[KineJapan] Our Little Sister ~ Umimachi diary

Roger Macy macyroger at yahoo.co.uk
Thu Oct 15 07:03:09 EDT 2015


Dear KineJapaners,Below is a short take on Our Little Sister / Umimachi Diary and is anentirely optional read.
Followingfrom its audience prize at San Sebastian and warmreviews at Venice, I caught up with Koreeda’s Our Little Sister atthe London Film Festival.The audience,paying about £13 (c.$20) a ticket, were chuckling along, almost from theoff.  There were however, a couple ofcircumstances that slightly detached me from the film.  One was that many of the subtitles appearedearly so that I was hearing laughter before the line was delivered.  The other was that I had just spent a journeyreading NAKAGAMI Kenji’s The Cape. Both stories circle aroundrelationships to an absent and now dead father by multiple half-siblings ofdifferent mothers.  But in style theycouldn’t be farther apart..  The more Iread The Cape, the more I admired it but couldn’t imagine a film adaptationthat I wouldn’t viscerally reject.  Themore I watched the beautiful lives in Our Little Sister, the more Ithought I should make a greater effort to appreciate films like MillennialRapture (WAKAMATSU) and The Egoists (HIROKI Ryūichi), and get pasttheir unlikeable characters.
Everyone lefthappily as the end-credits (entirely in english) rolled.  I stayed to catch the translation credit(Linda Hoaglund).  All that were leftwere the three next to me who had been so wrapped up the film that they had entirelyforgotten to eat their popcorn.  I shouldbe grateful for that.  So it was time formy - er, statistically robust - audience survey.  “So, come on what was so funny about “I’lltake a bath first.” ? “  “It was just theway they argued.  I love Koreeda films.”
I’d like tomention two scenes from Our Little Sister to show what I liked and whatI didn’t like.  Both are near the end andboth have only the eldest and youngest sisters. In the first scene the two sisters climb a hill near Kamakura to watchthe view which their father remembered in Yamagata-ken.  The two sisters embrace.  We get a close-up of one beautiful faceemoting and then reverse to get the other beautiful sister emoting.  Both viewpoints would be from off the groundof the hill-top.  It jammed into me notjust that it was ‘notOzu’ that we were watching a manga adaptation for Fuji-tv.A scene Iadmired was inside their house.  The shotis continuous, taking in the room and the garden.  Younger sister is making a plum winecocktail.  The first question is, ‘Do youwant it sweet or bitter?’.  An off-screenvoice says ‘Bitter’. The second question was ‘Strong or weak?’  ‘Strong’. Younger sister also makes a sweet weak drink for herself.  The composition of little things was held.I’d like toimagine, on no evidence (I haven’t seen the manga by YOSHIDA Akimi), thatKoreeda is telling us that he has to make sweet films along with the strong,and that we should be patient.
Roger
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