After the Storm is a family drama of supreme subtlety - review

After the Storm’s central character, Ryota, is played by Hiroshi Abe, who played a character in Still Walking with the same name and a similar familial rank: he’s both a son and a father, and both roles are proving a struggle. This Ryota is a once-promising novelist who now works for a private detective agency in the Tokyo commuter town of Kiyose, where Kore-eda himself spent much of his childhood and early adult life. 

It’s an unedifying job – mostly snooping on cheating husbands at neon-lit love hotels – and he claims is merely research for his long-delayed second book. In reality, though, no book is being written, and most of his cash-in-hand pay fuels his gambling addiction – a problem we’re given to understand played a central role in the break-up of his marriage to Kyoko (Yoko Maki), and continues to stymie his child-support payments to his young son Shingo (Taiyo Yoshizawa).

Ryota’s own father has also recently died, and he gets back in touch with his elderly mother, an adorably wily old bird called Yoshiko (Kilin Kiki), from whom he’s drifted apart in the wake of his own divorce. Yoshiko’s bittersweet remembrances of her late husband’s spendthrift ways suggest the apple hasn’t fallen too far from the tree. And in fact when Ryota arrives at his mother’s house, the first thing he does is pocket her unscratched lottery tickets and take a disrespectful bite from a rice cake placed on his father’s memorial.

The film follows Ryota’s gradual reconciliation with his mother and son, while the storm of the title – the 23rd typhoon to hit Tokyo this year, Ryota’s sister (Satomi Kobayashi) observes at the start of the film – makes its way towards the city. Its arrival forces Ryota to shelter overnight at his mother’s with his ex-wife and son, though Kore-eda doesn’t use the contrivance to stir up a melodramatic showdown.

Instead, it facilitates a series of beautifully played, low-key one-on-one conversations. That’s the best thing about storms. They clear the air.

The film is twinklingly funny but also infused with a scruffy melancholy – often both at once, when events throw the gap between Ryota’s former ambitions and his present situation into relief. (“I’m the great talent that blooms late,” he tells his mother. “Well you’re taking too long,” she replies. “Hurry up, or I’ll haunt you.”)

There are also, of course, some wonderful scenes of food preparation and eating. Kore-eda is a director for whom a meal can be visually appealing and also loaded with dramatic significance, and in an early scene, Ryota and his mother chip away in vain at her home-made kakigori (a kind of iced dessert): a minor comic set-piece that also delicately reveals his disdain for her frugal ways.

The food here isn’t particularly glamorous, but Kore-eda’s camera finds beauty everywhere in the details of everyday life. There are shots here of unremarkable urban spaces that catch your breath with their uninsistent beauty: the criss-crossed frames at a bicycle park, the rainbow glimmer of a pachinko parlour, the soft glow of a florist on a blustery evening.

No filmmaker today is watching ordinary human life more closely than Kore-eda, or is more unfailingly generous with what they find.