FILM 252: SIGNAL OF LIFE DIRECTOR MIZUTA NOBUO

252: Signal of Life

Synopsis: A biblical tidal wave strikes Tokyo. In the aftermath, Shizuma leads a rescue squad from the city Fire Department to Shimbashi Station, now an area of devastated wasteland. Shocked to learn that his younger brother Yuji and seven year-old niece are trapped underground, Shizuma mobilises a specialist rescue squad to track down their position. While Yuji brings strong leadership to the lucky survivors who collect around him, a series of aftershocks bury some of their number under the rubble, further jeopardising the rescue mission. Those left unscathed fight exhaustion to communicate an S.O.S. to their rescuers: a code 2-5-2, the signal of life.

The disaster film is familiar territory for Japanese audiences. From Shirô Moritani’s Japan Sinks (Nippon Chinbotsu, 1973) and Mt. Hakkoda (Hakkodasan, 1977) to more recent apocalyptic fare such as Shinji Higuchi’s Japan Sinks remake (Nihon Chinbotsu, 2006) and Takehisa Zeze’s Pandemic (Kansen Retto, 2009), tales of earthquakes and catastrophic tidal waves hitting Japan emphasise an unsettling reality which the Japanese deal with on a weekly basis. This the disaster movie duly relates in pointed references to the circum-Pacific belt, the most geographically active zone on the planet across which the Japanese archipelago is distributed. Low intensity earth tremors, earthquakes, volcanic activity and typhoons are so frequent on the islands that the citizenry tend to take things in their stride. In this, Japanese cinema certainly isn’t alone. A diverse range of disaster-related films are emerging across East and Southeast Asia, including Aditya Assarat’s post-tsunami drama Wonderful Town (2007, Thailand), Toranong Srichua’s 2022: Tsunami (2009, Thailand), Je-kyoon Yoon’s event movie Haeundae (2009, South Korea) and Xiaogang Feng’s Aftershock (2010, China), but as coarse (or genuinely sobering) as these films can be, not one boasts the idyllic topography of Japan, or the dazzling opulence and expansive imagination of a modernist city such as Tokyo.

Made in the period after the 2004 Chuetsu Earthquake, when plans to improve the quake-proofing of residential and public buildings were still being drawn, 252: Signal of Life is something of a public relations exercise, a semi-educational but wholly impassioned melodrama conceived to spotlight the necessity of advanced rescue teams and to raise the profile of projects such as the Fire and Disaster Management Agency. Using under- and over-cranked photography, digital enhancement, full-CGI shots and a fluid simulator to render photorealistic 3D waves, the film reads, surprisingly in summary, like a catalogue of spectacular attractions: it features an enormous tidal wave that looms over Tokyo Bay and takes out both the Rainbow Bridge and the Fuji TV building, a deadly hailstorm over the Ginza Yon-chome crossing which defaces familiar landmarks the Wako and San-ai buildings, the flooding and collapse of Shimbashi subway station, a super typhoon grand enough in scale to cover the archipelago, rescue operations played out on the same grimy streets, and a multiplex-friendly eye-of-the-storm sequence that clears the winds and torrential rain long enough for panoramic views of a now waterlogged Tokyo. Nothing, however, quite survives comparison with Higuchi’s Japan Sinks or the Korean Haeundae. The main location of the film, for instance, is neither Daiba, where tantalisingly the round observation deck of the Fuji building is displaced into the Bay, nor even Shiba Park where the iconic Tokyo Tower is seen in context standing defiant against the typhoon; it is, rather, the largely subterranean Shimbashi station, a set befitting of a 12-certificate film which cannot match the open-air carnage of larger-scale big-budget productions. Like Oliver Stone’s World Trade Centre (2006, USA), 252: Signal of Life is a more intimate record of the specifics of the day. Set-pieces in and around the station create an alarming authenticity and so convey something of the nightmare endured by drowning citizens as seen from a variety of “subjective” perspectives.

