The Wonders

Alice Rohrwacher's second feature, winner of the Jury Prize at Cannes, is a movie about principles and how hard it is to keep them afloat in a changing world. It is also a lovely coming of age story about a young girl who is trying to blossom into her own person. Gelsomina (the astounding, Falconetti-like Maria Alexandra Lungu) is a teenage girl who lives with her beekeeper parents in rural Italy at an organic farm where they make honey. Her father is a hardworking German who is trying to live sustainably and to survive hard economic times. He has the misfortune, agriculturally speaking, of having four daughters, something the locals never stop teasing him about. He has turned Gelsomina, the oldest, into his right hand woman. She is conscientious, hardworking and efficient. But she is also growing and she is starting to bristle at his authority. He works her too hard, and even though he adores her, he is oblivious to her simple yearnings, for which he will eventually pay a bittersweet price.
Rohrwacher finds rich detail in every character.  She fills this world with inner life. Through the family's daily travails, she immerses us in a rural world that is being encroached upon by suspect government schemes involving tourism and appalling Italian reality shows. For a principled hippie like the father, keeping these monstrosities at bay from his daughters and his farm is a heroic, if thankless struggle, but for Gelsomina, these invasions may provide a way out of the crunch of financial doom and into something less relentlessly taxing. They are also full of whimsy, something that is in short supply in her exacting life. She is, after all, a young girl.
Rohrwacher is a wise and mature talent. An astute director of actors and a wonderful writer, she is immune to sentimentality. Her movies are tough, yet tender. The things that happen to this family may be small potatoes to us, but for them they can mean catastrophe. Because of their self-imposed isolation, everything that comes this family's way has enormous impact, whether it is a ridiculous reality TV contest or an extra helping hand at the farm. So when they take in a young boy as part of an exchange program for juvenile delinquents, nothing huge happens, but he throws everything out of whack: Gelsomina's importance as the oldest and most favorite daughter is undermined, as her interest in the boy is piqued, and this eventually leads to her blossoming into a decision maker, going against her father's demands for the first time. Like any great Italian film, The Wonders has a wistful combination of humor and sadness, of satire and heartbreak, of toughness and grace. A lovely, intelligent film.

Bridge of Spies

Based on a true story, the latest Steven Spielberg movie starts darkly and nimbly enough as insurance lawyer James Donovan, (Tom Hanks) is asked to represent Rudolph Abel (Mark Rylance) an artist accused of being a Russian spy. Since this is the cold war, the US government wants to give an appearance of justice and due process in order to teach the tyrannical Soviets a lesson. Behind closed doors, however, everybody thinks this is just putting on a show, and that Donovan will play his role, Abel will be sent to the gallows and America will look good. But it so happens that Donovan is a man of integrity, and, as a lawyer, he is not prepared to lose a case, no matter who he is defending.
Donovan soon finds out that at the apex of cold war paranoia, people, including judges, are willing to throw the Constitution out the window and to convict first and ask questions later, much like what has happened since 9/11 gave the government the pretext to ignore constitutional protections and do terrible things in the name of freedom. So far, so good.
This being Spielberg, every frame is richly composed, the production design by Adam Stockhausen is fantastic, the cinematography by Spielberg's longtime collaborator Janusz Kaminsky is lush and theatrical, and we zip along thinking that this is a great rebuke to laws like the Patriot Act, and aren't we lucky to have directors like Spielberg who want to call attention to the dark side of the American obsession with "freedom".
But then, this being Spielberg, the movie turns into a predictable hero-worship tale in which Donovan fights through thick and thin to save his client and ends up negotiating a spy exchange in East Berlin, which puts him into something out of a spy movie, but without the suspense.
Attempting to get a chocolate chip cookie out of its aluminum foil wrapping without the usher noticing was far more suspenseful that whatever was happening on the screen. People complained that Lincoln was boring. Well, I was riveted by the back and forth of political negotiation in Lincoln (and by the rich and precise language of Tony Kushner's script) and was bored to tears here.
I suspect the reason is that as written and played, the character of Donovan is toothless. Hanks is his usual likable, capable self, but for someone so shrewd, he lacks edge. There is a total absence of sexiness, and I don't just mean the physical kind, but the sexiness of a shrewd mind, of a crack negotiator who enjoys the fun and games. I understand the concept of a reluctant hero, but Donovan is thrown into an adventure by the CIA, and keeps complaining that he wants to go home. No doubt he uses this "aw shucks" strategy to disarm the enemy, but he is terribly uninteresting. This character needs an actor with more guile, someone who doesn't ooze virtue. Nothing is more boring than virtue.
I was not impressed with Mark Rylance either, because his Abel is a caricature and his mousy shtick wears thin. The great Amy Ryan is wasted as Donovan's wife. The movie is very stagey, and it gets hokier by the minute.
A terrific montage of school kids being traumatized by cold war propaganda is better than the entire film. Spielberg orchestrates a couple of visually exciting moments, but his instinct is towards the sappy, and I, for one, am exhausted with the fantasy of American decency. It has long outlasted its welcome. No one believes it anymore. Somebody make it stop.
For a much better hero, I recommend The Measure of A Man, a small, powerful film in which the hero (the great Vincent Lindon) is a guy who loses his job and is willing to do anything to have one, until his conscience says "enough".  It takes place mostly in a kind of French WalMart. Director Stephane Brizé wrests nail-biting suspense from a conversation with the guy in the unemployment bureau, from confrontations between security guys in the store and people whom they catch stealing. No Russian spies, no cold war, no swelling string section when the hero stops at nothing to do the heroic thing. Just the relentless fight of every man, every day, for dignity.

