APRIL 2020 77realism, its surprising humor, and what might be called
its moral grace. Some viewers might have sought out
his earlier work and discovered other, equally affect-
ing family dramas such as Maborosi (1995), Nobody
Knows (2004), Still Walking (2008), I Wish (2011),
Our Little Sister (2015), and After the Storm (2016).
The Truth, though it’s set in France in a culturally rar-
efied milieu that Kore-eda has never shown the slightest
interest in before, is very much of a piece with the mov-
ies he’s made in his own land and language. He’s not an
artist who loses his identity when he’s away from home.
And that, I think, is because the idea of home and
the twisty paradoxes of identity are the subjects he’s
been exploring for his entire career. At this strange
moment in history, with so many people (voluntarily
or not) far from home, and seemingly every nation in
the grip of an identity crisis, Kore-eda’s research could
be of some use. Near the end of the beautiful After the
Storm, a serious boy asks his father, “Are you who you
wanted to be?” The dad, Ryota (Hiroshi Abe), who
sees his son only once a month and has never been a
paragon of responsibility, ruefully replies, “I’m not who
I want to be yet.” (He’s in his late 30s or thereabouts.)
Then, after a thoughtful pause, he says, “What matters
is to live my life trying to become what I want to be.”
As in all of Kore-eda’s films, the simple statement’s
weight comes from the accumulation of ordinary
moments that have preceded it. Through that quotid-
ian stuff, the movie shows us exactly why Ryota says
what he says to his son: He has a growing sense that
he is helplessly turning into his own late and fiercely
unreliable father; he’s painfully conscious of his failure
to write a second novel after a prizewinning first; and
he’s recently been shocked by his ex-wife’s accusation
that he only acts like a real father. He does, as it hap-
pens, love the boy, and now, approaching middle age,
he wants to become the part he’s been playing. And in
the world of Kore-eda’s films, a tried-on identity can,
over time, turn into the genuine article. Actors know
that. So do children when they’re playing—pretending
hard, as if they could imagine themselves into what they
want to be. Becoming who you’re going to be begins,
for all of us, as play but ends as work: doing take after
take after take until it feels right, feels like yourself.
Children are often right at the center of Kore-
eda’s dramatic films, and usually, like Ryota’s pensive
son, they’re trying furiously to figure out the peculiar
worlds they live in, and what roles they’ll need to play
to survive in them. In I Wish, which is Kore-eda’s fun-
niest movie, a pair of brothers perform some pretty
strenuous magical thinking in an attempt to reunite
their divorced parents. In Nobody Knows, which is
his saddest, four siblings abandoned by their mother
do their best to act like a real, intact family, with the
eldest—12-year-old Akira—assuming the role of father.
They’re even further off the grid than the ragtag aggre-
gation of Shoplifters, yet they make of their grim situ-
ation, for a while, a reasonable facsimile of normality.
Kore-eda doesn’t romanticize childhood as Words-
worth did, but he clearly sees it as a crucial time, as a
sort of laboratory of identity. He respects children, not
out of some reverence for their innocence, or because
they are—as speechmakers never tire of reminding
us—“our future,” but because they’re interesting. That’s
why he’s the best director of kids since François Truf-
faut; he understands that they’re natural actors, that
making believe is what they do and how they grow.
That growth is a slow process, of course. But
Kore-eda is fascinated by process, and he has no prob-
lem with slow. The rhythms of his films are more
deliberate than many viewers are accustomed to. (He’s
the sole credited editor on all his dramatic films save
his first, Maborosi.) There’s a lot of walking around in
his pictures; a good deal of talking about, preparing,
and eating food; and a pervasive low-level sense of
expectation—of people waiting for something, keep-
ing alert for it as they go through their daily routines.
Kore-eda, who started out making documentaries for
Japanese television, watches and waits along with his
characters, strolling with them, taking his sweet time.
Then, when time is running out, his people get a lit-
tle desperate. While the kids play, the grown-ups brood
and fret, and those nearing the end of life grow melan-
choly or bitter. The elderly parents in Still Walking are
fearsomely unpleasant: the father grumpy and unyield-
ing, the mother a monster of passive-aggression. Fabi-
enne, in The Truth, is a world-class passive- aggressor too.
For all her success, she is a restless, unhappy woman. She
can’t help giving everyone around her—her daughter,
her son-in-law (Ethan Hawke), her staff, the film crew—
the feeling that somehow they’re letting her down. Her
tea, whoever serves it, is never the right temperature.
Ryota’s widowed mother, in After the Storm, is
kinder, more self-effacing, but prone to attacks of
rueful ness. At one point late in the film, as her son,
grandson, and former daughter-in-law take shelter in
her apartment from a howling typhoon, she muses qui-
etly, “I really just can’t understand why things turned
out like this.” You feel, in that heartbreaking moment,
her deep sense of too-lateness, her regret that few dis-
coveries about her life or herself are left to be made.For Kore-eda, the direst affliction a human being
can have is the feeling that one’s identity is settled, that
the rest of the story is simply unspooling, of its own
momentum, toward an inevitable ending. That’s like
living in a state of permanent denouement. As a story-
teller, Kore-eda doesn’t traffic much in denouements
or, for that matter, climaxes. What he cares about isIn the world
of Kore-eda’s
films, a tried-on
identity can,
over time,
turn into the
genuine article.