Doors and windows, the seaside, a road that stretches indefinitely, these "are elements of Hirokazu Kore-eda", dotted with distinctive home movies.
From "Haijie Diary" (2015) to "The Thief's Family" (2018), he presents different "problem families" with camera freeze-frames and line drawings, but always tells the family's life with warm tones and detailed tension. commonality.
In the film, even if it is not the original family that carries the educational function in the traditional sense, the soft side of human nature still flows and is passed down from generation to generation. A family of thieves who did not know each other adopted a child abused by their biological parents, and three sisters who were grumpy about their mother's departure took in their half-sister...
These plots raise the question: What is a family? What is goodness? What exactly should we love and wait for?
Perhaps, love knows no bounds. A mother who gave birth to a child may not know more about family affection than a woman who sells sex to make a living. In the family as the basic unit of society, members are citizens and relations are society. Whether it is family or society, it is not a standard still life painting, but a beauty that wanders between black and white light and shadow.
For too long we have been too accustomed to thinking of law as ethics. In fact, everyone will make a little exception to the established rules in the depths of their hearts. It is Hirokazu Kore-eda who reveals the mundane but repressed conflicts within us in a tepid presentation. It seems unconventional, but it actually induces the audience to tell the truth in the face of real human nature.
No matter how big the world is, when you open its door, it is nothing more than a small window upstairs. It was Hirokazu Koreeda who continued to dissolve the traditional definition of family, and finally came to a more primitive and formalized definition—the continuity of the family definition lies in space, rather than the generative theory of blood, or the functional theory of social construction.
On the opposite side of taking blood relationship as the condition for family formation, there is also a broken ethical relationship that cannot be maintained by blood ties; on the opposite side of the statement that building society is the family function, the role of special family education is anti-social.
Thus, even though the family is often seen as a social unit, it is also an independent community that does not always have the same interests as society. Facing an open society in space, it was Hirokazu Koreeda who chose to limit the family to a relatively fixed and closed space scene, and constantly strengthened the elements of these scenes, thus opposing the traditional family definition.
But this family definition simplified to space makes us not feel abrupt, because traditional families also have the continuation and habit of specific space. When we got used to this, it was Hirokazu Kore-eda who seemed to be asking us again: So is home just a house?
He never answered. At the end of the film, it was Hirokazu Koreeda who gave us an open scene, just like the sea scene that appeared in several films—the group of people who have experienced countless knots and reconciliations in the face of the vast and boundless space can finally be counted. Are you a writer?
At the end of the infinite space, perhaps he is waiting for everyone's answer.
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