Small Stories with Big Meaning

JAPANESE DIRECTOR Hirokazu Koreeda tells delicate, exquisite tales—small stories that invite huge responses. They hold expansive space in which human beings can see what we really are—a little lower than the angels, deciphering what it is to live between the steeple and the gargoyle.

Koreeda’s early film After Life imagines death being followed by a week of decision during which the deceased are invited to choose the memory they wish to live in forever. It takes place mostly in a nondescript office building, in which ghosts and bureaucrats talk over desks and filing cabinets. But magic is at work. After Life is one of the great alchemical films—light and words dance with the viewer’s perception, transforming thoughts we thought were ours alone into a recognition of the universal need for love and our aspirations to live better.

Other Koreeda films—such as Like Father, Like Son; Our Little Sister; and Still Walking—are firmly rooted on earth, but the distance between the characters might be cosmic: a family confronting the discovery that their biological son was accidentally switched with another, three siblings meeting their teenage stepsister after their father’s death, the survivor of a near-drowning unsure what he owes the family of the boy who saved him.

Koreeda’s latest, After the Storm, is an exquisite cameo of life. And I do mean life—something more than existence, something whose beauty depends on simply noticing the gifts of everyday experience. This is a common theme in Koreeda’s work—if emblematic masterpiece After Life is all about choosing just one moment to take into eternity, After the Storm is about how the greatest moments, the most human ones, are often the simplest.

After the Storm locates itself in a suburban housing development and a nearby city, as a man who feels he has failed at life begins to wake up to the invitation to look around. It’s one of the quieter films you’ll see—limited conversation, gentle silences, minimal music. One of the loveliest elements is that Ryota, the lead character, is a writer who once found acclaim, now working as a private detective. He is trying to establish meaningful relationship with his son and ex-wife and to hear the wisdom in his mother’s eldering.

We’ve seen poetic spirits moonlighting as private detectives in the movies before (most memorably, perhaps, in Robert Altman’sThe Long Goodbye), but Ryota’s employment is merely background music to his calling. He wants to reunite his family, but he is becoming aware that getting what you want isn’t the same thing as loving others into what they need.