歩いても歩いても - Still Walking

'All happy families are alike...'





I saw a Japanese movie last weekend, 'Still Walking' is the English title. It was part of an Ozu season but it's not an Ozu film. It was made by Koreeda Hirokazu, the same guy who made Daremo Shiranai (Nobody Knows). I did not know this at the time. I watched the latter back in Japan when I was off sick having lost my voice. It reduced me to tears and found me on my friends' doorstep, unable to speak, with a post-it saying 'i need a hug'.



This film was very different. It was quiet, not unlike Daremo Shiranai, but it was not shocking. Nor was it tragic... At least, not in the same fashion. It discreetly reveals a family in its complexity. To see what you will, take what you will.
You slowly begin to piece together a history of shared relationships, shared time. But you also become aware of the gaps. The time spent apart. The children are grown and have families and children of their own. Their situations are all different. Their concerns are all different.

The film centres around the family-home. Grandma's house. It is full of life. It is full of the shared life of their family. But that life is not smooth, but like an old picture frame fractured and held together with tape. All the pieces are still pretty much in the right place but it's not lined up anymore and it's definitely no longer smooth.





Is it better to cling on to bitterness and fallacy or speak the truth and perhaps irrevocably damage relationships?

The focus in the film is on the silences, the gaps, the things left unsaid - what happens if you try to put those things into words? To fill in those gaps?
I seem to be from a generation of broken families. Will this be remembered historically as a period of emotional turmoil? Will this change as people become more adaptable to social change? As they become used to new roles as sons and daughters, as fathers and husbands, sisters and friends? What lessons are there to learn? What can be passed on and what can only be experienced?

If you look at the linguistic collocations:
broken families
split families
fractured families
shattered families

This all seems to suggest that families are not a malleable thing - but hard and fixed and rigid - something that shatters like glass.

relationships are strained to breaking point
people are bound to each other
yet ties are severed
and people are cut off





The main protagonist in the film is the middle aged son. The film ends with a snapshot several years after the main events of the film, with his own family. Repeating the things done before. Repeating what his mother taught him.