Guest post by Jon Vickers.
My love affair with the sublime films of Japanese master filmmaker Koreeda Hirokazu (Hirokazu Kore-eda) began more than 25 years ago on March 7, 1997, in the small town of Three Oaks, Michigan.
Maborosi had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September of 1995 (where it was nominated for the Golden Lion and won the Golden Osella award for cinematography) and North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. After seeing the film in Toronto and Vancouver, Dennis Doros and Amy Heller met with Koreedasan over tea and secured the U.S. distribution rights to the film for their boutique distribution company, Milestone Films.
The film started its slow theatrical roll-out on September 6, 1996, at Lincoln Center in New York, then the four 35mm prints began making their way across the U.S. In my recent conversation with Doros, he said that this was a relatively large release for their company at the time, when two 35mm prints was their norm for small films. This would change for them the following year with their release of Takeshi Kitano’s Fireworks/Hana-Bi having 20 prints. (Note: For major Hollywood releases in the U.S., it is common to have 3,000-4,000 prints, now DCPs, in cinemas opening weekend.)
The film opened at our Vickers Theatre (hence my introduction), the same day Roger Ebert reviewed the film for the Chicago Sun Times and two weeks before it opened in Chicago at the Music Box Theatre. Curating and programming an art cinema in the 1990s was much different, without the benefit of the internet and multiple sources for film festival reviews. We programmed the film based on some early print reviews and our trust in Milestone, having already screened some of the films they represented.
Sorry for this trip “into the weeds,” but thought it might be helpful to understand how a small but important Japanese film might make it to a Southwest Michigan farming town.
Like many of his films, Maborosi is a family drama. Kore-eda’s sense of family is expansive, which is seen here and in many of his films to follow. In fact, his films often lead their audience to reconsider the concept of family in a much more expansive and inclusive way. The characters in his films are often on spiritual quests with death and life running parallel, closely linked. Kore-eda has said that “life and death run parallel at all times. They reflect each other, so I live that way and I think that translates to my films as well.” Even Tadanobu Asano, the actor who plays Ikuo in Maborosi said he approached the character as if “death was intrinsically linked to Ikuo’s life. Even after his screen death, his presence is felt throughout the rest of the film.”
Maborosi indeed walks this line. Yumiko (Makiko Esumi) is haunted by the past with the mysterious loss of her grandmother in addition to her more current loss. She moves forward with her life and begins again, expanding her sense of family. A trip home for a wedding triggers her grief as she tries to make sense of the tragedies from her past. Kore-eda is a master of observation, showing us (and Yumiko) that life is filled with everyday moments of beauty and wonder, awakening her to love, regeneration, and a sense of peace. There are simple moments in our lives which connect us and we will remember forever. During Yumiko’s awakening in the near-final sequence of the film, Kore-eda breaks from his sense of realism, admitting that he “might have escaped to the realm of fable.” The balance between life and death is put on full cinematic display and ultimately, Yumiko chooses life… and life goes on.
Maborosi is beautifully (even painterly) shot by cinematographer Masao Nakabori using only natural light. The film is known in Japan as Maboroshi no Hikari, which translates into “phantasmic light” or “trick of the light.” There is no questioning the beauty this brings to the film, in turn bringing its characters and audience into the beauty of the natural world. Kore-eda commented that he considers the film “a document of light and shadows which flicker inside of a woman.” To help assure the beauty of the film, costume designer Michiko Kitamura designed every costume specifically for the subtleties of natural lighting. Despite this being one of the things I remember well about the film upon seeing it in 1997, Maborosi is the only film in Kore-eda’s career where he has limited himself to natural lighting.
The film also introduces another trademark of Kore-eda’s work, which is a resolute sense of calmness, or quietness. Whatever anxieties or anguish his characters may be going through, they express them quietly, calmly, or internally. It is unclear whether this is to be interpreted as a sense of acceptance… Perhaps. While I do not know of Kore-eda’s personal beliefs, the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism all revolve around the acknowledgment and acceptance of suffering (the human condition) and understanding that all things pass.
There are no villains within his films, no major value judgments. Characters eventually all find their own truths. Perhaps Kore-eda’s humanism and acceptance of his characters without judgment, regardless of who they are and what they have done, comes from his background as a documentary filmmaker. For TV Man Union, he made at least eight documentaries before embarking on Maborosi, including But-in the Time of Government Aid Cuts (1991), which examines the consequences of government welfare policy. Coincidentally, this film included a woman who depended on welfare assistance due to the loss of her husband. Regardless of this connection, upon viewing Kore-eda’s work it is easy to connect his documentary sensibilities to his narrative storytelling. He pays attention to the simple details of everyday life, builds empathy for his characters, and brings a sense of realism to his films.
