MOVIE REVIEW
“Our Little Sister”
Grade: A
Starring Haruka Ayase, Masami Nagasawa and Suzu Hirose. Directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda. In Japanese with English subtitles.
Rated PG for thematic elements and brief language. Check listings for theaters. 2 hours, 6 minutes.
Bottom line: It's warm and approachable without being sentimental
“Our Little Sister” has to be seen to be believed. Not because it depends on huge explosions or special effects but because it doesn’t.
A delicate, unforced meditation on the bonds of family and the joys and wonders hidden in everyday life, this film is able to move audiences without apparent effort, and that must be experienced firsthand to be appreciated and understood.
One of the favorite films at Cannes 2015, “Our Little Sister” is the latest work by master Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda, a writer-director-editor whose wonderfully human films include “After Life,” “Nobody Knows,” “Still Walking” and “Like Father, Like Son,” the last of which won the Cannes jury prize in 2013.
This time, working from a graphic novel by Akimi Yoshida, Kore-eda focuses on sisters and their relationship to one another, starting with three siblings in their 20s who live together in an old ramshackle family house in the charming seaside town of Kamakura south of Tokyo.
But more than this, Kore-eda, as always, focuses on family, on how people relate to one another and the way life in all its inescapable complexity simply happens to the film’s protagonists and those they know and love.
“Our Little Sister’s” plot kicks in when the three Koda sisters receive the news that their “kind but useless” father, whom they haven’t seen or heard from in 15 years, has died.
Traveling to the funeral in a small town, they meet Suzu (Suzu Hirose, described in the press notes as “the Busiest 16-Year-Old in Japan”), the shy half sister they didn’t know they had. She’s the daughter of their father and the woman, also now dead, who broke up his marriage to their mother.
On an impulse but one shared by her siblings, oldest daughter Sachi (Haruka Ayase) invites Suzu to move to Kamakura and live with them. And this, despite warnings from the women’s acerbic great aunt that a child is not a pet, is just what happens.
As shot by Takimoto Mikiya, “Our Little Sister” is visually attentive to the beauties of the changing landscape, with a marvelous bicycle ride Suzu takes through a veritable tunnel of blooming cherry blossoms being a special high point.
It is the nature of director Kore-eda’s style, which is warm and approachable without being in the least sentimental, that “Our Little Sister” deepens almost without our noticing it, effortlessly taking us inside the particular dilemmas of these intertwined lives.
