Home Alone
The worst thing in the world is that someone's suffering should go unacknowledged," Terence Davies told a New York Film Festival press conference back in 1989. He was explaining the motivation for his extraordinary, highly affecting film Distant Voices, Still Lives, about the fearful home atmosphere that his mother and older siblings endured. It was a grim yet exultant movie musical. There was no doubt where Davies felt sympathy (and joy). But he also recognized his tyrannical father's personal torment. Davies' artistry-his humanity-extended a harsh pity to the monster that was in his blood.
They're made into hermits, fugitives from social workers and the Ministry of Education. But they're still family. Kore-eda shows that Keiko's unstable arrangement results from her own immaturity and bad choices. Instead of harsh pity, Kore-eda applies mercy towards Keiko's erratic nature that is reflected in the behavior of her children who are respectful, shy and intimidated by the outside world. Wary of being separated, the children's circle is bound by a loving interdependence. Keiko leaves Akira in charge whenever she goes out with men, eventually abandoning her brood altogether.
As a record of the small family's suffering, Nobody Knows is only inadvertently a story of abuse; it's primarily the intimate, inside view of a social statistic. Keiko's like so many young women not ready for the responsibilities of motherhood, plus she's unwilling to commit herself to the necessary sacrifices. Although she's more benign than Terence Davies' ogre-like father figure, she endangers the family through her own failings-selfishness, exhaustion and anxiety about the carefree life that eludes her. We face the devastating fact that this mother of four feels robbed of her youth.
That insight shows Kore-eda has something of Davies' understanding about complex family tragedy. He acknowledges Keiko's misery-her detachment from Japanese custom-and sees it as the root of his drama. Nobody Knows goes beyond the issue of single mothers to observe the troubling phenomenon of adults who don't know how to be parents-or fully functioning people. This generational folly, an advent of both the post-war baby boom and the spread of industrial capitalism around the world, becomes apparent when Keiko returns from "work" drunk, waking the kids to give them a surprise sushi meal. In this stressful, impromptu party, they all seem to be playing house. Both older kids Akira and Kyoko are nearly Keiko's height, so the three of them can look each other in the eye, but they avoid sharing the same thought: They know the game is a ruse and that the illusion of family stability is soon to collapse.
How Kore-eda attends to the clan's alternating happiness and sadness sets Nobody Knows apart from other films about children who are thrust into adulthood. Coppola's The Outsiders represents the American paradigm; it winningly (and hysterically) romanticized adolescent deprivation. References to Gone With the Wind alluded to Coppola's glorification of the American individualism and the allure of the juvenile delinquent as found in each young male protagonist-the most impulsive (Matt Dillon) and the most conscientious (C. Thomas Howell).
But Kore-eda daydreams differently, focusing on mundane details like a washing machine's hum-and-thump that signifies domestic stability or the loud outbursts of the tyke Shigeru that could be just an excess of boyish energy or chemical imbalance. Kore-eda's poetic, but his minutiae has an authentic resonance. Where Coppola aimed for pathos, Kore-eda subtly suggests that the modern tragedy he addresses can sometimes be paradoxical; it may contain moments of unexpected beauty. Davies showed the same thing whenever his beleaguered family members broke into song and Kore-eda's knowledge also makes for some remarkable moments: Akira wrestles with his math homework, largely to communicate with Keiko; he gives in to a superficial intellectual challenge in order to feel intimate.
Nobody Knows recalls the dilemma of "babies making babies"-the tragedy that results from social disintegration. ("I hope you will look out for us," Keiko appeals to a pair of older tenants who are never seen again.) Fittingly, the film's four-seasons structure, used to reveal the children's yearning, is uncannily lyrical. This film could be a dark yet gentle rap-poem-from the opening sequence of the smallest children being smuggled-in through Keiko's luggage to a later, complementary scene of Akira and a friend (the lonely school girl Saki played by Hanae Kan) hauling the same pink suitcase through a Tokyo airport en route to a burial. These haunting images evoke a young family's struggle with its own innocence, a small but great effort happening at the periphery of society's awareness.
I did not expect such lucidity from Kore-eda, whose previous U.S. release, the unaccountably lauded After-Life, I thought barely tolerable. After-Life indulged a too-precious conceit in which dead people were allowed to choose a memory to sustain them through eternity. It seemed a pedantic version of ideas already made pithy in Albert Brooks' Defending My Life or profound in Spielberg's Hook. Kore-eda's film just seemed strained. What a surprise to see his artsiness become relevant in an age that commonly reduces this film's scandalous subject to tabloid sensationalism. I now realize that After-Life appealed to a nascent agnostic prejudice in today's film culture. In Nobody Knows, Kore-eda re-connects to good ol' fellow-feeling.
There's a wonderful scene where Akira walks at night with his sister Kyoko into the world that ignites his curiosity and they pause to observe a monorail, lit from within and zooming along the rails overhead. It recalled the freight trains I used to hear as a kid lying in bed at night but it also equaled the significant, immortal train imagery that is linked to youthful wishing in Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali and as recently as Alirezi Raisian's Deserted Station. I value the sensitivity and compassion in such Kore-eda observations. A shot of two different hands playing Kyoko's red toy piano is poignant for its image of unspecified communion. Another scene shows Akira drawing a childlike smile on the back of a cancelled water bill. Little Yuki enjoys a gift of Apollo Choco candies then closes the box lid ("I'll save it for later," she says with grown-up rationality). And a superb sequence where Akira visits two of the babydaddies with which he's familiar shows his different reactions to the contrasting personalities of two men-his own remote father and the jock-like man he admires. These regular Japanese guys are like Keiko, surprised parents who treat Akira as an equal because they lack the parenting faculty. And Kore-eda ends the sequence by leaving us with the image of Akira trying to imitate one of them, desperate for a role model.
By mixing his characters' hope and suffering, Kore-eda creates an ambivalent view of urban pressure and precarious family unity. Nobody Knows is consonant with the rap-era's hard and soft estimations of how people persevere in a cold society-the paradox found in such distinctive modern rap recordings as Jay-Z's "You Must Love Me" and "Song Cry." Similarly, Kore-eda gives his young characters' feelings the lilting, forlorn quality we associate with fable even while understanding that this family's dilemma is part of a larger social tragedy. Kore-eda has come up with a film whose style is equal parts emotional fable and political tragedy. He's acknowledged private suffering in the best public way.