Unless the story includes a gun fight, serious movies about family life are quiet stories, their rise and fall as gentle as the ripples in a Forest Park lagoon. So it is in "Still Walking," a Japanese import. But there's a current hidden below the surface, and it affects everyone in Hirokazu Kore-Eda's lovely film about a family that cannot let go of its past, or its future, for that matter. Kore-Eda wrote, directed and edited with real skill.
We're dealing with an upper-middle class family. Kyohei (Yoshio Harada) is a retired doctor, his wife, Toshiko (Kirin Kiki) is a homemaker and they have three children. Junpei, the eldest, died while saving a small boy who was drowning, and the other two, son Ryota (Hiroshi Abe) and daughter Chinami (the single-named You), have lived in his shadow. Even the annual vacation at the seashore summer house, where we are joining them, is a chance for Kyohei to speak of Junpei and what a perfect person he was.
Adding to the difficulties is the fact that Ryota has married a widow with a child, a marriage that the patriarch does not like very much. And Chinami also has a husband and two small children, making the house rather crowded, and she is working her parents to leave her the house. Small disputes are common, Kiki's determination and kitchen skills are good to watch (her performance impressed me a lot), and the rhythms of family and life in Japan, we discover, are not dissimilar from those in St. Louis
At the Tivoli.
–Joe