The film begins with a funeral and ends with a funeral. The narrative in the middle is the most concerned family story in Hirokazu Koreeda's films. My father eloped with his lover in his early years, and my mother ran away from home, leaving only an empty house, with no feelings for his three daughters, and never heard from him again. The last time the three sisters saw their father was at his funeral at the beginning of the film, so they met their half-sister. When my sister saw her worried sister in this broken family, she thought of her childhood experience and endurance, so she offered to let her move in together. Thus, in the Kamakura era, the four sisters started a new life. Two families meet again.
Kamakura, an ancient capital next to Kyoto and Nara, experienced the prosperity of Genji shogunate, the division and decline of the Southern and Northern Dynasties and the revival of the Edo era. Thousands of years of history have left this city with clean and tidy storefront streets, antique shrines and temples, and a life surrounded by mountains on three sides and facing the sea on the south.
There are honorary citizens Yasunari Kawabata, and Natsume Sozaki, Yasujirō Ozu and Akira Kurosawa who practice meditation are also buried here.
Of course, there is also the southern Hunan coast belonging to Sakuragi and Haruko.
There is another important thing here, and that is Ajisai. The rainy season in June is the peak tourist season in Kamakura, because Ajisai was the most prosperous at this time, and Ajisai appeared many times in this film.
Junichi Watanabe explained this flower in Ajisai Diary:
However, this beautiful flower means the instability of love. In this film, when my sister and mother meet by chance and walk on the stone road of the temple, there is a blooming Ajisai on the left side of the lens, reflecting the mother who was abandoned because her husband and lover left home, and the sister who is now in love with a man with a family.
I always feel that smell and taste have unconsciously laid an anchor point in my memory. When you walk in the street one day, a faint smell will pull you away from the clear reality and jump into another story. Although you are the protagonist, it still seems like a lifetime ago.
In this movie, the lines that touched me the most were also related to food. After many years away from home, my mother met her sister and said:
Speaking of which, I heard that you are still making plum wine. My aunt worships you very much. It's hard to do it every year. But only after that will I feel: Ah, summer is coming.
Sometimes, food can soothe heavy homesickness.
In the memory of this family, there are not only plum wine in summer, but also the daily preferences of the four sisters for food, all of which have traces of relatives. Elder sister was lucky enough to eat the seafood curry rice taught by her mother. Second sister Jia was the favorite fish in Nanman sauce and bamboo pod in Haimao canteen where her family used to go. Third sister Qian Jia learned the fish steak paella from her grandmother. Sister Ling's favorite sardine rice was also the dish that her father often cooked for her when she was in Sendai. Her father often made seasonal fish raw toast for her, which was originally learned from her uncle in Haimao canteen.
In this way, Hirokazu Koreeda linked the lives of the four sisters with the broken family through the food and memories hidden under everyone's taste buds.
Throughout the movie, the scene about cherry blossoms is only one minute 15-year-old bells shuttle through the tunnel of cherry blossoms, brief and beautiful, just like the cherry blossoms themselves.
Bell is the youngest of the four sisters, but like her sister, she has taken on too many responsibilities that should not belong to them. In the second half of the film, when my sister said goodbye to her favorite pediatrician, she said that Bell was burdened with too many things and was deprived of his childhood. The doctor told her that her childhood was also taken away by the adults around her.
It is also for this reason that Ling's emotions in the first half of the film are deliberately suppressed by herself, following the labels that family, society, tradition and life have labeled for her. Judging from the plot behind the film, Ling was very dissatisfied with this living condition, but she couldn't escape it, which led her to finally choose to move to Kamakura, leave her contradictory and incomplete family and start a new life.
The new life is that four half-sisters live in the same house. At first, the bell slowly adapts and releases itself bit by bit. When she passed through the cherry blossom tunnel, the director gave Bell a close-up of her face for one and a half minutes. Only in this way can she see bright hope for the future from her face.
Asano Nagaakira Bell, played by Suzu Hirose, doesn't have many lines in the film, but she well interprets the inner story of the role, the beauty and simplicity of adolescent girls and an almost transparent sadness hanging over her for family reasons.
Of course, in this context, this is also the girl's heart of 54-year-old director Hirokazu Koreeda.
The life around fireworks is the most wonderful part of the whole movie, not only because of the director's filter or composition, but because the life stories of the four sisters are all linked by this fireworks, and their past life stories travel through time and space and gently enter this beautiful night.
Understanding is the warmest theme of this film, just as my sister forgave her father's departure and her mother's escape, and my second sister accepted another love failure, and Ling finally reconciled with herself. But what impressed me most was my third sister's boyfriend, the man who broke six toes while climbing Mount Everest. After the defeat, he returned to the Kamakura era and silently opened his own shop. During most of the movie, he was full of joy. But when others were watching the fireworks, the camera showed him quietly looking at the back of the photo of Mount Everest hanging on the wall, which seemed a little lonely. Third sister went over and asked him if he wanted to go again. He said, no, that's enough. At that time, it suddenly occurred to me that in the hot afternoon of Chengdu Strawberry Music Festival, after Donye.S finished singing "Miss Dong", he whispered in the cheers of the audience: "Sorry is the most beautiful, really."
At the end of the film, the director said through the mouth of uncle in the canteen:
In the movie, two people who passed away both experienced the cherry blossom season and found the beauty of peace at the end of their lives.
Similarly, in the film, my sister talked about the 55-year-old Li Shu and said that "everything alive needs a lot of effort". Similarly, the writer sakaguchi ango commented on the death of Osamu Dazai:
They fought like this themselves. Four girls who are injured because of their families can always leave their warmth to others in their cramped lives. Together, they will slowly bridge the cracks in their families and leave the audience with a firm sense of security and sufficient vitality. This is the real moving part of this movie. The director sprinkled deep feelings of home and country in every trivial matter of life, which was soft but powerful, plain but not mediocre, reconciled and sublimated personal feelings in the family and changed everyone's life track. It is this family bond or bondage that makes us stand in the world, work hard and feel warm in the saddest time.
This may also be the reason why Don Corleone told Mike before he died: "Life is so beautiful".
First published in my personal blog: flying over the madhouse?