After the Storm

Hirokazu Kore-eda, a vital voice in Japanese cinema, known for his emotionally distressing family dramas – Nobody Knows (2004), Still Walking (2008), I Wish (2011), Like Father, Like Son (2013) and Our Little Sister (2015), champions the everyday struggles of regular working class people and especially the complex family relationships between children and their parents.

After the Storm is a quietly desperate and darkly humorous portrait of a lower class Japanese family struggling with divorce, separation, financial uncertainty, and society’s expectations. 

Ryota (Hiroshi Abe), who has the charmingly disheveled looks and manner of a Japanese version of Hugh Grant, is a divorced novelist working as a part time private detective to make ends meet while keeping tabs on his estranged wife and son. He must come to terms with his failed marriage while competing for his son’s affections with his ex-wife’s new fiancé.

After achieving early success with an award winning novel in his youth, his family and friends keep mocking him for his lack of ambition and keep asking him when his next novel will come out. But as he struggles with midlife crisis looking back on his failed career as a novelist, his mother (Kirin Kiki) reassures him that great talents often bloom late in life.

Behind on the rent and his alimony payments due to his reckless gambling addiction, Abe’s Ryota gives an endearingly comic performance of a man-child, revealing a parent awkwardly struggling to bond with his son Shingo (Taiyô Yoshizawa), while trying to step-up and mend his reputation as a father by buying him expensive gifts he can’t afford.

We follow Ryota on his daily grind as he gambles and participates in shady extortion schemes to stay financially afloat. Sensitively told with delicate performances that speak volumes, the film visually immerses us in authentic lived-in locations filmed in tight intimately detailed spaces giving us the tactile feeling of a typical close-knit Japanese urban life. 

Visionary auteur Kore-eda knows how to get subtle nuanced moments out of his actors and is able to vividly unveil a human tenderness and understanding of such depth and power that it harkens back to the neorealism of Italian cinema showing regular people suffering with painful universal family issues.

When a typhoon (storm) hits Japan while visiting his mother, Ryota and his son and ex-wife Kyoko (Yôko Maki) are forced to spend the night together in her small ancestral cozy apartment, the close quarters allowing for a chance to remember the old family bonds that were lost after the divorce and confront their family failings.

After the Storm is a contemplative yet heartwarming optimistic experience that effectively deals with bitter generational human issues with a humor and insightfulness that everyone can relate to and will resonate with a wide audience of all cultures and classes.

JP