“Dying isn’t simple, is it?” Those words repeat through Christopher Makoto Yogi’s “I Was a Simple Man,” calling frequent attention to the film’s title, and to its curious use of the past tense. It frames the cancer-stricken final days of Masao Matsuoshi (Steve Iwamoto) in the context of someone who’s only thinking about the mess of people caught in his web now that his body has run out of filament and they’re all forever enmeshed.
Not that Yogi holds that against him. Layering the spectral hush of “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” over the elegiac domesticity of a late Ozu film like “An Autumn Afternoon,” the Honolulu-born filmmaker’s singularly Hawaiian second feature is haunted and haunting in equal measure — a reckoning pitched at the volume of a whisper. Just because people don’t stay behind doesn’t mean they ever leave.
Not that Yogi holds that against him. Layering the spectral hush of “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” over the elegiac domesticity of a late Ozu film like “An Autumn Afternoon,” the Honolulu-born filmmaker’s singularly Hawaiian second feature is haunted and haunting in equal measure — a reckoning pitched at the volume of a whisper. Just because people don’t stay behind doesn’t mean they ever leave.
- 1/29/2021
- by David Ehrlich
- Indiewire
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