One of the best living filmmakers is getting a well-deserved showcase this weekend at the Chicago International Film Festival when Hirokazu Kore-eda will be honored by a fest that I've always associated closely with one of my absolute favorite directors. CIFF has been a platform for Kore-eda multiple times, and they're the fest that helped me discover him with the showing of "Nobody Knows" in 2004. It's hard to believe it's been two decades since that masterpiece, a film I'm tempted to call Kore-eda's best, but there are a lot of candidates for that position.
What makes Kore-eda special? A deep, honest interest in humanity, and the emotional undercurrents that shape it. His films contain such rich curiosity about mankind, often returning to themes like grief, trauma, and, most of all, how family isn't always biological. He's interested in connection, and he creates more of it through his art by fulfilling Roger's belief of film as an empathy machine as much as any filmmaker that I can think of. He's a gem, and CIFF is showing six of his films in honor of this event. Find details about the screenings below along with links to our reviews of all six films and a quote from each. Go see at least one. Maybe more.
"After Life" (****)
""After Life" considers the kind of delicate material that could bedestroyed by schmaltz. It's the kind of film that Hollywood likes to remake with vulgar, paint-by-the-numbers sentimentality. It is like a transcendent version of "Ghost," evoking the same emotions, but deserving them. Knowing that his premise is supernatural and fantastical, Kore-eda makes everything else in the film quietly pragmatic. The staff labors against deadlines. The arrivals set to work on their memories. There will be a screening of the films on Saturday–and then Sunday, and everything else, will cease to exist. Except for the memories."
Screening: October 17th, 5:30pm, AMC Newcity
"After the Storm" (***1/2)
"In films like "Nobody Knows," "After Life" and "Still Walking" (the three best of an incredible career if you're looking for a place to start), he turns the camera into a window. We look through it and see people a lot like us on the other side, but that empathy never comes through manipulation or cliché. With his latest, the remarkably moving "After the Storm," he again finds truth and drama in relatable human behavior, and does so by sketching fully-realized, three-dimensional characters. "After the Storm" is about a man unable to live in the present. He is always longing for what he's lost or dreaming about what he has yet to achieve. And it's destroying him. We've all been there. We've all waded in regret and felt skeptical about the future. "After the Storm" is one of our best filmmaker's best films."
Screening: October 18th, 2pm, Siskel Film Center
"Broker" (****)
"Hirokazu Kore-eda understands that unimaginable life decisions aren't made easily. They're often made by people who have reached a fork in the road where neither direction felt like the right one. We're all stumbling through life at certain points. And it's the people we meet on the way, the ones who end up joining us, that keep us moving."
Screening: October 20th, 1:45pm, AMC Newcity
"Like Father, Like Son" (***1/2)
"In a series of beautifully calibrated scenes, Kore-eda explores not just the nature of parental love but of filial love, and as the painful alienated past of Ryota comes to light, his stiffness and lack of empathy become more comprehensible but no less kind of infuriating. It's a testimony to Fukuyama's acting skills that as pig-headedly alienating as the character can be, he never becomes a complete turn-off. That's also a testimony to the way Kore-eda presents the situation; while the perspective is never not clear-headed, the abject heartbreak of the scenario is ever present. (Imagine the way that a typical Hollywood film about this story would make a deliberate burlesque of it.)"
Screening: October 19th, 11:30am, Siskel Film Center
"Nobody Knows" (***1/2)
"Kore-eda is the most gifted of the young Japanese directors. His "Mabarosi" (1995) about a widow who remarries and takes her child to live in a small village, and "After Life" (1998), about a waiting room in heaven, are masterful. Here he is more matter-of-fact, more realistic, in suggesting the slow progress of time, the cold winter followed by the hot summer days, the desperation growing behind Akira's cautious expression. The fact that he doesn't crank up the energy with manufactured emergencies makes the impending danger more dramatic: This cannot go on, and it is going to end badly."
Screening: October 18th, 7:30pm, Siskel Film Center
"Shoplifters" (****)
"In many ways, "Shoplifters" feels like a natural extension of themes that Kore-eda has been exploring his entire career regarding family, inequity, and the unseen residents of a crowded city like Tokyo. With this movie especially, his characters and their predicament are not merely mouthpieces for the issues that interest him but fully-realized people who feel like they existed before the film started and will go on after it ends. The final shots of "Shoplifters" haunt me—two kids, one looking back and one looking out, both changed forever."
Screening: October 19th, 2:45pm, Siskel Film Center
