78 APRIL 2020
Culture & Critics OMNIVOREhow we move a little farther toward ourselves, take a
few more halting steps forward. In the whimsical After
Life (1998), he even allows himself to fantasize that the
process goes on, at least for a while, after death. In that
film, the newly deceased are required, as a condition of
admission to heaven, to select a single memory from
their earthly lives to hold on to for eternity. Naturally,
he’s interested not in heaven per se, but in how the dead
might imagine an afterlife of their own choosing, a story
of who they were when they were most themselves.
In his 1996 documentary, Without Memory,
Kore-eda tells the story of a man named Hiro-
shi Sekine who has a neurological condition called
Wernicke- Korsakoff syndrome and is unable to retain
the memories of recent experiences. He can remember
his life prior to the onset of the disorder, but next to
nothing of what he did a day or even an hour before.
“If I’m really here, inside this flow of time,” Sekine
says, “if I really exist or not, I just don’t know.” Every-
thing is new to him, all the time. His life is a perpetual
reinvention. He’s an extreme case, in other words, of
the qualities that draw Kore-eda to children and, in
his latest film, to actors—to those dedicated to the
constant reimagining of experience, to endless revi-
sions of the self. The trick, for his fictional characters,
is to do what the real-life subject of Without Memory
cannot: to find a sense of continuity in the chaos.
His movies don’t presume to tell us how to do that
trick—only that it has to be done, somehow. A lovely
moment arrives near the end of The Truth when Fabi-
enne’s little granddaughter, Charlotte (Clémentine Gre-
nier), tells her grandma quite earnestly that she’d like to
be an actress too, when she grows up. Fabienne is visibly
moved by this demonstration of generational conti-
nuity, which apparently skipped her daughter (who
was “lousy” in her school play, and became a writer
instead). She might be even more pleased to know, as
the audience learns soon after, that Charlotte is already
an actress: The child was playing a scene scripted for her
by her mother, and playing it to perfection.
“True” or not, Charlotte’s declaration seems to do
Fabienne a world of good. It puts a spring in her step
as she marches with her entourage to reshoot her own
scene. This filmmaker constructs his stories so that they
arrive not at a clear resolution but at witty, paradoxical
moments like this one. He never leaves us unsatisfied,
though. For those of us who are trying to understand
why things turned out like this—most of the current
human residents of Earth, these days—Kore-eda offers,
as he always has, sound advice: Keep imagining, keep
playing, and, most of all, keep walking.
Terrence Rafferty is the author of The Thing Happens,
a collection of writings about movies.
Billy Collins is a former U.S. and New York State poet laureate.
His new collection, Whale Day, will be published in September.A Sight
By Billy CollinsLast night I watched a documentary on war,
and the part I carry with me today
was the spectacle of a line
of maybe 20 blinded soldiers
being led, single-file,
away from a yellow cloud of gas.That must be what accounts
for this morning’s brightness—
sunlight slathered over everything
from the royal palms to the store awnings,
from the blue Corolla at the curb
to a purple flower climbing a fence,
one gift of sight after another.I couldn’t see their bandaged faces,
but each man had one hand
resting on the shoulder
of the man in front of him
so that every man was guiding
and being guided at the same time,
and in the same tempo,
given the unison of their small, cautious steps.