Kim Sumin (Minji) and Yuji Shinohara (Hideaki Itô) brave the floods in Mizuta Nobuo’s 252: Signal of Life (2008, Japan)

The resourceful hero of this tale is Yuji Shinohara (played with token efficiency by star Hideaki Itô). Yuji is an ex-sergeant of the Tokyo Fire Department who has cooked up an existence as a bad car salesman in the hope of keeping his sympathetic wife Yumi (Sachiko Sakurai) and deaf mute daughter Shiori (Ayane Omori) safe at home. When the flood clears and the family awaken, bruised and bloodied, only Yumi has made it out unscathed, leaving both husband and daughter trapped below ground. Confined to a disused subway station where they endeavour to signal their position using the 2-5-2 rescue code, the two are painstakingly helped by a trainee med. student (Takayuki Yamada), a small-time entrepreneur and president of the lowly Hyotanyama Engineering firm (Yûichi Kimura) and the largely out of commission Korean babe Kim Sumin (model turned K-pop star Minji, whose teen-ditty plays out over the credits). Above ground, Yuji’s older brother Shizuma (Masaaki Uchino), beset by memories of a failed operation, tests the patience of his increasingly strained crew (here representing the 8th Division of the Tokyo Fire Department) by resisting more hazardous rescue attempts, while Saki Umino (the evidently popular Yu Kashii), embodying the spirit of the National Meteorological Agency, predicts the chain of events which lead inevitably to catastrophe and fathoms one last rescue plan.

It is, then, a faithful tale of human resolve—its classic patriarchal message issued in no uncertain terms. Every character is saddled with his or her own tale of personal ruin, scripted to accentuate the long curve of their rehabilitation. The water filtration device “Mr. Bubbles,” a prototype designed by the hapless president of Hyotanyama Engineering is a case in point. Here, we see the downtrodden entrepreneur (Kimura in the role of Keisuke Fujii) pinning his last hopes on the commercial prospects of (of all things) a fish-tank filter, only for its highly secretive components to be stripped by his fellow survivors and used in a lifesaving blood transfusion—the success of which rekindles, but of course, Fujii’s mojo. Indeed, the film cares so much about the interior lives of the supporting cast, and the Shinohara brothers particularly, that when the storm eventually hits we’re left in no doubt about character motives, the importance of family ties, or the cyclical course of the narrative.

The film doesn’t belong to either brother necessarily, nor to much of the support cast, but instead to little Shiori, the seven year-old tyke who clings to her safety whistle with both paws and wrinkles her nose at daddy throughout every reprieve. As such, child actress Ayane Omori (who was eight years old at the time) bears the full weight of the most demanding scenes and the effect is extraordinarily forceful. Throughout the key Shimbashi setpiece, Shiori becomes separated from her mum and braves the station collapse alone, gluing herself to a ticket barrier for protection while Mizuta’s camera goes in close to scrutinise the extent of her disorientation. Late in the picture, Shiori is involved again in a tearful requiem that ends with a miraculous shift in tenor, a volte-face which subsumes—but cannot match for sheer feeling—the dying echo of the young girl’s agonising lament. While there’s no doubt that both scenes are unnecessarily protracted they are moving, and not without some merit as testimony to the trauma inflicted on innocents in such circumstances. Given that writer Yoichi Komori was inspired by the rescue in the 2004 Chuetsu Earthquake of a two year-old boy, Yuta Minagawa (coupled with the fact that the Tokyo Fire Department’s 8th Division were singularly responsible for his rescue), it is no surprise that so many of Shiori’s scenes are either so charming or forceful.

Disc: The film itself presents well, though audio is only two-channel Dolby stereo. While the Japanese editions come with interviews, making-of featurettes and a television special, this no-frills D.V.D. released in the U.K. by anime specialist M.V.M. Entertainment comes unadorned. Given that the film was made with the assistance of both the Tokyo Fire Department (members of the 8th Division) and the Japan Meteorological Agency a few “new” bases could well have been covered here. Granted, the brace of extras accompanying its Japanese cousin appear insubstantial, but the inclusion of context setting extras for British audiences would have been welcome. Artwork does at least reflect adequately the film’s chief concern with grumpy men of conviction.

This review was originally published by New Korean Cinema.

