From Cannes: "Our Little Sister" Falls Short

Hirokazu Koreeda, often considered successor of the legendary Japanese filmmaker Yasujirō Ozu, is famous for his slow-paced, delicately told films about lovers and families. “Umimachi Diary” (English “Our Little Sister”) is a standard Koreeda film in that it has almost no dramatic conflicts but instead focuses  the emotions and family bonding of four sisters in a family. It is so typical of Koreeda that it fails to surprise in any sense and seems to be produced on an assembly line with a standard art film formula.

“Umimachi Diary” begins when three sisters (played by Haruka Arase, Masami Nagasawa, and Kaho) go to a small village to attend the funeral of their father, whom they have not seen for 15 years. At the funeral, they meet their little half-sister Suzu (Suzu Hirose) and decide to take the now orphaned girl back to live with them. The rest of the film focuses on how Suzu adapts to the new way of life and her relationship with her three sisters, as she goes to a new school, join the local soccer team, and helps with housework. At the same time, the film also addresses each of the three other sisters’ problems with work and family.

The film does succeed in its execution of each individual subplot. The cinematography is beautiful, the performance is performances are easily connectable, and the pacing is natural. Koreeda shows his great power of observation when the emotional bonds of the characters are represented in or developed through the most tiny details like cooking or walking. However, all these details do not ever coalesce into a coherent whole. As the director tries to elaborate on every character, he ends up not fully exploiting the potential of any of them. While Koreeda tries to capture the passage of time through the travails of a family, he just shows a collection of interchangeable episodes that rarely give the audience a sense of development. Also, at times the beautiful shots landscape and Japanese food together with the rather sentimental music become so excessive that the film feels like some TV soap for housewives. In the end, none of the subplots are especially impressive, and the whole work fails to put itself above the hundreds of slow art films depicting ordinary families.

It would be unfair to call “Umimachi Diary” a bad film, because it’s delicate, well crafted and has many pretty moments. However, it falls short of being a great film, because these fragmented moments don’t work together to rise from mediocrity.

—Tianxing V. Lan can be reached at tianxinglan@thecrimson.com.