Time Out Of Mind

In Time Out Of Mind, Richard Gere plays a homeless man. This must be a feather in the actoral cap, as coveted as roles that call for drunks or geniuses with disabilities. Gere may very well get a nomination for his troubles, because these are the kinds of roles the Academy voters like. He has always been a very charismatic movie star, if not the most versatile actor. Here, grizzled and made to look bad (an impossible task) he has some good moments, but his limitations as an actor are also evident. He tends to mug a bit.
Written and directed by Oren Moverman, the movie explores what daily life is like for the homeless in New York City. It shows us that these people have pasts, and lives, and are trying hard to belong, at the very least to be seen. Moverman uses well known actors (in particular a great Ben Vereen and Kyra Sedgwick) and he has written a story, not just decided to ape reality. He does not pretend to speak or dream for the homeless. He is trying to get into their experience. We get a glimpse into life in the homeless shelters and a dispiriting, if fleeting, view of what it is like to live on the streets. Although it succeeds in moving us in spurts, the movie is bogged down by cursory writing and too much style.
Moverman and his cinematographer Billy Bukowski make some conceptual choices that they can't easily get out of. In order to express how the homeless are like ghosts among the living, they resort to shooting everything through panes of glass, windows, doors, frames within frames. This is a powerful device, but when deployed in almost every scene, it distracts from the story and robs presence to the actors, who are giving their all only to be shot through fifteen layers of glass. The sound design is also supposed to imitate New York, but instead of summoning reality, it sounds completely artificial. Every tangential conversation is heard at the same blistering level. The entire movie sounds like the opening of The Conversation; not necessarily a good thing. It is a fact of life in New York that we learn to ignore the sonic onslaught (just as we learn to ignore the rats and the homeless), so that we don't all go insane. It's not as if every single person on the street is screaming in our ear. Again, as an introduction to the disorientation of the main character it is a powerful device, but used all through the movie, it becomes highly annoying. In this movie, there seems to be more concern for trying to replicate the experience of homelessness than for telling a compelling, coherent story.
I never understood what was wrong with Gere's character. Did he suffer from amnesia, was he damaged by drugs and alcohol, was he in denial? What happened to him?  It is valid not to give us a glimpse of his former sheltered life. We see many homeless people on the street we don't know anything about, though we surmise that they had a home and a family once. His powerlessness and invisibility are sobering enough for all of us to think "there but for the grace of God...", but it is a problem in terms of clarity. There is also a business with his bartender daughter (a self-conscious Jena Malone) who is sore over his abandonment that has been seen before (in The Wrestler, for example, where it doesn't work either). Moverman has been more direct and precise with the story in films like The Messenger and Rampart. In Time Out Of Mind there lies a better movie buried beneath all the artifice.

Her

This is the kind of movie people love to love, because is it about "love". But it is not about any kind of actual human love that one can recognize. And not because the main relationship is between Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) and Samantha, his Operating System (Scarlett Johansson: best thing in the movie, and you never even get to see her).
It's because the way Her is written makes love look and feel like an endless Hallmark card, an endless sappy, hipsterish, saccharine pop song. As far as love and relationships are concerned, it has the depth of an inflatable kiddie pool, though it seems to think itself profound. Maybe I am an old, but if this is what young people think love is like, an endless litany of interminable kvetching, as a gaping chasm of "I need" and "I miss" and "I want", we are in deep doodoo. No wonder people in this movie can't relate to other people. They think love is all about themselves.
If you want to find out about true love, go see Amour. Her is for sissies.
Despite its lovely look and enticing premise, Her is a bore. Many are the reasons:
Theodore falls in love with his computer's operating system, Samantha, which is designed to be intuitive. She is super efficient and sexy and cool. I thought she was a bit too eager, but then again she is an OS. I wish mine was as perky.  Joaquin Phoenix, in the role of a sensitive schlub, has to act all by himself, cry all by himself and be a milquetoast all by himself. As always, he delivers. It is to Phoenix's credit that he is rather transfixing even when Theodore's only trait is sensitivity. There is no trace of edginess, irony, mischief, ego, self-destruction (always so sexy) or any flaws, except clinging to an infinite wellspring of grief and ennui. 100% sensitivity in a guy is not only hard to believe, it is boring. Theodore works writing virtual personal letters for a sort of personalized Hallmark cards of the future. If he were a corporate lawyer who is sensitive on the side, that would be interesting. But there is no contrast to him. He just aches and mopes.
I have complained elsewhere about this newfangled stereotype in American films; that of the hyper-sensitive male (there is one in every Pixar movie, and many a Mumblecore). These guys are the male embodiment of wallflowers: shy, afraid of girls, too emotionally frail to function. Excuse me if I burp. Meanwhile, with the exception of Samantha, who is perfect because she aims to please, the rest of the women in the movie are just plain strange. Theodore's ex-wife, played mostly silently by Rooney Mara, who deserves better, seems to be a slightly bipolar, difficult girl. We never really understand why they divorced, since she appears mostly in silent flashback montages, like a Saint Valentine's day catalog of Kodak relationship moments: laughing on the beach, having a pillow fight, etc. Since we never really get to experience what it was like to be married to her, his grieving seems a bit over the top. There is a fun dating sequence with Olivia Wilde (a lovely actress with great comic chops) but she turns into a shrew from hell in no time and for no clear reason. Amy Adams, almost unrecognizable in a crazy hairdo, plays an old flame and now good friend. When she and Phoenix are in the same room it feels like they are in different continents. I still don't understand what their deal was all about. Apparently, in the male wallflower genre women are so mysterious as to be incomprehensible, which is another load of crock.
Writer/director Spike Jonze has lovely visual ideas, and he creates a Los Angeles of the future with actual locations and by shooting in Shanghai (where he could not get a blue sky for love or money). He comes up with some arresting, intense moments.
A love scene between Phoenix and Samantha that borders on the ridiculous, is actually bracing, sexy and erotic. When was the last time you could say that about a scene in an American film? But the rest of the movie is most decidedly not. Jonze's vision of love is immature and self-centered, as I assume is that of all those self-proclaimed sensitive guys in movies, who, like Theodore, can't seem to grow a pair. What risk is this guy taking by comfortably falling in love with a machine? Try that with a human if you want real bravery. The sketchy writing never pays off the  questions the premise raises about our codependency with virtual tools. It doesn't even know how to resolve the conundrum of Theo's and Samantha's relationship and does so in an arbitrary cop out.