4 January, 2011

FILM A SNAKE OF JUNE DIRECTOR TSUKAMOTO SHINYA

Tsukamoto Shinya’s A Snake of June (2002)
Pictures in the Rain

Tsukamoto Shinya’s tantalising, photographic tale charting a woman’s sexual reawakening in a modern Japanese city carries with it one of the most irritating and at times infuriating aesthetics cultivated outside of the contemporary avant-garde. Shot in CCTV blue, with a fevered editing style, A Snake of June benefits hugely from Tsukamoto’s thematic preoccupations as both an observer of the human figure and impressionistic storyteller, but less so from his lofty intentions as a cinematographer or lover of montage. When characters find themselves alone, his camera wanders skyward, searching for some inelegant truth in the shadowy projection of rainfall cast on the wall behind and finding little or nothing of the sort. The film, of course, stands up far better than this line of criticism suggests, for even in its crudest hallucinatory moments a powerful emotional balance is struck, such that one cannot overlook the beauty, virtue, or achievements of its scenes. In this, A Snake of June achieves what its predecessors Tetsuo (1989), Tokyo Fist (1995) and Sôseiji (aka, Gemini, 1999) largely cannot. An almost total absence of the biomechanical tricks and mannerisms of those films is one of several indications that Tsukamoto is comfortable with his discovery here, that he is content or confident enough in the story’s intrinsic value to merely observe how one relationship rebuilds another.

At its core, A Snake of June is an accumulation of increasingly daring, excited experiences which, taken together, offers a glimpse of the importance and power of seduction to a woman confined by the mechanical orthodoxy of a marriage lacking concord, passion and love. Little of this is in any way original (think of Body Heat, think of The Postman Always Rings Twice) but the effect nonetheless is spellbinding, and come the final scene surprisingly moving.

Before this, however, Tsukamoto devotes a lengthy scene to the climax of this revolutionary movement in our protagonist Rinko’s life, her erotic imagination no longer teased and stimulated by the intervention of an other but instead excited by and for only itself. Having braved and survived the earlier demands of her blackmailer, a photographer who is shown in the opening scene literally bringing off a woman with his camera, Rinko (played by Kurosawa Asuka) now leads blackmailer (Iguchi, a role for Tsukamoto), husband (Shigehiko, taken by Kohtari Yuji), and it goes without saying film and audience into a desolate back alley where the thick summer rain churns the ground to a crescendo. There she succumbs amid all this noise and provocation, stimulated by the remote vibrator between her legs and brought to exhaustion by her own ascendancy, desire and domination. It is the moment of cruel freedom traditionally afforded female virginal subjects in classical works of art, the brief respite before fate’s evil intervention.

18 July, 2010

EVENT LONDON FILM FESTIVAL VENUE LEICESTER SQUARE

The Times BFI 52nd London Film Festival

Day 4 of the festival for me and with four films in the bag the weather is beginning to turn and everyone's looking/acting irritable. There’s been nothing I’ve hated yet, but there's only been one film, a short, that has grabbed me (more on this in a bit). Tonight’s event is a Times Gala red-carpet screening of Oliver Stone’s W. (2008, USA/Australia/Hong Kong/Switzerland/China), the sympathetic portrait of one man (the imprudent Dub-ya) and his struggle to refigure his younger self in the more “appropriate” image of his father en route to the White House and certain global humiliation. Stone is in attendance, which should be a treat, and so is that Josh Brolin fellow who may or may not take to the stage and say much.

As for this week’s films, first mention goes to Jia Zhangke’s 24 City (Ershsi Cheng Ji, 2008, China/Hong Kong/Japan) which takes as its master subject the demolition of an aeronautics plant in Chengdu (once a secret military hardware factory) and the mass redundancies to have affected its core workforce since the 1950s. There’s little mourning or nostalgia for the past (life is presented, by and large, in honest terms) and Jia interviews a few of the old workers whose identities were unceremoniously upturned by life in the factory. But Jia feels compelled to dramatise this suffering melodramatically, conjuring fictional characters who indulge in sometimes disturbing but always impassioned tales of hardship ... I’m not sure it works or serves the film’s purpose. The opening short Cry Me a River (He Shang de Aiqing, 2008, China/Spain/France) is a painful watch but excellently well-drawn: two ex-couples from university, now settled with their own “life partners” and having realised what huge disappointments they are to each other after years of living together, are reunited at a celebration party.

