Using the framing incident of a fire at the local hostess bar, three different versions of the same story play out with different outcomes. A single mother suspects her son is being abused by a teacher at his school and takes drastic steps to find out what is going on, the actual teacher does not know what is going on and wonders why he is being forced to take the blame and the actual child has a different reason for acting the way they do.
I enjoyed the movie Broker last year at the film festival and for some reason thought that this was also a Korean movie. Only when people started talking in Japanese I realised. The story is set in rural Japan but it could almost be any small town as the themes seem universal.
The stuff about the school being more interested in preserving its reputation than actually listening to what happened seems very Japanese.
The children involved are not quite teenagers so they are still working out what they want to be. It is hard to watch one of them being mistreated by their father and the other child trying to stick up for them gets misconstrued as something else. I am not going to say what the ending was as it is left deliberately vague even in the movie.
With the two stories of the adults it seems they are at opposite ends of the same story as the mother is assuming the worst all the time. The teacher may have been a drip whose hobby was to write letters to publishing companies about errors in books but he was not an abuser and does not know why he was asked to say that he did.
This was Ryuichi Sakamoto’s last film score but what I could say about the film score is that it didn’t stick out which is a sign of a great score that you don’t really notice it being overbearing.
This film sold out all three screenings at MIFF and is getting a release coming up so more people will hopefully get to see it.
An enjoyable film about differing experiences of the same situation and certainly different than what I usually see at the festival from South Korea or Japan. Well worth your time.
Film details:
Key Cast: Eita Nagayama, Hinata Hiiragi, Mitsuki Takahata, Sakura Ando, Soya Kurokawa, Yûko Tanaka
Director: Kore-eda Hirokazu
Producers: Genki Kawamura, Hijiri Taguchi, Kenji Yamada, Megumi Banse, Taichi Itô
Screenwriter: Yuji Sakamoto
Cinematographer: Ryûto Kondô
Composer: Ryuichi Sakamoto
Editor: Kore-eda Hirokazu
Premiere Status: Victorian Premiere
Distributor: Madman Entertainment
Origin: Japan (2023)
Headliners | Feature
Language: Japanese with English subtitles
Genre: Drama
Trailer:
