Sublime: Like Father, Like Son

Like Father, Like Son (2013)
Written and directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda
Produced by Kaoru Matsuzaki, Hijiri Taguchi, Megumi Osawa, Tatsuro Hatanaka, Chihiro Kameyama, Tom Yoda, Chiaki Harada, Satomi Odake, Yasushi Ogawa
Starring Masaharu Fukuyama, Machiko Ono, Lily Franky, Yoko Maki, Keita Ninomiya, Shogen Hwang, Jun Kunimura, Yuri Nakamura, Kazuya Takahashi, Kirin Kiki, Jun Fubuki, Isao Natsuyagi
Any brief of another flower effloresced from Kore-eda’s preoccupation with familial misadventures and their reverberations reads as that of timeworn, televised fayre via Lifetime: two irreconcilably unlike families headed respectively by a stuffy, operose architect (Fukuyama) and a jovial, lovably scruffy shopkeeper and electrician (Franky) are shaken to learn that two of their sons (Ninomiya, Hwang) were at birth covertly commuted by a nurse (Takahashi). Social convention dictates that the boys be restituted to their cognate nuclear units, but six years of parental intimacy stay all involved, and their woe is only aggravated by contradistinctions of class and constitution: Fukuyama’s aloof, white-collar striver disdains the lenience, uxoriousness and relative impecuniousness of Franky’s working-class handyman, who in turn contemns with his assertive wife (Maki) the corporate cog’s fatherly inattention in pursuit of professional projects. For all their failings and recriminations fermented by reciprocal misapprehensions, none among them are unsympathetic; the overachiever’s no more callous than his demurely adoring spouse (Ono), and oscillations and frivolity belie the depth of his counterpart’s paternal perspicacity. Once preponderate in civilized cinema beyond Hollywood’s orbit, Kore-eda’s strain of sentimentality is rooted in realism, its poignance piercing far deeper for an economy of expression, nested in precisely composed perspective shots, slow zooms, drifting pans in rich high contrast. He unsoundly deprecates consanguinity as a mere priority of obsolescent tradition in a culture where it may be taken for granted in the luxury of social and ethnic cohesion, but in doing so postulates an equally vital insight: beneath the burdensome strata of lineage, expectations and ambition, the hearts of children and their parents need beat no slower, nor at all asynchronous for that weight.