All Is Lost

There are two movies this season that are very similar in their preoccupation with man against the immensity of nature, where human accomplishment is suddenly brought to its knees and made to eat major humble pie.
All Is Lost, written and directed by J.C. Chandor, is like Gravity at sea. But in contrast to the more jokey, commercial endeavors of Gravity, it is a much more sober film, and an impressive writing and directorial improvement for Chandor, after his first film, Margin Call.
Robert Redford has never been the most expressive of actors, but he is perfectly cast and very effective as Our Man, a lone, rugged sailor who is somewhere in the Indian Ocean on a nicely appointed sailboat, when he runs into trouble. We know little about him, and he says even less during the course of the movie. His character is revealed  by all the decisions, big and small, he makes to survive.
The individual choices Our Man makes are small, methodical, but essential steps he takes to salvage his boat and keep himself alive. This is not a visceral movie. It is beautifully shot, and at times everything seems a little too perfect (curiously, the lens never gets wet, even when the storm is raging), but it does give you the sense of what it is like to be alone and surrounded by merciless water, whether under the cruel sun or tossed about in a vicious storm. One learns a lot about the kinds of things you could do in case you're stranded in the ocean like Our Man. With any luck, you will have an extremely well-equipped boat, like he does. And even then, all that man made ingenuity and wealth of resources may fail you.
All Is Lost reminded me of the power of visual storytelling, which is how movies began. The movie is transfixing without dialogue. Our Man is extraordinarily self-possessed, considering his dire circumstances. Clearly, he is a man of few words, even when alone against nature. Chandor has written an elegant, economical script and has wisely resisted the temptation of giving too much information to the audience or plucking too much on the heart strings. This is not a sentimental movie. Chandor gives the audience the opportunity of filling in the blanks of the character, something that is usually absent in commercial films, which refuse to leave anything to the imagination.
At the beginning there are clues as to who he is to others. And because he is so precise in his behavior, and so true to character, one can come up with an interesting back story. I imagine he is wealthy, a titan of industry, used to everything going his way, a leader, who when faced with imminent extinction, does not panic and methodically tries to fix things. This is in stark contrast to Clooney's and Bullock's gabfest in Gravity, and it is so much more mysterious and interesting. I could have used a little more panicking from Redford, who has one fabulous moment where he finally loses it, and with good reason. But because he so clearly establishes who he is by how he does things, his sangfroid is coherent with the character, if not entirely believable at all times.
All Is Loss plunges us into chaos immediately. We experience the ups and mostly relentless downs of this man's losing battle against the ocean. There are some inspired images, like a flock of floating sneakers bobbing out of a stray container, or Our Man wading almost dreamily inside the flooded boat to retrieve a spoon and a fork. He is a fastidious, refined man, and not about to become a savage just because he is lost at sea.
The sound design is fantastic. The cinematography, both over and underwater, is gorgeous. Alas, there are a couple of moments that undermine the very thoughtful craftsmanship and conceptual approach of this film. The music at the beginning is very good; just a couple of menacing chords that blend seamlessly into the terrifying sounds of invading water. I was thanking Chandor in my head for being extremely adroit with the use of music, when out comes a sequence where the music blooms into a horrid, cheesy melody that has Our Man covering his ears in despair. It isn't clear if he is hearing it in his head, in which case he is right to loathe it, but it happens at a key turning point and it shatters our illusion of being there.
Similarly, some people may feel the ending is a cop out, but, even if it is a bit contrived, it is handled with grace and understatement, and it is justly rewarding.

NYFF: The Bad And The Ugly

We're almost 3/4 of the way through our movie marathon, and this year's edition of the Festival has been a little lackluster, in our humble opinion. 

