More than perhaps any other contemporary Japanese filmmaker, Hirokazu Kore-eda channels the tranquility and humanism of the great Yasujirô Ozu. Where his genre-fixated colleagues—Takeshi Kitano, Takashi Miike, Kiyoshi Kurosawa and, to a lesser although similar degree, Sion Sono—tend to aim for the hyperbolic and sensationalistic, Kore-eda has remained decidedly earthbound, and, like Ozu, he combines an austere and often rigorous artistic style with the carefully observed emotions of his characters. Our Little Sister, adapted from a serialized manga series called Umimachi Diary, is yet another of the director’s anecdotal marvels, an episodic journey through the lives of four siblings that eloquently captures the myriad ways families can break apart and realign.
The three Koda sisters—Sachi (Haruka Ayase), Yoshino (Masami Nagasawa) and Chika (Kaho)—live together in an old, airy home in the seaside town of Kamakura, a family inheritance and self-described “girls dormitory” where they’ve built cozy lives for themselves in the wake of overwhelming familial dysfunction. Decades before, their father left for another woman and their mother, in search of a new life, swiftly abandoned them, forcing Sachi into a maternal role while still a teenager. Though hardened by the experience, the nearly 30-year-old Sachi managed to create a safe and loving space within the house, which grows by one occupant when long-lost sister Suzu (Suzu Hirose), their now-deceased father’s 13-year-old daughter from his third wife, comes to live with them. Though seemingly the starting point for a melodramatic narrative, Suzu’s arrival is merely one in a series of moments calmly presented by Kore-eda, whose slowly pivoting camera and delicate framing matches the characters’ leisurely, low-key lives.
The film isn’t fixed to a single perspective, but we see the world mostly through Sachi’s eyes. A nurse at a local hospital, she approaches her younger siblings as both a fretful mother and a supportive big sister. She’s wary of their taste in boyfriends and impatient with their occasional immaturity, but her playful teasing and seemingly endless patience reflects Kore-eda’s instinctive feel for family dynamics. The sisters’ lives ebb and flow in the same way as the nearby ocean, and the passing seasons are marked by unstable love affairs, routine work experiences and the occasional tough decision. Simultaneously, family traditions both new and old work their way into the story, and like the homemade plum wine the sisters make each summer, their bond is crafted and preserved with the utmost care.
Witnessing such pleasures deepens our relationship with the characters, so much that their lowest moments, however understated by Kore-eda, land with a major emotional thud. Sachi fears becoming just like her father, or worse, her mother, who shows up in the film’s second half and creates the closest thing to a conventional dramatic conflict. Her secret romance with a colleague from work threatens to not only derail her relationship with her sisters but to also re-create the very dynamic that forged their unique situation in the first place. Though the film’s title suggests a coming-of-age story, Our Little Sister is more closely attuned to the pains of being grown and the ways in which adult children deal with the messes left by their parents. After Nobody Knows, I Wish and Like Father, Like Son, this is Kore-eda’s fourth film to deal with abandoned children, but it’s the first to approach the subject from the side of adulthood, making it a major step forward in the director’s career.
Some viewers are sure to find issue with a perceived lack of dramatic stakes, but Kore-eda doesn’t shy away from his characters’ faults. He simply refuses to harp on them. He permits his characters agency and doesn’t force them to act on every emotion or share their every thought. They’re allowed to exist and grow and adapt within the world they’ve built or are attempting to build for themselves, and instances where that world is threatened tend to arrive with the utmost subtlety, if they arrive at all. Our Little Sister is a melodrama of absence, where we don’t meet some of the most important characters—like the girls’ father, or Suzu’s deceased mother, or the grandmother who left them the house—and some of the most important dramatic plot points, like the death of a semi-major character and Suzu’s troubled childhood, don’t even happen on screen. These gaps create a sense of longing and mystery, but they also serve to remind us of life’s more crucial moments, like rapturous bike rides beneath blooming cherry blossoms and long, leisurely strolls on the beach with people who not only love us but take the time to nurture us.
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