After the Storm
(Umi yori mo mada fukaku)

After the storm… comes a sunny spell. At least this is the moment that the once successful writer Ryota (Hiroshi Abe, here bearing the same first name as in Still Walking) is hoping for, as he clumsily bumps into everything, even in his mother’s apartment. Behind the figure of Ryota, a failed and helpless father, we should see the painful acceptance of a string of losses: the loss of his absent father, of an unlikely reconciliation with his ex-wife and thus the loss of his former family life. The unvarnished spaces in the film, the suburb where Kore-eda spent his youth, the duration of the shots, the absence of emphatic dramatic mechanisms, lend an intimate and tragic dimension to the passage of time. JB