Less successful, the triptych Tôkyô! (2008, France/Japan/South Korea/Germany) pulls together diverse Tokyo-based stories from South Korean director Bong Joon-ho and French directors Michel Gondry and Leos Carax. Gondry’s short film “Interior Design” concerns Akira (Kase Ryo) who moves to the city with his devoted girlfriend Hiroko (Fujitani Ayako) to become a filmmaker. Despite a promising set-up the film builds towards a shoddy punchline ending that brings to mind the architecture of other omnibus films such as Creepshow (George Romero, 1982, USA). Critically, his film overlooks the thematic concerns that expectant audiences are primed for going into act two: the patriarchal division of labour, the indictment of women as burdens to hardworking men, forced servitude, etc. No such plot development here. Essentially, “Interior Design” ends at the point at which our protagonist Hiroko accepts her dehumanisation in the city of Tokyo as a natural consequence of becoming the guilty party in a relationship (her creative type boyfriend is a much harder worker); she thus turns into a wooden chair and seems to like it.

Memorable for its deliberate bleakness and fabulous caricature, the story goes that a subterranean hermit Mr Merde (Denis Lavant)—who has lived underground for some time and now has the dubious honour of literally being classed “a foreigner”—is now surfacing in central and Western Tokyo and randomly terrorising the citizenry

I thought “Shaking Tokyo” (Bong Joon-ho) was equally banal. It shifts focus from the inner-city to the confined quarters of Tokyo’s residential backstreets where the story concerns a hikikomori, a regimented recluse who hasn’t spoken to a soul in roughly a decade (Kagawa Teruyuki takes the role). Things change when the gorgeous archetype (a dreamy delivery girl played by Yù Aoi) literally falls into his arms, and he must fathom how best to deal with her. In the end, the segment is all male wish-fulfillment fantasy (I wouldn’t recommend it) and Bong should be denied basic food privileges for spinning conventional notions of romantic longing via earthquake metaphor.

The film’s conclusion, in which Kitano seems to affirm an earlier judgement that the contemporary art world is the province of charlatan dealers, devious hustlers and talentless celebrity rogues, is surprisingly affecting

Over the last couple of days, though, I’ve been thinking a lot about a grim little short by Leos Carax, the second film in the Tôkyô! omnibus, dubiously entitled “Merde”. Memorable for its deliberate bleakness and fabulous caricature, the story goes that a subterranean hermit Mr Merde (Denis Lavant)—who has lived underground for some time and who has the dubious honour of literally being classed “a foreigner”—is now surfacing in central and Western Tokyo and randomly terrorising the unsuspecting citizenry. It all feels sartorial and fun and amusing until one afternoon the depth to which the man’s malevolence runs becomes alarmingly clear, and from that point the film shifts into uncomfortable almost Lynchian territory. Curiously enough Carax’s film receives no mention in Tony Rayns’ write-up for the L.F.F. programme; this perhaps isn’t an accidental omission, for the less we know the more affecting the experience, the more disturbing its socio-political statement. I thought the film was fantastic (needless to say Lavant is remarkable in the role) and based on feedback from other film festivals audiences seem to enjoy it above and beyond the Gondry and Bong shorts too; on a personal note, it deserves special scholarly attention in contemporary Asian film studies.

One of the most disappointing entries in last year’s line-up of Japanese films was Kitano Takeshi’s Glory to the Filmmaker! (Kantoku - Banzai!, 2007, Japan), an audacious and surreal film (quintessentially “Beat” in terms of comic tone and irony) though ultimately one whopper of an indulgent mess. This year’s entry Achilles and the Tortoise (Akiresu to kame, 2008, Japan) feels like a return to a more contemplative style of filmmaking for the director—the obviously less action-packed general tone recalling Kikujiro (Kikujirô no natsu, 1999, Japan) and Hana-bi (aka., Fireworks, 1997, Japan)—particularly as its central themes (of parental absence and mortality) are more adult, yet it plays to convention in a manner that echoes the far more commercially successful Zatôichi (2003, Japan). The film is a touching and curiously sincere portrait of the mythical Artist, a boy that has not quite matured: outstandingly impressionable, awkward, lacking responsibility, hurting his loved ones to the real point of extreme absurdity. Its conclusion, in which Kitano seems to affirm an earlier judgement that the contemporary art world is the province of charlatan dealers, devious hustlers and talentless celebrity rogues is surprisingly affecting. But goodness knows where Kitano will turn next: a Buddhist parable concerning his dead Sonatine (1993) character perhaps?

