita's
Departures (Okuribito) won Best Foreign Language Film. Writer-director Hirokazu Koreeda is a filmmaker who has been quietly celebrated internationally for the past five years now. If this film is nominated, it would be his first appearance at the Oscars and a lot of people believe that he's due.
I have been a fan of Koreeda for five years since I saw his film
Like Father, Like Son (2014) and I also really liked his recent film
After the Storm (2017). I have not been a true fan in that I've seen a large body of his work. I certainly haven't seen everything he's done. I've now only seen three of his films, but I find it funny that this will be the film that gets him or his country an Oscar nomination when I think that it's at least the lesser of the aforementioned films by him. It's not that I think this is a bad film. I honestly don't think Koreeda is capable of producing a bad film. It's simply that I wasn't as engaged by this film as I were some of his previous.
Such as many of Koreeda's films, this one is about family. It focuses on family dynamics, the relationships therein and how certain families can manifest themselves. It focuses on how they can break up and how they can come back together. Orientation and feelings within families and among family members whether related by blood or not are things Koreeda have dealt with previously. He does so again here. Typically, the families in his films aren't rich or wealthy. Often times, they're barely middle class. The families in his films are poor or impoverished in some way, or they're low on the economic spectrum. Again, that's the case here.
Koreeda remains on the scale of domestic dramas most of the time. He does so here, but arguably this film could be described as a crime film as well. It's about a group of people who may or may not be related by blood, but generally they're a makeshift family. The difference is that the family here is a family of crooks and scam artists.
There have been films about criminals, heist films that delight in the crimes. In those films, it's all about the cleverness and how smart or how intricate a criminal's plan has to be against something that seems impossible in order to accomplish the crime. This film isn't about how clever or how amazing these people are in their thefts or scams.
Sometimes, these crime films are about the economic disparities, corporate corruption or unbridled capitalism. There were even two films this year,
Where's Kyra and
Can You Ever Forgive Me, that are about how women of a certain type can struggle in the workforce for various reasons and are pushed toward criminal acts like fraud. Sometimes, these crime films can shed light on the difficulties of certain minority or oppressed groups like women or black people. Otherwise, the crime film can just expose the pitfalls of poverty in general.
I suppose that's what Koreeda is trying to do here. I thought the film was going to be how families on the fringe have to band together in order to survive. One character here even wears a shirt that reads, "Freedom is never voluntary. It must be demanded by the oppressed." That's the impression that I had of this family, trying to demand some kind of freedom. However, revelations later in the film reveal that they might just be fugitives on the lamb who have randomly picked up abused or emotionally troubled people along the way.
It's not that any of these people are evil. They don't hurt anybody and they do love each other. The context of how they find themselves where they are is something that may or may not be evil, a crime of passion as it's called. That crime isn't really reckoned or properly addressed. It's rather skimmed over, which left me cold about the whole thing.
Rated R for some sexual content and nudity.
Running Time: 2 hrs. and 1 min.
In select cities, including DC, Philly and Baltimore.
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