Still walking

Family, death and memories are dominant themes in the work of Japanese writer-director Kore-eda Hirokazu, multi-award-winningly-so for After Life (1998) and Nobody Knows (2004). He's gained international acclaim too for Distance (2001) and Hana (2006); his Still Walking (2008) prompted critic Roger Ebert to dub him the new Ozu of Japanese cinema, as a similar master of immaculately-observed family relationships and human behaviour.

Hirokazu dismisses such a comparison in his very informative to-camera interview for the Criterion DVD; instead he relates himself to the veteran director who also influenced Ozu (best known outside Japan for The Tokyo Story) - Mikio Ukigumo Naruse.

The Ozu comparison was inevitable. Still Walking reveals a prickly proud old local doctor and his bitter-sweet wife hosting their two surviving children's families for an annual gathering marking the accidental death of their oldest son. They bicker, cook (in brilliantly-detailed close-ups), exchange niceties, suppress emotional outbursts and grudgingly cope with the universal problems of belonging to an unlovable family.

Hirokazu once again shows his winning ways with child actors, and this film's trio are everything that Hollywood brats so often fail to be: natural, moody, coolly observant, clearly sensing their elders' social inadequacies and weaknesses. Their parents are distinctive characters; the in-laws are the nicer people to meet. As a self-confessed semi-autobiographical set of anecdotes, this film clearly sublimates the writer-director's dislike of his parents' personalities and the young man they made him become.

Each cast member, several of whom have worked for Hirokazu on other movies, present characters as nuanced as the writer's storyboard, and as finely-detailed as the director's focuses on production details. Most notably, veteran actress Kirin Kiki, as the pseudo-deferential venomous grandmother, rightly won various awards.

The director's interview includes his comment that he should have deleted the end scene, an unnecessarily poignant and happy conclusion whose pat voice-over words and symbol-packed scenes look like pretty plastic bows of platitude and pretence added to the whole movie's sincere package of home truths.

Hirokazu's next film really shunted aside the petrifying burden of being seen as Ozu reincarnate: Air Doll (2009) is a quirky delight about a blow-up model who gains a human spirit and falls in love.