MABOROSI (1995)
"Why did he do it? It's like a riddle."
3.5 out of ****
Starring Makiko Esumi, Takashi Naitoh, Gohki Kashiyama
Directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda
Written by Yoshihisa Ogita
Cinematography by Masao Nakabori
Some movies want to explain everything. They approach some of life's most profound issues--love, faith, mortality--and try to give us a neatly-packaged answer in a couple of hours. Sometimes this even results in great movies. But there are other, wiser films, which don't try to explain everything, but undertake the harder task of observing life, watching events unfold, standing back and illuminating the nuances of existence, without theorizing or philosophizing.
Hirokazu Kore-eda's remarkable first feature, MABOROSI, is one of those movies which is content to watch from a distance. It plays like a series of stills, one beautifully composed shot after another, observing the life of a woman whose first husband commits suicide, leaving her alone with a three-month-old son, and who remarries a few years later.
There are obvious ways of dealing with this subject matter: tearful scenes of mourning, angry outbursts, denial. Kore-eda isn't interested. We never see the woman, Yumiko (played perfectly by Makiko Esumi), crying over the death of her husband. Infinitely more powerful is a long-shot of Yumiko and her son (Gohki Kashiyama) boarding a train platform several years later, preparing to leave the city and join the new husband in his little Japanese fishing community; we watch them, dressed in black, walk slowly up the steps and along the platform, the sky grim and overcast. What does it mean? It doesn't 'mean' anything. What does it convey? It conveys volumes, and does so in the language of pure cinema.
That is one of the great pleasures of MABOROSI, that it says so much by saying so little, by merely contemplating the everyday rituals and routines of life. Yumiko's changing moods are reflected in the visual compositions, not simply in her 'character arc.' Later in the film, after she has lived with her new husband (Takashi Naitoh) for some time, we see the family seated in front of their house, looking at the sea. The husband and son eat slices of watermelon, laughing as they spit the seeds out; Yumiko watches and smiles. This scene conveys subtly, without fanfare, the pleasure she has found in her new life; everything we need to know is up there on the screen, in the little gestures and details, and nothing needs to be said aloud. In this movie, it is not grand speeches and melodramatic confrontations that are important, it's things like scrubbing the steps or teaching a child to ride a bike.
Kore-eda and cinematographer Masao Nakabori use light and shadow masterfully, without the benefit of off-screen lighting (as far as I could tell). In the first third of the film--the build-up to the suicide and its aftermath--most scenes are shot in darkness, or on cloudy, grey days. There isn't much sunshine. The second third, as Yumiko finds some measure of happiness again, is sunnily lit, reflecting her changing circumstances, and the final third becomes grey again, rainy, stormy, as the unresolved grief from her first husband's death preoccupies her once more, and she seeks an answer that doesn't exist--the dead never explain themselves. There is also, in most scenes, a balance of light and dark. Indoor scenes are either brightly lit inside with darkness outside, or shadowy within and light without. This mix of light and dark reflects the balanced tone of the film--and of life, for that matter--augmented by Ming Chang Chen's spare score.
Some of the shots are perfect. Two children run beside a lake, their reflections in the still water, the sky looming above: the image is unforgettable. And my favourite visual shows a line of mourners walking along the shoreline, silhouetted by a narrow ribbon of ocean, dwarfed by land below and sky above. Both these images show human figures trapped by water, caught between the vast reaches of heaven and earth, and this poetic re-fashioning of images (such as the various shots of bicycles and trains) serves to develop and deepen the film's themes, and the feelings it evokes.
The only problem, really, is that this approach demands considerable patience from the viewer. This is not a movie to see when you're in the mood for something light and entertaining, nor is it a movie for impatient viewers. But if one has the patience to accept Kore-eda's approach, it is deeply rewarding. The most obvious point of reference is Kieslowski's BLUE, but MABOROSI is, I think, even better. The final third in particular is absorbing, moving, and, in its finest moments, sublime, possessing a grace and wisdom few films strive for, much less achieve.
A Review by David Dalgleish (February 10/98)
dgd@intouch.bc.ca
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