This gentle sibling story was one of the most anticipated films of the 2015 Cannes Film Festival (hence the vast number of journos turned away at the door of the vastly over-subscribed screening). Here’s Jamie Graham’s reaction…
Adapted from Akima Yoshida’s manga, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s latest only adds to his reputation as a modern Japanese master whose films look back past the eruptions of the Japanese New Wave to the gentle rhythms of Yasujiro Ozu’s domestic dramas. Perhaps a little too tranquil and, on the surface at least, inconsequential to challenge for prizes in this year’s competition, Our Little Sister bewitches from first frame to last, nonetheless.
Suzu, meanwhile, settles into her new family and school without so much as a blip, and any heartache that the sisters carry within (Sachi, the most mature of the three, loves a man who cannot bring himself to divorce his ill wife) is handled with tremendous understanding, with quiet dignity.
But rather than feeling idealised, infantilised or plain syrupy, Our Little Sister instead entices viewers into its becalmed world. Camera moves are barely perceptible; the luminous lensing of bucolic landscapes and homely interiors radiate warmth; and the tinkling score is used sparingly for fear of being intrusive or overly sentimental. This is not a world without pain. It’s just that the sisters choose to cope with it by brushing it to the corners of their minds, be it the desertion of their father and inattention of their mother, Yoshi’s over-fondness of alcohol, or the intimations of spinsterhood that outsiders bring to their doorstep.
With Kore-eda long established as a master director of children and women, it should come as no surprise that the central performances are both faultless and entirely beguiling.
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