Thoughts on Still Walking

    Last Sunday on Criterion, I watched Still Walking, a 2008 Japanese film written and directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda. The film is a drama about a family coming together on the twelfth anniversary of the eldest son's death, and the complicated dynamics between the parents and the surviving adult children and their families.

    The Yokoyama family come together every year to commemorate the death of the eldest son, Junpei, who drowned twelve years prior while saving a 13-year old boy. The father Kyohei (Yoshio Harada) is a retired doctor, and idealizes his deceased son, while treating his living son Ryota (Hiroshi Abe) like a disappointment because he went into art restoration instead of becoming a doctor like him, and leaves Junpei's items untouched like a shrine to him. Ryota brings his wife Yukari (Yu Natsukawa), who is widowed from a previous marriage, and her son Atsushi (Shohei Tanaka), and Ryota's family is initially distant and cold towards Yukari, thinking it is bad luck to marry a widow, but gradually warm to her once they get to know her as a person. Ryota's sister, Chinami (You, aka Yukiko Ehara), wants her family to move in with her aging parents to take care of them.

    The film progresses over one day into the next morning, and I liked how quiet the film felt, but very rich with family moments and vignettes that give a lot of coloring to the family's history with each other. Like how Kyohei would retell a positive anecdote about Junpei, and forget that the anecdote was actually about Ryota. Royta would feel bitter towards his father's obvious favoritism towards his older brother. Or how the mother Toshiko (Kirin Kiki) would reminisce at dinner about her and Kyohei's personal romantic song, "Blue Light Yokohama" by Ayumi Ishida, and how she had heard Kyohei singing it from another woman's house, and purchased the record and would play it in private. And that the couple, despite decades of mutual resentment where Kyohei criticizes his wife in front of the family, still stayed together anyway.

    The film shows just one day in this family's life, and there are no big changes or revelations to their relationships. People avoid conflict just to get along, even if they have resentment, and are trying to be nice and polite to "keep the peace." Even if Ryota suggests a change to how his family does a certain ritual, concerned on how it affects someone, he just gets told that the ritual is done out of habit to avoid confronting difficult feelings, even if it's at someone's expense and comes off as cruel and selfish, and that they won't change their behavior even when called out on it.

    I really like Kore-eda's films, having seen Air Doll, Shoplifters, After Life, The Truth, and Broker, After Life and Shoplifters being my favorites. His films excel at focusing on complex emotions and fraught relationships, where no one is a hero or villain, and has shades of gray to their character. Like the family of criminals in Shoplifters, or the brokers selling abandoned babies on the black market in Broker, or the rules of the afterlife being that the recently deceased can only hold on to one memory for eternity in After Life. He is a highly acclaimed filmmaker, and I had heard of Still Walking as one of his best films, but hadn't seen it, and I enjoyed just sitting with it and letting the scenes pour over me. This was a beautiful and stunning film to watch.