23 October, 2008

EVENT LONDON FILM FESTIVAL VENUE LEICESTER SQUARE

The Times BFI 52nd London Film Festival

Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S Thompson brings together new footage of the legendary creator of “Gonzo” journalism at his Woody Creek home with a narration by fellow Kentuckian Johnny Depp. It should with any luck cancel out the memory of the smug Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride: Hunter S Thompson on Film which did nothing to upgrade the BBC’s original 1978 documentary Fear and Loathing in Gonzovision

My programme for the BFI 52nd London Film Festival (15–30 October) arrived today, so I spent the morning shortlisting my highlights and want-to-sees. The first on offer is 24 City (Er shi si Cheng Ji, 2008, China/Hong Kong/Japan), Jia Zhangke’s latest film which I’ve been keen to see since Still Life (Sanxia haoren, 2006, China/Hong Kong) and which is being screened with his new short film Cry Me a River (Heshang aiqing, 2008, China/Spain/France). Next up is Kitano Takeshi’s Achilles and the Tortoise (Achilles to Kame, 2008, Japan). I shouldn’t bother after the colossal misfire of Glory to the Filmmaker! (Kantoku - Banzai!, 2007, Japan), which played at last year’s L.F.F., but I’m personally drawn to this idea (promised in the programme) of the aspiring uneasy artist perpetually constrained by a sort of impossible search for the self. Then there is Tokyo! (2008, France/Japan/South Korea/Germany) an omnibus film in which French directors Michel Gondry and Leos Carax and South Korean director Bong Joon Ho deliver diametrically opposed stories, ranging from one man’s struggle to regain his sense of purpose and the dehumanisation of one woman in the city. All Around Us (Gururi no Koto, 2008, Japan) is Hashiguchi Ryosuke’s intimate take on an eight-year marriage and the struggle it is to hold onto happiness and personal contentment. Next we have Aditya Assarat’s Wonderful Town (2007, Thailand), a film which is set against the backdrop of the 2004 tsunami recovery project and which concerns the impact an unorthodox affair between a Bangkok architect and a Chinese-Thai hotel manageress has on the small coast town of Takua Pa. Then Koreeda Hirokazu’s Still Walking (Aruitemo aruitemo, 2008, Japan), a family melodrama which the programme describes as “piercingly true” in the tradition of Ozu Yasujirō. Finally two Gala events: the opening night of Ron Howard’s Frost/Nixon (1008, USA/UK/France), and the Times Gala of Oliver Stone’s W. (2008, USA/Australia/Hong Kong/Switzerland/China).

But the two finest treats on offer, for me personally, include the long-awaited The Good, the Bad, the Weird (Joh-un Nom, Nappun Nom, Isanghan Nom, 2008, South Korea), Kim Jee Woon’s first film since A Bittersweet Life (Dalkomhan insaeng, 2005, South Korea). Also, a chance to see Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S Thompson (Alex Gibney, 2008, USA), the documentary which brings together new footage of the legendary creator of “Gonzo” journalism at his Woody Creek home with a narration by fellow Kentuckian Johnny Depp, whose portrayal of Thompson in Terry Gilliam’s Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas was quite wonderful and I highly recommended it. The latter is directed by Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room-helmer Alex Gibney and with any luck it should cancel out the memory of the appallingly smug Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride: Hunter S Thompson on Film (Tom Thurman, 2006, USA) which did nothing to upgrade the BBC’s original 1978 documentary Fear and Loathing in Gonzovision. As for The Good, the Bad, the Weird — Kim’s South Korean Western opus set in 1930s Japanese-occupied Manchuria, which brings together local stars Lee Byeong Heon, Jung Woo Sung and the mighty Song Kang Ho — well, this could be my clear contender for cinematic blockbuster of the year.