We've seen a bunch of duds, starting with the silly, humorless Real, by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, a movie for 14 year-olds without a shred of lightness or wit. It's a science fiction romance about a young woman in a coma, and her boyfriend, who is allowed to roam her mind. The premise is fantastic and full of interesting possibilities. The movie is great to look at, with a crisp, stylish use of CGI, and it has some good creepy moments. Being inside someone else's mind is not necessarily a walk in the park. I fail to understand how it made to the festival. It's not a good sign when the audience claps thinking the movie is thankfully over and laughs when it insists on going on. This is one instance where a smarter remake is in order.

I hated Bastards, Claire Denis' exploitative, sordid, gratuitous, sloppy movie. I surmise she set out to make the film noir to end all noirs, some sort of depraved version of Chinatown, and, as far as I'm concerned, it did not pan out. Her brilliant contribution is to think she can intersperse bits of plot out of sequence, but this is not only disorienting, it's confusing and makes no sense.  
Bastards is a visually and spiritually ugly movie, with a puerile, simplistic wish to disgust disguised as an attack on capitalism (major yawn), a flimsy plot and otherwise dignified actors like Vincent Lindon (only good thing in the movie) and Chiara Mastroianni trying to impart coherence to barely sketched out characters.
It's a good story. A ship captain, estranged from his wealthy family, comes to shore to help his relatives at a difficult juncture and unravels a web of human depravity: a classic tale of diving into the darkest pits of the underworld. But nothing is believable. Instead, Bastards is some sort of pretentious intellectual exploration of genre. Plus, every time I see Lola Creton and her insufferable pout onscreen, I want to strangle her.
There are very few times when I want to unsee a movie, when a movie so pollutes my consciousness, that I want to scrub my brain with lye. This is one of those times. And it's not that what disgusts me is the trite revelation of depravity that Denis taunts the audience with for two hours and saves like a dog salivating over a bone towards the end; it's the utter lack of empathy, grace or genuine human feeling. That, and the terribly cheesy music, vulgar and in bad taste, like the rest of the movie. It made me gag.
The fact that Bastards was made by a woman doesn't make it any less prurient and exploitative. This movie is the equivalent of watching an exhibitionist fondle his dick in public. There is no meaning, only self-absorption and the perverse wish to molest.

NYFF 2013: Club Sandwich

Fernando Eimbcke's third feature is a wry, sharp, sweetly funny coming of age story with a twist. Héctor (Lucio Giménez Cacho Goded) is a chubby, awkward teenager on vacation with his young mom, Paloma (the spectacular María Reneé Prudencio). They are staying in a deserted hotel in Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca, which seems suspended in time. In fact, time seems suspended in time, since nothing much happens. At the beginning, we are not even sure if they are mother and son or brother and sister, such is their rapport. They apply sunscreen, they lie like lizards by the empty pool, they play rock paper scissors to see who takes a shower first. Paloma has an eyebrow piercing, tattoos and an attitude. Héctor is mutating into adulthood, which means he is a sulking, monosyllabic teenager with secret desires. Their chummy relationship is clearly on the cusp of changing. They bicker over their choice of underwear, and there are times when Paloma can feel his awkwardness shutting her out, as he starts objecting to the status quo.
One day, a family arrives. A chubby teenage girl, an old man in a wheelchair and a nurse who looks like a cross between Nurse Ratched and Chloris Leachman in Young Frankenstein. The girl, Jasmín (Danae Reynaud), sees Héctor by the pool and avoids him at first. But then, as she sees him baking like a lobster under the sun, having clearly disregarded Paloma's sunscreen instructions, Jasmín wakes him up and invites him over to his room to slather Phillips Milk of Magnesia on his back. Love, or something like it, ensues.
By now, Eimbcke has established a sparse, still style. His camera never moves. It observes the characters up close or from afar and stays out of the way to allow us to see how they move, mostly internally. He is so skilled a writer/director that one doesn't miss the moving camera. His framing is never boring. One welcomes the beautiful compositions, the almost theatrical, yet fluid, organic staging. Nothing else calls attention to itself, but the characters and their moods and gestures.
The movie seems suspended in amniotic fluid, but Eimbcke has a mischievous spirit and he shatters the stillness of this family's cocoon with a couple of fantastically disruptive visual gags. And there is nothing superfluous in his writing. A seemingly tangential trip to grab a bag of chips from a vending machine at the beginning of the movie is used for a beautiful turning point towards the end.
Not much action, not much dialogue, and still, tectonic shifts are taking place. Héctor discovers sex, but most importantly, and here's the twist (because how many times have you seen a teenage coming of age story?), it is Paloma's coming of age as well. Hers is the ruder awakening, as she suddenly realizes that the exciting tiny new bristles over Hector's upper lip are the harbingers of his impending independence from her; that from now on, he will divide his love for her with someone else. It's the dawn of a new, scary era and her ambivalent, shocked, confused, and unprepared reaction to it is hilarious and deeply moving.
We learn that "there is no dad" for Hector, which explains his strong bond with Paloma. Jasmin knows every detail of her conception. But Paloma doesn't remember how Hector got made (she slept around). That is, she is as far from the stereotypical long-suffering Mexican mother as anyone has ever been in a Mexican film, a feat for which Eimbcke should be named national hero. Paloma is independent minded, a single mother, fiercely loving but not unduly smothering. She is bracingly unsentimental. She is jealous and suspicious of the angelic-faced yet sinuous Jasmin, and just as she exhibits behaviors unseemly for a mother in their wounded competitiveness, in the end she rises quietly to the ocassion with a simple, unobtrusive, selfless act of enormous grace.