While Maborosi is based on the short story “Maborosi no Hikari,” written by Teru Miyamoto, it also has elements inspired by Kore-eda’s own life experiences; for example, his grandfather suffered from dementia similar to Yumiko’s grandmother. Kore-eda cautiously spent three years developing the project before he found funding (and the courage) to begin shooting the film. He never attended film school, though he has a degree in literature, and his film production knowledge came from the “school of trial and error” while working at TV Man Union. Of Maborosi, he was quoted as saying, “I felt nervous to be embarking on such a thing, but to go from documentary to the fiction world, it felt like somebody was telling me to do this.”
And he was indeed being coaxed. One of his filmmaking idols in the 1990s was Hou Hsiao-Hsien (A City of Sadness, Flowers of Shanghai, Café Lumière, The Assassin), who was familiar with Kore-eda’s documentary work. He encouraged him to make a narrative feature film and vowed to help in any way he could. While I do not know of Hsiao-Hsien’s involvement in the making of Maborosi, Kore-eda did use a collaborator, composer Ming-chang Chen, to create the score, sprinkled with recurring leitmotifs for the lead characters.
Over the years, there have been many comparisons of Kore-eda’s work to that of Yasujirō Ozu. This includes the late film critic and personal friend Roger Ebert. In his review of Maborosi. Ebert is correct in saying, “There isn’t a shot in the movie that’s not graceful and pleasing.” He also talks about Kore-eda (and Ozu’s) use of “pillow shots,” similar to “pillow words” in Japanese poetry, which lead you out of or into the rest of the poem, providing a resting place, pause, or punctuation. Kore-eda often cuts away from the action, pointing the camera for a moment at something mundane: a street, a doorway, a storefront, etc. In Maborosi, there is also a more prominent “nod” to Ozu with the presence of a teapot in the foreground of many shots. It is hard not to think of this as an homage. However, Kore-eda does not accept comparisons to Ozu, thinking his films favor the influence of another master, Mikio Naruse, more.
Whether influences be Ozu, Naruse, or others, Kore-eda uses film language to its fullest potential, showing instead of telling, but never showing his audience too much. An example of this is how he subtly shows the passage of time, whether it be a change of seasons or the fading of fingernail polish on a child’s hand. In his films, you are never told “Three weeks later…” or “Five years later…” He masterfully uses his images and sound to create unique and profound (even transformative) visual cinematic experiences.
I was recently asked which of Kore-eda’s films I would choose as an introduction to someone new to his work. Of his 15 narrative feature films, I have seen all but three theatrically, including his newest, Broker, which will be released in cinemas later this year. I have missed The Truth (2019), his English/French-language debut starring Catherine Deneuve, Juliette Binoche, and Ethan Hawke, released during Covid-19 closures; Hana (2006), his unconventional story of a reluctant samurai; and Distance (2001), following members of a cult who sabotage a city’s water supply then commit mass suicide.
While I love Maborosi, of the films I have seen, I would likely recommend either Afterlife (1998) — his film in which upon dying, the dead transport to a waystation where they have three days to choose a single memory from their life, which will then be filmed and the dead must then live with their single memory forever — or Shoplifters (2018), now his most celebrated and accessible film in which an extended family of unrelated shoplifters (spanning three generations) care for each other deeply and do what they need to do to survive and stay together. Like I was hooked in 1997 by Maborosi, either of these two films will connect with a first-time viewer of his work, introducing all of Kore-eda’s themes and nuances while also showing how a master filmmaker uses the language of cinema to build empathy for their characters.
There is so much more to talk about regarding Hirokazu Kore-eda, like similarities in career paths with Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. Both started making documentary films, moving to narrative feature films and eventually shooting late films abroad (coincidentally each choosing Juliette Binoche to star in their debuts outside of their native countries), but that is for another time.
Instead, I will close with a quote I appreciate from film scholar Linda Erlich. She said Maborosi is a “film about asking questions and not finding answers.” Isn’t that what any real work of art is supposed to do?
Maborosi screens at IU Cinema on November 12 at 7 pm. The screening is part of an annual series called Jon Vickers Pics, honoring IU Cinema’s Founding Director Emeritus, which is endowed by Darlene J. Sadlier and James O. Naremore, two immensely important figures in the development of IU Cinema. Thanks to them both for their many contributions to IU Cinema, including the endowment of this series. The screening will be introduced by Jon Vickers.
Jon Vickers is the founding director emeritus of IU Cinema. His tenure included ‘building community’ through film experiences since the early 1990s, having opened and built programs for three thriving art cinemas in the Midwest. Favorite film: Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch, 1995).