After the Storm
The story of people who are not so difficult themselves dealing with extremely difficult people, told in such a way as to maximize sympathy for the extremely difficult people. This is director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s 16th film. Wikipedia tells me that he is most often compared to Yasujiro Ozu, but that he himself feels most influenced by Ken Loch. I have seen six of Kore-eda’s movies, and about ten of Ozu’s, and zero of Loach’s, so I’ll focus for a minute on the Ozu/Kore-eda axis. Like Ozu, Kore-eda directs movies that are for the most part rooted in a Japan that is contemporary with his own, that seem to express less emotion than they really do (that are “quiet,” with the quotation marks there meant to be full of meaning), that use a repertory of actors who appear in film after film often carrying with them an essential kernel of character that is repurposed in various ways. Like Ozu, Kore-eda knows what is beautiful, and when he has a chance he puts his camera on beautiful things. In After the Storm there is a shot of an apartment building among trees, against a grey sky, that is at the maximum limit of beauty.
Kore-eda likes middlebrow conceits, such as detective agencies, abandoned children, and babies switched at birth. Combining this with an Ozu-like commitment to the slow, the digressive, the repetitive, yields a dissonant genre, soap opera by way of Philip Glass. After the Storm tells the story of Ryota (Hiroshi Abe), of his efforts to behave in an acceptable manner towards his family, and of their efforts to deal with his bullshit. There is a lot of bullshit. Ryota is a gambling addict, and one of those men who seem to experience guilt as a kind of interior soul-sickness, without any of that exterior modulation of behavior that such suffering is meant to lead to. We see him grimace, regret, promise reform, but we doubt anything will change. In the meantime, he blackmails a high schooler, gambles away funds needed to pay alimony to his ex-wife Kyoko, makes a gross pass at Kyoko, and steals from his mother, Yoshiko. Yoshiko is played by the late Kirin Kiki as a salt of the earth, brimming with a vinegarish affection for her son, and both set free and unmoored by the death of her husband - himself a gambler who failed to meet his responsibilities
The failure of parents is an ongoing theme for Kore-eda. Both After the Storm and his previous film Our Little Sister begin with the death of a patriarch who goes shockingly unmourned. Like Father, Like Son features the father as a distant workaholic. Nobody Knows is about children abandoned alone in their apartment by their mother, and is so brutally sad that I will never be able to re-watch it. Ryota seems to be a softer case. His pre-teen son lives with Kyoko; Ryota is given one Sunday a month to visit. Much of the film’s action takes place on such a Sunday, following Ryota as he tries to bond with his son. Eventually the two of them, along with Kyoko now, end up at Yoshiko’s apartment. The titular storm arrives, they decide to stay the night, and some light drama ensues. Nothing is rushed. Kore-eda always has time for the happiness of his characters, even when they are in dire straits. He enjoys the little pleasures: a good bowl of curry, or Ryota’s pride in taking his son to “the nice” hamburger place.
The lightness of the drama should not lead us to overlook the suffering Kore-eda portrays. Again like Ozu, he specializes in lives that are blighted; but because he doesn’t use the tropes of sadness – he uses music that is wistful, never lachrymose – it is easy for the blight to blend with the textures of habit. His brutality is to show how much tragedy is packed into an ordinary existence, and his consolation is to show how equipped we are to maintain a day-to-day equipoise in the face of it. Parents die, children die, we fail at our most basic responsibilities, and dreams decay, but we don’t claw our eyes out or anything. If something like Schindler’s List shows us the horror of human relations thrown into complete disfunction, After the Storm does the same for human relations humming along in an utterly sustainable harmony. And indeed, after the storm in After the Storm we see that nothing has changed.