NYFF 2013: Stranger By The Lake

A mesmerizing, if hermetic film by Alain Guiraudie, it comes preceded by its notorious sexually explicit gay sex scenes. It's supposed to be a thriller, but if so, it is more concerned with the mating habits of gay men cruising by a remote lake, than by the typical plot machinations of murder mysteries. I found Stranger By The Lake mostly tedious and repetitive, and I desperately wanted it to cut to the chase promised by the promise of a thriller, but it does have an obsessional quality that is hard to shake off. It's as if the film is like its characters, obsessed with the cruising ritual, dispassionate about meaningful emotional connections. 
Guiraudie comes back again and again to the starting point. The first images are lovely and bracing. Franck, a very handsome young man, arrives in his car to look for men to fuck. There are naked men at the beach and naked men coming out of the evergreen woods as if they were creatures grazing in their rightful habitat. The leisurely scenes of nature, of naked men at ease, reminded me of earnest animal life documentaries without the voiceover.
In a few economic strokes Guiraudie introduces a small cast of characters. There's the guy who loudly asks where are the horny women, the paranoid guy who is obsessed with privacy, the nerdy perv who likes to watch.  Yet there seems to be no real connection or camaraderie other than getting each other off and exchanging pleasantries. Even in the heat of Summer, and considering that they are there mostly for sex, the place seems oddly muted and cold.
An event stands out. Franck strikes up a conversation with Henri, a chubby loner who likes to sit away from everybody. Through the course of the movie they develop a friendship; the only relationship that has emotional dimension in the movie, and not coincidentally, one where there is no sex involved. But Franck has a crush on Michel, a textbook beefcake reminiscent of Tom Selleck, so hirsutely handsome as to be borderline ugly.
The problem with Guirardeau's dispassionate approach is that despite the scenes of graphic sex, which did not seem to me any different from run of the mill porn, we never really remotely feel Franck's longing. He claims to want this man but we don't see it happening. I thought of In The Mood For Love, a film that is about nothing but longing, and in which nothing happens, yet the feeling of repressed desire is intoxicating, because it is shown in myriad gestures. Here it is the opposite: every desire gets easily fulfilled, but the whole thing is as sexy as a piece of cardboard. Granted, I am not a constituent, but I'd be curious to know if gay men find this movie erotic. I found it anything but.
Because we never experience the frisson of Franck's obsession, and because the object of his affection is emotionally unappealing, I found it hard to relate to what happens next, which is an intellectual illustration of amour fou.
Guirardeau's conceit is that the fear of intimacy, the denial of an emotional bond between these men, the strict emphasis on sexual desire, results in behavior that is far more shocking than the sex itself. Suddenly a young man is gone, his towel and sneakers and car sit abandoned for days, and no one at the beach bothers to ask. Franck is more interested in having Michel all to himself, in spite of knowing that he is extremely bad news. 
Guirardeau takes forever to sprinkle plot into his observational perch, but when he does, it comes in a few bold, effective strokes. A detective shows up, asking questions. Franck understands that his life is in jeopardy and still proceeds to engage in reckless and ultimately self-destructive mind games. He too, comes back again and again to a place of great risk, but he can't help it. He is head over heels, perhaps in love with desire itself, in love with danger, and with death itself.

