New Kore-eda film?

[Aaron Gerow]

I promised to report a bit on the new Koreeda film DISTANCE.  Not too 
much time to write, but here's the gist:

As reported before, the film is about 4 family members of cult believers 
who committed an act of mass terrorism, and were later killed by the 
cult.  The 4 people (Arata, Natsukawa Yui, Terajima Susumu, and Iseya 
Yuya) visit the lake where their loved one's ashes were spread and there 
meet Sakata (Asano Tadanobu), a former member of the cult's elite squad 
that was to undertake the act of mass terrorism.  Someone stole their 
car, so all 5 are forced to spend the night in the house where the terror 
squad stayed.

Basically, this is another of Koreeda's films about memory, but while 
After Life is about the best memories that define one, Distance is about 
those painful memories which you can't escape.  Yet as in his other work, 
memories are valorized in the sense that one of cult's problems is the 
fact it rejects memory.  Unlike Maboroshi, which I still feel 
inadequately "resolves" the issue of Yumiko's memory, this film doesn't 
try to solve the problems.  In fact, one of the meanings of distance in 
the title is the distance between the 4 characters, who, while being 
friendly to each other are never really close, and between each one and 
their memories of loved ones.  No one really gets close here and no one 
really comes to some solution about the fact their loved one left them 
and went off to commit mass murder.  In effect, the Other remains 
unexplained.  This is in part confirmed by a style that abruptly cuts to 
the memories without any clear explanation or accounting afterwards.

Still, Koreeda valorizes memory to the degree, as with After Life, he 
even advocates a certain kind of "recreation" of memory.  Not to give 
anything away, but not all these memories are as they seem.  This creates 
a kind of Mystery for the audience I felt was kind of simplistic, but it 
does fit with Koreeda's world view.

The style is his most documentary yet: lots of hand-held cameras, lots of 
pans and shifts in camera distance, etc.  There are some of the aesthetic 
compositions of Maboroshi and some of the interviews of After Life, but 
in general it's more like his TV documentaries.  I'm still not sure he 
sufficiently dealt with the problem of distance in stylstic terms, though.

As with many recent films, there's a lot here on borders: between land 
and water, between an old life and a new one, between past and present, 
between 2 people, between this world and the other world, between the 
soul, the body, and this dirty world (shoes and feet shots abound!).

There's still something too calculating about Koreeda, something not 
unrelated to what I see as an adequate questioning of the image, that I 
find problematic, but this was better than Maboroshi (which I didn't 
like) and better in certain ways than After Life (which I did like).  It 
is a bit long in parts, and, as usual with Koreeda, a bit short on 
theorizing, but still quite good.

Will interview Koreeda on Friday for the theatrical catalog, so I'll test 
him a bit more.


Aaron Gerow
Associate Professor
International Student Center
Yokohama National University
79-1 Tokiwadai
Hodogaya-ku, Yokohama 240-8501
JAPAN
E-mail: gerow at ynu.ac.jp
Phone: 81-45-339-3170
Fax: 81-45-339-3171