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REVIEWS
Our Little Sister
Japanese filmmaker Hirozaku Koreeda is back with a
breezy but underwhelming tale of four sisters enjoying domestic
harmony in a seaside city by leslie felperin
ONE OF WRITERdirector
Hirokazu
Koreeda’s marvelous
early films, After Life (1998),
unfolds a vision of limbo where
the recently deceased collaborate
with angelic filmmakers to
re-create treasured moments — a
cherry-blossom shower, a plane
ride through clouds and so on —
from their lives before they pass
into oblivion. His new film seems
to consist solely of happy, weightless
moments like those. Nearly
all the conflict is in the past as
the movie observes three grown
sisters (played by Ayase Haruka,
Nagasawa Masami and Kaho)
welcoming their teenage half-sibling
(Hirose Suzu) into the family
after the death of their common
father. The result is an episodic,
generous-spirited, pristinely shot
and, quite frankly, somewhat dull
effort which probably will play
well in Japan, where the leads are
big stars and the graphic novel on
which it is based is well known.
However, it’s unlikely to have the
same appeal to audiences offshore
except for hardcore Koreeda fans
and committed Japanophiles.
In the photogenic seaside city
of Kamakura near Tokyo, the
three Koda sisters, all roughly in
their 20s, live in relative harmony
together, apart from the odd spat
over clothes borrowed without
permission. Responsible eldest
Sachi (Ayase), a nurse at the local
hospital, is in a relationship with
a married pediatrician (Shin’ichi
Tsutsumi). Ever since the girls’
mother (Shinobu Ohtake) moved
away and their grandmother died,
Sachi has been the de facto matriarch
of the family for her younger
sisters, party-girl bank clerk
Yoshino (Nagasawa Masami) and
quirkily dressed but less well-defined
Chika (Kaho).
When their father, who took off
when Chika was a toddler, dies in
a distant province, the three sisters
attend the funeral and meet
their half-sibling, 15-year-old Suzu
(Hirose) for the first time. Since
Suzu’s own mother, whom the
father went off to be with years
ago, is now dead and Suzu doesn’t
get on with her stepmother, she
gladly accepts when Sachi invites
her to come live with them in their
capacious homestead.
Viewers conditioned by more
conventional movies to expect
that spats or at least complications
would arise from this
Three grown sisters and their
younger half-sister bond in
Koreeda’s latest.
inciting incident will be underwhelmed
by Suzu’s seamless
assimilation into the Koda
family. Before long, she’s making
friends at school and finding her
niche on the local teen soccer
team. The passage of time is
marked by a procession of seasonal
vignettes, like pages from a
medieval book of hours brought
to life. Suzu rides backseat on a
friend’s bicycle through a lane of
flowery blossomed trees to mark
the coming of spring, and soon
it’s time to etch kanji characters
into the skin of greengages as
the sisters prepare their annual
batch of plum wine. (A great
deal of the running time is spent
watching characters preparing
food, eating meals and discussing
the virtues of, say, whitebait
toast, or the local cafe’s preparation
of marinated horse
mackerel, making this a film
one shouldn’t see on an empty
stomach.) As the season turns,
it’s time for the women to dress
in their best summer kimonos to
enjoy an entirely non-metaphorical
fireworks display.
As if grudgingly aware that he
must provide at least a modicum
of drama, Koreeda warms up the
emotional temperature in the last
few reels when the original trio’s
mother shows up to make vague
threats about selling the house,
and the older girls find a way to
forgive the father they barely
knew but Suzu loved deeply. The
sometimes self-righteous Sachi
finally has an epiphany when she
realizes her own extramarital
goings-on make her no better a
person than Suzu’s mother, who
supposedly stole her father away.
It’s not really a spoiler to report
that by the end, like Chekhov’s
three sisters but without any of
the Slavic melancholy or frustration,
the women are exactly
in the same place as where they
started — if just a little happier.
And like the children in Koreeda’s
much more tragic but punchier
Nobody Knows, they find the inner
resources to survive without
parents, forming a somewhat
unconventional family unit.
Our Little Sister certainly marks
a change from the heavy melodramatics
of the swapped-at-birth
storyline of the director’s last
effort, Like Father, Like Son, but it
feels ineffably slight even if it’s a
consistent pleasure to spend time
in the company of these likable
women. The actors have a breezy,
unforced and entirely credible
sisterly chemistry together, and
working once again with Like
Father’s director of photography,
Takimoto Mikiya, Koreeda
often groups them together in
midrange shots, all the better to
showcase their private economy
of exchanged smiles and amused
raised eyebrows.
But pleasant though that is, it’s
not quite enough to sustain interest
in a film that easily could be
half an hour shorter than it is. The
thing that was so inspired about
the central conceit of After Life
was that it was based on the notion
that everyone has experienced just
one moment of perfect happiness
in his or her life. This new film,
on the other hand, proves that
if nearly every moment is pretty
happy, then no one moment feels
particularly special.
In Competition // Cast Ayase
Haruka, Nagasawa Masami, Kaho,
Hirose Suzu, Shin’ichi Tsutsumi
Director Hirokazu Koreeda
126 minutes
THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER 42