Maboroshi no Hikari 幻の光 (1995)

Maboroshi no Hikari was director Kore-eda Hirokazu’s first film. It is a story about a girl who fails to stop her grandma from wondering off to which she eventually dies. She was never faulted for it, but carries with her the guilt leading us into her early 20s. We now see her happily married with a baby. She still has nightmares about her grandmother and after a bad dream, her husband comments that he is not her grandmother reincarnated, suggesting an ongoing thought to the audience.  One day she is awoken by the police to identify her husband’s body who was hit by train. It is never said whether the death was accidental or not, and it is precisely this question she dwells on. She carries this burden even harder and becomes distant even to her own child until her relatives arrange a marriage for her with another widower who also has a child. She moves from Osaka out to a small village off the Sea of Japan and we watch as she copes with her loss as her life progress.  

This being the director’s first film the style influences are highly evident. In much of the aesthetics of Ozu Yasujiro we get low angle “tatami mat” style shots, long atmospheric static shots, and almost no camera movement except one slow panning shot towards the end of the film. The pacing is slow with an ASL that one would have to believe to be well beyond 20 seconds. This was great as it gave him the platform for his own style which you can see in any one of his later films (two of which I have blogged Distance & Dare Mo Shirainai) that have become quite distinctive to Kore-eda. In addition, only natural lighting is used in this film so the majority of the film is shot quite dark with no clean facial shots of any one of the characters. This, in addition to matching the overall dark somber feel of the film, gives I feel a bit of distance between the characters and the audience.

I love the films ending! We get a long shot of her new husband teaching her son how to ride a bike. This was an interesting shot as one would imagine at an emotional height you would want a closer shot to capture the moment but instead he holds this shot for over a minute with a cut to her new husband’s father who is looking out the veranda at the sea. She sits next to him, and comments on the weather being nice, to which he agrees. Then we get a cut of both of them looking out to the sea and a long shot of the sea….Really Beautiful! In the spirit of Ozu or in literature Kawabata Yasunari he captures perfectly the Japanese concept of Mono no Aware. Suggesting to the viewer her contented resignation to her new life as it exists.