This film starts like a mystery or possibly a J-horror flick. Twin boys, Shun and Kei, are washing up after getting ink spilled on them, when suddenly Kei takes off like a rabbit without explanation. He leads Shun on a chase through the narrow, winding streets of their neighborhood in the ancient city of Nara, and vanishes literally within the few seconds that he is out of Shun's sight. Shun wanders around bewildered, and when he finds his parents, he seems unable to articulate what has happened.
Fast forward ten years. Shun is now in high school, a quiet young man who has a platonic friendship with a girl named Yu. Life at home is quiet and subdued to the point of isolation. In fact, the movie contains surprisingly little dialogue. Shun's father is a blue collar craftsmen of some sort (he has a workshop inside the family's sprawling old house), and his mother is in an advanced state of pregnancy. Each member of the family moves around the house as if not aware of the others, and meals are silent affairs.
The only vitality in the film comes from scenes in which Shun's father is involved with the neighborhood's Basara festival. The discussions with the neighbors are spirited and believable.
In a subplot, Yu learns that the woman who has raised her is not her mother but her aunt. This earthshaking news is revealed matter-of-factly as Yu and her putative mother are walking down the street.
At one point in the film, Shun overhears his father talking to a policeman. Kei has been found, and the father is supposed to come and identify him. He is dead, not abducted and kept prisoner, as has happened in a couple of cases that were in the news recently in Japan, but the viewer knows that only because he never comes home. We are never given any details, not even at the very end, when the soundtrack of the disappearance scene is replayed while the camera moves ever farther away, culminating in an aerial view of Nara, which is exceedingly frustrating, since we saw his disappearance from Shun's point of view.
Learning that Kei is dead does nothing to raise the emotional temperature inside the house. Everyone is locked into themselves, and despite occasional outbursts, everyone seems to be hurting silently and alone. Even the birth of another son seems to excite the neighbors and the midwife more than it does the members of the family.
As another reviewer said, the festival scenes are truly wonderful, as is the cinematography in general. You see the life of a typical traditional Japanese neighborhood, sense its small-town atmosphere, with everyone knowing everyone else's business, and even feel the muggy heat of summer. I've lived in Japan, and those scenes made me "homesick." However, because I've lived in Japan, I know that the emotional detachment portrayed in the film is extreme even by the standards of that culture. The emotional flatness and the unresolved plot detract from what could have been a moving study of a family adjusting to the certainty of grief after years of uncertainty.
Fast forward ten years. Shun is now in high school, a quiet young man who has a platonic friendship with a girl named Yu. Life at home is quiet and subdued to the point of isolation. In fact, the movie contains surprisingly little dialogue. Shun's father is a blue collar craftsmen of some sort (he has a workshop inside the family's sprawling old house), and his mother is in an advanced state of pregnancy. Each member of the family moves around the house as if not aware of the others, and meals are silent affairs.
The only vitality in the film comes from scenes in which Shun's father is involved with the neighborhood's Basara festival. The discussions with the neighbors are spirited and believable.
In a subplot, Yu learns that the woman who has raised her is not her mother but her aunt. This earthshaking news is revealed matter-of-factly as Yu and her putative mother are walking down the street.
At one point in the film, Shun overhears his father talking to a policeman. Kei has been found, and the father is supposed to come and identify him. He is dead, not abducted and kept prisoner, as has happened in a couple of cases that were in the news recently in Japan, but the viewer knows that only because he never comes home. We are never given any details, not even at the very end, when the soundtrack of the disappearance scene is replayed while the camera moves ever farther away, culminating in an aerial view of Nara, which is exceedingly frustrating, since we saw his disappearance from Shun's point of view.
Learning that Kei is dead does nothing to raise the emotional temperature inside the house. Everyone is locked into themselves, and despite occasional outbursts, everyone seems to be hurting silently and alone. Even the birth of another son seems to excite the neighbors and the midwife more than it does the members of the family.
As another reviewer said, the festival scenes are truly wonderful, as is the cinematography in general. You see the life of a typical traditional Japanese neighborhood, sense its small-town atmosphere, with everyone knowing everyone else's business, and even feel the muggy heat of summer. I've lived in Japan, and those scenes made me "homesick." However, because I've lived in Japan, I know that the emotional detachment portrayed in the film is extreme even by the standards of that culture. The emotional flatness and the unresolved plot detract from what could have been a moving study of a family adjusting to the certainty of grief after years of uncertainty.