Advertisement
Become a member of the Big Issue community
JOIN
Film

Film Review: After the Storm - an honest and complex depiction of family life

Hirokazu Koreeda’s old-fashioned family drama deserves to make the Japanese director much better known to UK audiences thinks Edward Lawrenson.

After the Storm is the latest 
film from Japanese director Hirokazu Koreeda, a director who isn’t as well known to UK audiences as he should be. His new film is a family drama: the pace is slow, attuned to the unhurried domestic rituals of an ageing matriarch who is one of the main characters, and its observations on life rueful and delicate. It’s the kind of film that risks being labelled old-fashioned, and it’s true that After the Storm invites our
 involvement through an accumulation of gentle, small-scale moments, passing character details and a quiet command of atmosphere. Yes, it requires some patience but compared to the attention-demanding brashness of so many other films I found
 something rather radical about its unfurling subtleties and 
contemplative mood.

After the Storm is set in 
suburban Tokyo, and much of the action converges on the small flat owned by Yoshiko (Kirin Kiki), an elderly widow and mother to a grown-up son, Ryôta (Hiroshi Abe). Their relationship is what the film worries away at, with absorbing insight and unsparing honesty. Now in his 40s, Ryôta wrote an award-winning novel more than 10 years ago. But that success is a distant memory, one of the figurative storms, perhaps, implied by the film’s title: this is a movie much more interested in the consequences of tempestuous events than their direct depiction. Right now Ryôta’s a mess. He works at a detective agency,
 devising tawdry ways with his partner to fleece clients of their money; he has a
gambling addiction; he is struggling to pay the child support for his young son Shingo; and he makes regular trips to his mum’s house to look for antiques he might pawn
 (a scheme of which the owlishly wise Yoshiko is all too aware).

In short, not an especially likeable character: and yet in a performance of rangy, ramshackle charisma Abe is able to draw out our sympathy. Even in his most pathetic moments Ryôta demonstrates roguish ingenuity – such as a lovely scene when he scuffs an expensive pair of trainers he has promised to his son in a sports store to secure a discount. Only his ex-wife Kyôko is immune to his charm. After the Storm is a film built from sharply observed throwaway moments and the best of them is the lacerating glower Kyôko gives him when he tricks her into spending the night with him and Shingo at Yoshiko’s flat. This extended sojourn in a cramped, untidy apartment – to which Kyôko reluctantly agrees because a typhoon has made travel plans difficult – is the film’s deeply moving set-piece, a night-long conversation piece between mother, son and ex-daughter-in-law. What follows is a mini-masterpiece of writing and performance, in which the disappointments and regrets of the past are ruminated on, joked about and angrily revisited by the flat’s 
inhabitants as the weather rages outside.

She reminded me of the elderly women who populate Alan Bennett’s plays – spiky, sardonic, soppily sentimental but wily and cunning too.

After the Storm catches you unawares: seemingly so slight, a chamber piece in a minor key, it is in fact as honest and complex a depiction of family life – and the fraught, tender, melancholy relationship between generations – that I’ve seen in a long time.

Special mention should be made of the vivid impression left by Yoshiko (wonderfully played by Kiki). She reminded me of the elderly women who populate Alan Bennett’s plays – spiky, sardonic, soppily sentimental but wily and cunning too.
 When encouraged to cultivate more of a social life now that her husband is dead, she says: “New friends at my age only mean more funerals.” It’s a line one can imagine the late Thora Hird delivering with mordant relish.

Advertisement
Advertisement

After the Storm is in cinemas from June 2

Advertisement

Become a Big Issue member

3.8 million people in the UK live in extreme poverty. Turn your anger into action - become a Big Issue member and give us the power to take poverty to zero.

Recommended for you

View all
Timestalker review – digging deep into how love makes fools of us all
Alice Lowe in Timestalker
Film

Timestalker review – digging deep into how love makes fools of us all

Why the problems of this remote Kenyan community are the problems that face us all
Film

Why the problems of this remote Kenyan community are the problems that face us all

Joker: Folie à Deux says nothing meaningful about living with mental illness
Joaquin Phoenix as Arthur Fleck (aka Joker) and Lady Gaga as Harley ‘Lee’ Quinn in Folie à Deux
Film

Joker: Folie à Deux says nothing meaningful about living with mental illness

Actor Adam Pearson: 'I wake up every morning, let the universe kick my arse and then carry on'
Adam Pearson in A Different Man
Letter To My Younger Self

Actor Adam Pearson: 'I wake up every morning, let the universe kick my arse and then carry on'

Most Popular

Read All
Renters pay their landlords' buy-to-let mortgages, so they should get a share of the profits
Renters: A mortgage lender's window advertising buy-to-let products
1.

Renters pay their landlords' buy-to-let mortgages, so they should get a share of the profits

Exclusive: Disabled people are 'set up to fail' by the DWP in target-driven disability benefits system, whistleblowers reveal
Pound coins on a piece of paper with disability living allowancve
2.

Exclusive: Disabled people are 'set up to fail' by the DWP in target-driven disability benefits system, whistleblowers reveal

Cost of living payment 2024: Where to get help now the scheme is over
next dwp cost of living payment 2023
3.

Cost of living payment 2024: Where to get help now the scheme is over

Strike dates 2023: From train drivers to NHS doctors, here are the dates to know
4.

Strike dates 2023: From train drivers to NHS doctors, here are the dates to know