Kore-eda’s film about four children left to themselves in a flat is patient, exact and the saddest thing about childhood we have seen in years. It is also twenty minutes too long. We recommend it without hesitation.
Keiko (YOU) moves into a flat with her son Akira (Yūya Yagira) and lets it be understood that it is just the two of them. That night Shigeru (Hiei Kimura) and Yuki (Momoko Shimizu) are brought in quietly; Kyoko (Ayu Kitaura) arrives on her own. The rules are explained over dinner: no school, no going outside, no noise. Then Keiko goes away for work, leaves Akira an envelope of cash and a note, and the film settles in to watch what four children do with a flat and a shrinking pile of money.
It is one of the best films about children we know, and it gets there by refusing to raise its voice. Hirokazu Kore-eda, who wrote, edited and produced as well as directed, has not written a single scene in which anyone says what the film is about. The children do not weep for the camera. Nobody shouts at the mother. The film records what is in the fridge, what is on the balcony and who is wearing whose shoes, and it trusts us to do the arithmetic.
Yutaka Yamazaki shoots nearly everything handheld and close, at child height, and spends an unusual amount of time on hands and feet: Akira counting coins at a convenience store till, Yuki’s sandals that squeak with every step, nail varnish going on and chipping off. The production designers, Keiko Mitsumatsu and Toshihiro Isomi, let the flat change in front of us. It starts tidy and bright and ends with crayon on the walls, washing-up in the bath and a row of seedlings growing in instant-noodle pots on the balcony. Titi Matsumura’s music is mostly acoustic guitar, used sparingly, and it stays out of the flat for long stretches.
What moved us more than we expected was not any of the obvious things. It was those noodle pots. The children have brought seeds back from the park and planted them in rubbish, and the plants come up, and someone has to remember to water them. We also felt a steady anger, which the film never asks for, at YOU’s Keiko. She is played not as a monster but as a girl: a sing-song voice, a giggle, presents from the station kiosk, and one honest question to Akira about whether she is not allowed to be happy too. The performance is so light that it takes a while to notice how cold it is.
Yūya Yagira carries the film, and the shooting has plainly gone on long enough that we can watch him change; his face lengthens and his shoulders drop as the months pass. He is a boy who does the shopping, cooks, deals with the adults who come to the door, and still wants to play baseball with children his own age. Ayu Kitaura’s Kyoko, who wants a piano and settles for picking out notes on a toy one, is the quietest of the four and we think the saddest. Hanae Kan arrives midway as Saki, a schoolgirl who starts spending afternoons at the flat, and the scenes with her are the most conventionally written in the film.
It is 141 minutes and does not need to be. The middle hour, in which the money runs out and the seasons turn, repeats itself: another trip to the shop, another unpaid bill, another empty rice box. We think that is partly the point and partly a director editing his own footage and finding it hard to let any of it go. The second half takes a turn we will not describe, and the film’s handling of it, with the music up and the camera looking away, is the one place it reaches for an effect it had not needed before.
Kore-eda has made warmer films since, and busier ones. This is the barest, and it belongs alongside Loach’s Kes among films that simply watch a child the adults have given up on and wait to see what happens.
It is a 12 certificate. Nothing in it would frighten a child. Nearly all of it will frighten a parent.
