E-Mail This Article to a Friend He knows The films of Hirokazu Koreeda BY BRETT MICHEL
	Nobody Knows Written and directed by Hirokazu Koreeda. With Yuya Yagira, Ayu Kitaura, Hiei Kimura, Momoko Shimizu, Hanae Kan, and You. An IFC Films release. In Japanese with English subtitles (141 minutes). At the Kendall Square. Distance Written and directed by Hirokazu Koreeda. With Arata, Yusuke Iseya, and Susumu Terajima. In Japanese with English subtitles (132 minutes). At the Harvard Film Archive this Friday, February 18.
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Memory and loss: filtered through the elegiac lens of 42-year-old Japanese writer/director Hirokazu Koreeda, one cannot exist without the other. Common to his eight pictures (four award-winning documentaries and four fictional narrative features produced for Japan’s TV Man Union, all of them featured in this month’s retrospective at the Harvard Film Archive) is the quiet observation of persons who have lost someone important to them. Unable (or unwilling) to forgo the past or embrace the future, these people simply exist, lingering in meditative, intermediate states within their anamnestic netherworlds.

Koreeda’s sumptuously shot feature debut, Maborosi (1995), a hypnotically paced portrait of a young mother (Makiko Esumi) who remarries after her first husband’s unexplained suicide yet is unable to reconnect with life, signaled the arrival of a new talent. After Life (1998) confirmed it. A simple idea that could have been a maudlin mess, this was Koreeda’s first feature to deal directly with memory. The recently deceased spend a week within the bureaucracy of purgatory while choosing the one memory they’ll carry to eternity. The result is a quietly elegant masterpiece.

A third feature, Distance (2001), was apparently deemed too distant for American consumption, since it never got distributed. That’s a minor crime, even though its dense narrative begs a second viewing. On the third anniversary of an act of biological terror, relatives of the deceased perpetrators embark on a Pavlovian trek to the site of the tragedy, grasping for some sort of understanding. Koreeda’s most experimental work of fiction also bears the heaviest burden of his background in documentary filmmaking.

These films have earned Koreeda a reputation as one of Asia’s younger generation of filmmakers, alongside such countryman Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Taiwan’s Hou Hsiao-hsien and Tsai Ming-liang. However, close observation of his films belies any significant new-wave associations, exposing instead a fellowship with the work of Japanese cinema’s golden-era giants. In their unblinking humanism, Koreeda’s best works echo the films of Kenji Mizoguchi, Mikio Naruse, and, most profoundly, Yasujiro Ozu. Long labeled "the most Japanese" of directors, Ozu was a prolific master of simplicity. Firmly rejecting most of cinema’s established "language" (the "Ozu style" consisted of artfully composed frames, always with the same camera set-up — roughly three feet off the ground, the eye line of a kneeling individual, with virtually no camera movement whatsoever), he spent the majority of his career directing variations of the same film, always with a core group of actors.

Koreeda’s latest feature, Nobody Knows, continues this Ozu theme. Inspired by a real incident, and informed by his own experience as a "latchkey kid," it gives us four children (each sired by a separate father, and none recognized by the state) who’ve been abandoned by their mother (portrayed by pop star You as perhaps the most childlike and irresponsible of the bunch). The oldest at 12, Akira (Yuya Yagira, winner of the Best Actor award at Cannes 2004) quietly falls into the paternal role with the stoic grace of a saint; he’s been in this position before.

For a time, the kids enjoy a carefree idyll, even as the money, the gas, the electricity, and eventually the water run out. Yet none of this is played for sentiment, unlike similar scenes in Isao Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies (1988) and Hiroshi Shimizu’s Children of the Beehive (1948). As you sit in stunned silence, observing the inevitability of it all, there’s no easy release of tears, only the anxiety that arises from helplessness.