NYFF 2013: Like Father, Like Son

Hirokasu Kore-eda's devastatingly tender film centers on an unthinkable family nightmare. Imagine you get a call one day that informs you that the 6-year old boy you have raised all his life was switched at birth at the hospital. Your son is not your son. Your actual son, as defined by blood lines, is living with a different family.
You think your kid takes after you or his mother, in his personality and his quirks. But Kore-eda shows that the kids are not so much products of genes but of their family lives, and that this harks back generations, just like genes do. If your dad was stern and absent, chances are that you will be too. Is this the fault of genes or behavior, or both? The director does not intend to preach an easy answer. He unspools his tale with such careful, heartbreaking observation that the audience, like the parents in the film, goes through every human emotion in the space of two hours.
The only way I can describe this movie is as an infinite, rippling spiral of love and loss. What do you do? The instinctive reaction is to leave things as they are for the sake of everyone involved, particularly the children, since everyone seems happy. But the idea of blood being thicker than water still holds powerful sway in people's minds, and perhaps more so in a traditional culture like Japan.
To compound the deepening complexity of the matter, one of the boys, the elfin Keita, is the single child of an affluent young couple in a big city, whereas the other one is  brother to two feisty tots and the son of a goofy, struggling electrician in a small town. The contrasts in their lives are enormous.
The movie starts with tiny Keita being grilled by two stern adults for his entrance exam to a prestigious school. Keita is obedient to a fault, takes piano lessons, and is calm and polite, and you don't notice he leads a boring, circumscribed life until you meet the other kid, whose days are an endless string of carefree, raucous play.
We are outraged at the immediate assumption by the decision makers (the affluent dad, the hospital functionaries, lawyers - all men) that the kid who was raised poor will benefit from switching back to his blood parents, that he will profit from every opportunity of advancement. And that returning the kids to their rightful owners will somehow make things right. But it is Keita who has more to gain: he is to nestle in a happy, unstructured life of modest means; rich in devotion to his present childhood, not to his future success. Meanwhile, the other boy is to live in a spiffy condo with all the warmth of a hotel room.
Kore-eda does not use a parallel structure. He focuses on Keita's dad, an ambitious workaholic with perhaps antiquated notions of blood and duty, and the product of an unhappy childhood. Through his ordeal, which he encumbers and worsens for everybody, every step of the way, we get a meticulous view of the contrasts of family life in Japan. At times you want to strangle him, but Kore-eda makes him empathetic precisely by showing him as a product of nurture as well. He is trying, as all parents, to be a good dad in the way he knows best, which is what he learned from childhood.
Kore-eda elicits incredibly natural performances from the wonderful children in the movie and spectacular acting from the adults. Masterful writing, direction and command of tone, which weaves warmth, gentle humor, quiet defiance, and unimaginable irony and despair, won this film the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes. No surprise: Steven Spielberg was president of the jury. Dreamworks is already working on a remake. I'll be damned if they get it right. Like Father, Like Son is not to be missed. Just bring a crate of tissues.







In memory of my dear Aunt Dora, devoted reader of this blog, who was passionate about movies, and would have loved this one.