Wishing upon a bullet train

Wishing upon a bullet train

Japanese feel-good movie doesn't look away from the sharper edge of life

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
Wishing upon a bullet train

Hirokazu Kore-eda's I Wish is a film about small happiness hidden under earth-shaking woes. An unexpected hand clasp on the shoulder, a swimming trunk in a wash basin, the sound of a clinking bell, the volcanic ash that falls like confetti _ the random joy of life slowly works its way into the heart of a young boy at the centre of this family drama, on limited release starting yesterday. Sweet but thankfully not saccharine, observant without being obsessive, I Wish has the delicate lightness and calm lucidity of all Kore-eda's films. And although this one won't move you to ponder the painful disintegration of family values the way the director's near-masterpiece Nobody Knows did in 2004, the uncoiling of revelations here is as gentle as it is refreshing.

I Wish Starring Koki Maeda, Oshiro Maeda and Joe Odagiri. Directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda. In Japanese with English and Thai subtitles at Lido and House.

Two brothers are separated by the divorce of their parents. Koichi (Koki Maeda) lives with his mother and grandparents in a town on Kyushu island, where the resident volcano, beautiful and distant, spews harmless ash from up above.

Preoccupied by the break-up, Koichi's daily life loses its glimmer and significance under the cloud of his adolescent worries. In between hanging out with friends, Koichi watches as his mother tries to find a job and his grandfather begins making traditional sponge-cake in the hope of selling it at the new Shinkansen station in a nearby town.

The younger brother is Ryunosuke (Oshiro Maeda), a gabby, cheerful lad who lives with the father (Joe Odagiri), an indie musician prone to Bohemianism and oversleeping, in another Kyushu town.

The brothers keep in touch on the phone, and while Koichi stresses the importance of bringing the family together, Ryunosuke is perhaps too young or too optimistic to share the growing pains of his brother. He's not as interested in seeing his mother as to watch the fava beans he's grown in the backyard sprout: the boy is all for simple joy.

This material requires only a few flips on the melodramatic frying pan to become an overcooked reunion tear-jerker. The bliss and burden of family is a principal issue in Japanese cinema, from Ozu to Miike, from Miyazaki to Kiyoshi Kurosawa; Kore-eda, whose idol filmmaker is Mikio Naruse from the 1950s and who began his career making documentary films, has a way of trafficking in the sense of longing, foreboding fear, and even of domestic nightmare, without straying into the hollow ground of sentimentalism.

And yet Kore-eda is a director whose touch is sublime; a simple scene of children walking to school, or of morning light licking foliage as people stand watching, like in his Still Life, carries the simultaneous weightlessness, as well as the fleeting joy and anxiety beneath the calm surface. Even in films that don't quite achieve that sense of transport, in particular the sad, uneven Air Doll, such moments are recognisable like a familiar brush stroke in a painting.

I Wish is arguably Kore-eda's most commercial film _ this is a complimentary observation. Koichi, determined to bring his family back together, believes that if he can make a wish while witnessing two bullet trains run past each other, their magnetic field so massive that it can alter the course of the physical world, whatever he asks for will come true: the miracle of Japanese engineering facilitating the miracle of Japanese life. The second half of the film details the journey of Koichi, Ryunosuke and their friends to the town where they can see two Shinkansen trains going past each other so they can make a wish. This is a playbook of a coming-of-age drama, of kids on a quest narrative, as old as Peter Pan and The Wizard of Oz, that almost always sends the audience out brimming with cheer, and maybe of doubt.

Kore-eda uses observational, documentary-style moments to bring out the naturalism he's famous for, above all in his crown jewel Nobody Knows. But while that 2004 film is deep in its sorrow and social exegesis, I Wish is a fine example of a feel-good movie that doesn't look away from the sharper edge of life when it's necessary. For Koichi, the pain of realising that the world is bigger than himself is a rich moment, the Oz moment, that, if I may, hardly happens in Thai movies purporting to relate the agony of growing up. Without the effort to pump tears, that moment of beauty in I Wish touches us softly, exquisitely, perhaps miraculously, and that's all we could wish for from cinema these days.

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