Maborosi

Human beings crave solutions to all of their problems. Grief is especially difficult because it sometimes doesn’t have any answers. The emptiness in every scene, as if someone were missing, and the dark undertones of every landscape correlate with Yumiko being lost and confused. The sky only seems to turn blue when Tamio brings an answer, as plausible as it may have been, to Ikuo’s death. The precision and poetry with which the subject of grief is handled make it hard to believe this was Kore-eda’s directorial debut!