It goes: Mikio Naruse; Yasujirō Ozu; and Hirokazu Kore-eda. The trifecta represents a lineage of directors making the great Japanese domestic genre. They each make a form of shōshimin-eiga — dramas about common people — with Naruse and Ozu working in the Golden Age of this lower and middle-class movement and Kore-eda not yet canonized into it, but we are working on it. That is a good term that can be drawn between what the trio reflects about the interior domesticity of their characters, aware of the systems and hierarchies in place, and the formations of the family unit operating outside and away from the bourgeoisie.
When I interviewed Kore-eda a while back (something I will bring up forever, because it’s an honor and I’m an enthusiast), he told me two things that stuck out. The first was that he was losing his fastball. That once he had several pitches in his repertoire but now the batter may read his pitch, they may interpret that it’s slowed down, that he’s lost his change-up. Let’s confront that here because the most immediate thing about Monster is that Kore-eda has not only regained his fastball but developed a sinking slider, a pitch you read as coming directly over the plate until it sinks on you, not just a diversion but a tactical maneuver to offset our perceived understanding of what kind of pitch he can usually throw. The way this works in Monster is that most of the movie is one thing and then changes into a beautiful, other thing, that will make us reinterpret what the whole text means. It’s a beautiful switch that defines this movie as, once again, returning to Kore-eda’s imperial period. Now we might say we never left it.
The other thing that astounded me during the conversation is that when asked about what modern Japanese films Kore-eda thought our audience should watch, he took the task another way. Instead, he thought we ought to go back to the original works of Naruse, which would be the correct pathway into his movies. This is the wisest recommendation I’ve ever received and I think about it all the time. To understand contemporary cinema, the objective task is to go back and just find out where it all comes from, so we have any chance of appreciating what it means, and what the director thinks about cinema.
Naruse would often borrow from a gorgeous Japanese idiom about the impermanence of things: “Mono no aware,” which to me, best represents the shared consciousness between the three filmmakers, but also charts a course for what kind of story develops in their domestic dramas. This term, “Mono no aware,” suggests two things about the director’s worldview: either a resignation or a hard-worn wistfulness about the sadness of life, that all things are transient, and everything that happens slips through our fingers like sand. As Akira Kurosawa once said of Naruse’s style of filmmaking, it’s “like a great river with a calm surface and a raging current in its depths.”
That is another way we can understand what Monster is, as it presents serenity at its surface, but disruption bubbles underneath. For Ozu, he might have approached this same feeling with a more characteristic calmness, with calmness also lying beneath it, but achieved the same result with how we moved through the story and where his rivers took us. For Kore-eda, his “Mono no aware” represents a depth of empathy and compassion for life. You could say there isn’t a signature resignation there, even, but that he has still accepted the transience of the human experience, and has made many films that tell us about it. Monster is one more example in a filmography with several of them.
There is a great beauty in all of Kore-eda’s films. Even the ones where he has, for the moment, lost his fastball. But the veteran pitcher has returned to his old heights, with a whole new gambit of pitches to throw. We are once again in the river and we feel the current going one way before it sweeps us back under. We are embedded in a family and the nuances of Kore-eda’s way of capturing the relationship between children and adults, especially mothers, continues to define the tradition of Japanese domestic drama. By reaching into the past, we can understand that Kore-eda is a continuation and that we are adding a new chapter in the history of Japanese film.