Still Walking

“There’s a ghost at night.” So says young Mutsu (Hayashi Ryôga) of the house where his grandparents Toshiko (Kiki Kirin) and Kyohei (Harada Yoshio) live and where the whole family is gathering for an annual get-together.

Sure enough, while the house might be filled with the noisy presence of three generations, it is also haunted by several absences. For the gathering is to commemorate the anniversary of eldest son Junpei’s death a dozen years ago – while Junpei’s younger brother Ryota (Abe Hiroshi), a struggling art restorer from Tokyo who rarely (and reluctantly) visits, is only half replacing the late father of his stepson Atsushi (Tanaka Shohei). Meanwhile the grandparents, though still walking, are nearing the end of their own life’s journey without having resolved any of the tensions that they have with their descendants, or indeed with each other.

Still Walking is also, of course, haunted by the spirit of Yasujiro Ozu’s 1953 classic Tokyo Story, presenting perennial domestic themes in a composed style whose poetry derives from its plain simplicity. For while this film is full of all the bitterness, regret, jealousy, disappointment, deceit and awkward love that make up any family, it depicts these with a calm restraint and subtlety, excluding even the slightest hint of melodrama – or as writer/director Hirokazu Koreeda, who previously brought us After Life, Distance and Nobody Knows, has so rightly put it himself: “There are no typhoons in this film.”

Instead all the cruelties, conflicts, cracks and continuities in family life are collapsed into an uneventful yet revealing period of 24 concentrated hours (plus a brief coda). And while Koreeda certainly prefers quietly observed, mundane details to grand gestures or shrill twists, it is his unflinching honesty that makes Still Walking so confrontingly painful and sad.

Anton Bitel

Anticipation:

It sounds like Tokyo Story.

Enjoyment:

It is like Tokyo Story.

In Retrospect:

That is to say, it’s family drama at its most affectingly spare and sedate.