11 September, 2008

FILM NORIKO’S DINNER TABLE DIRECTOR SONO SION

Sono Sion’s Noriko’s Dinner Table (2005)
‘The family that eats together stays together’

Sono Sion is probably best known in the west for the independent Japanese shocker Suicide Club (2001), a tale of consumerist fads and intergenerational conflict that takes as its fictional starting point the mass suicide of 54 schoolgirls at Tokyo’s busy Shinjuku station. Suicide Club was to be part of a trilogy of films based loosely on this central conceit but in the intervening years Sono has found it “in reality [. . .] very difficult” bringing this to fruition (he is currently releasing follow-up novels to some of his most personal film projects, a practice he initiated in 2002 with the book Suicide Circle: The Complete Edition). In September 2006, Eleven Arts released Noriko’s Dinner Table, Sono’s promised follow-up to Suicide Club and the second of three feature productions made by the director in 2005 alone (the others were Into a Dream and Strange Circus). On the international festival circuit the film had a modest run, winning the Don Quixote award at the 40th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, but it also proved highly divisive. Both The New York Times and The New York Sun dismissed the film as scrambled and overblown (writes Zoller Seitz, [Sono] “oversells the first half’s whimsical touches [. . .] and the second half’s spiral-of-doom emoting”), while Leslie Felperin, writing for the trade paper Variety, said that “the puzzle doesn’t quite form a complete picture by the end, which may leave genre fans frustrated but the arthouse crowd intrigued”. Meanwhile in the world of online fandom, where allegiances hold strong for the original as well as for such subcultural gems as Yamaguchi Yudai and Yamamoto Junichi’s Meatball Machine (also released in 2005), the film appears to lack the bite or pop-cultural tackiness of the original and is regarded nowhere near as highly.

Suicide Club revisited: the mass suicide as seen again in Noriko’s Dinner Table (2005)

The story revolves around a suburban family, the Shimabaras. Teenage sisters Yuka and Noriko are holed up in the Aichi city of Toyokawa where emotional and intellectual discord gradually drives both girls to ditch school and run away from home. First Noriko (Fukiishi Kazue), then later Yuka (Yoshitaka Yuriko), seek out the adult world of Tokyo where they pick up with a bizarre cult group, known only as the Family Circle. Under the leadership of Kumiko (Tsugumi), who shares a sort of Philip K. Dick-inflected philosophy of life in which its members sell fake realities to potential clients, the girls learn to forger their past identities and in doing become key players in a lucrative family-rental service, catering to an entire cityscape fractured by social disintegration. Back at home, Taeko (Miyata Sanae) tragically accepts responsibility for failing in her duty as a mother and takes her own life, leaving her mortified husband, Tetsuzo, to obsess over the fate of his girls until very literally the point of absolute exhaustion. He then hatches a plan to track down the Family Circle, with the intention of ‘hiring’ back his daughters in order to re-make the family.

References to the events and themes of Suicide Club (whose victims gathered in the cyber-support forum Haikyo.com, a fictional website that is actually accessible online) are made in service of a much broader discussion about family structure, family relationships, social organisation, and social change. The film invites a re-evaluation of the characteristics of stable family systems and consideration of the ways in which family structure, family relationships, social organisation, living arrangements inside and outside the familial home, and the autonomy of children are changed over time. Despite its hopeful final image, which manages to consign the Shimabara family to history whilst simultaneously honouring it for producing a free-thinking, sensible adult in Yuka, Noriko’s Dinner Table ultimately ends on a down-note in its critique of family units. There is no getting away from the painful truth that in all families something inevitably has to give, that — although parents work exceptionally hard to develop family cohesion, providing levels of commitment, support and interest that often go unparalleled until a child develops a unique support system of their own — inevitably complacency sets in. Here, it is the father, Tetsuzo (Mitsuishi Ken, whose performance is compelling), that seems to fail, not because he is rigidly disciplinarian, or too emotionally nurturant, but because he seems to have lost himself in the humanitarian values he engenders. Yet his reasons for tracking down Yuka and Noriko are absurdly egotistical: he needs to show them precisely what he is capable of.

I find myself in agreement when Sono hints that neither popular freedom-of-choice values, nor classical Confucian values, will save the traditional family. He goes on to make the potentially upsetting point that personal connections and familial relationships are transitory, that although we may not literally be rootless we are, ultimately, making this journey on our own. The point at which we realise this, in early adolescence, is the point at which, Sono seems to be saying, the family hits its inevitable crossroads. Like some of the finer Hollywood movies of the 1980s / 1990s — think Allan Moyle’s generation gap movie Pump up the Volume (1990) — Sono’s film finds solace in its proposal that families have expiration dates, beyond which the typical power relations of children and their parents naturally dissolve. It may end on a pessimistic note, but Sono makes it a liberating one, a hopeful sign for Yuka, the real star of the film, of a connected future.

30 August, 2008