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    "'Thank you for being born.' - A single sentence that touches the audience in such a way that entire films rarely can. When every character, no matter how small or large, is intricately layered, simultaneously fractured and in the end so lovingly developed, that's cinema. Great cinema. This film is a journey. One filled with longings, with decisions, with detours. Sometimes it is precisely these detours that we must take in life to find ourselves and each other. And we found a bit of ourselves in this film." --Citation of the Best International film award for Broker at the Munich film festival T wo contemporary Japanese directors Hirokazu Kore-eda and Naomi Kawase are fascinating filmmakers because both make wonderful, distinctive films, both write their own original screenplays and most of their tales revolve around relationships involving parents and children, orphans and adoption. Sometimes the parents are old and dying, sometimes they are young and experi...

  Ryusuke Hamaguchi ’s Drive My Car will appeal to different folks for totally different reasons. Those familiar with Haruki Murakami’s written work flock to watch cinematic adaptations of his written works such as the Korean director Chang-dong Lee’s Burning (2018), Japanese director Anh Hung Tran’s Norwegian Wood (2010) or the Japanese director Jun Ichikawa’s Toni Takitani (2004), among the nine such feature films already released.   Drive My Car is the latest cinematic adaptation of the nine films and is based on a short story with the same title as the film.   The film Drive My Car is equally interesting for readers who love Anton Chekov’s famous play Uncle Vanya . They will be pleasantly surprised that it still can be staged in myriad ways, though purists will find Andrei Konchalovsky’s 1970 film version of Uncle Vanya with Innokentiy Smoktunovskiy, Sergei Bondarchuk and Irina Kupchenko, as the definitive cinematic adaptation. However, director Hamaguchi leaps...

  D irector and co-scriptwriter Naomi Kawase, co-scriptwriter Izumi Takahashi and novelist Mizuki Tsujimura present a diversity of candidates in the film True Mothers who could fit the title of the film. Confrontation between the biological mother  (left) and the foster parents (right) F irst, there is a biological mother, Hikari, a young teen in school, who accidentally becomes 24-weeks pregnant following a tryst with a teenager. S econd, Hikari’s own mother is another type of elderly mother, who is embarrassed by her teenage school-going daughter’s motherhood and wants to hide those facts from friends, neighbors and Hikari’s school. She obviously wants to protect her daughter’s and her family’s image in society for the future. Asami (Miyoki Asada) (center) runs the Baby Baton,   showering happiness to so many    T hird, there is Shizue Asami, who runs an adoption organization called “ Baby Baton, ” located in a secluded resort helping young mothers-to-...

    To see a World in a Grain of Sand, And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the Palm of your Hand, And Eternity in an Hour                         ---opening lines from William Blake’s poem                             “Auguries of Innocence” S ome people don’t like numbers or mathematics but many do. Whether you belong to either category, the 2003 Yomiuri-prize-winning novel by the Japanese lady Yoko Ogawa called The Housekeeper and the Professor (the English translation has been published by Picador) and Takashi Koizumi’s film The Professor and His Beloved Equation based on that novel lead you gently into the mystical world of numbers that have captivated great minds like Pythagoras and Descartes over the centuries. What Ogawa and Koizumi achieve is to make an average person look at numbers with respect and realize that numbers...

H irokazu Kore-eda is undoubtedly one of the most interesting film-directors alive and making films today.   His talent to write an original script is just awesome. His scripts are so diverse in subject matter and yet linked by two common threads:   family ties and importance of ethics in life. Only a few of his films have original scripts written by someone else. He is remarkably close in his treatments of varied chosen subjects to the works of Naomi Kawase, another contemporary Japanese filmmaker, who also prefers to write her own original scripts. Perhaps it is more than a coincidence that French actress Juliette Binoche is the star of both their latest films: Kore-eda’s  The Truth and Kawase’s Vision (2018).  Fabienne (Deneuve, left) is the mother and Lumir (Binoche, right) is her daughter The Truth presents a tale of an aging and reputed French actress Fabienne (Catherine Deneuve) who is rich enough to spend decades in outer space to counteract natural aging ...

M ost directors yearn to make one film at least that deals with science fiction in their careers; some succeed in making amazing products, most fail to make a lasting impact. Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: a Space Odyssey (1968), Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972), Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011), and Godard’s Alphaville (1965) are memorable efforts by directors to deal with science fiction and come out trumps. They make a singular effort and rarely return to the genre.   Others like John Boorman’s Zardoz (1974), Richard Fleischer’s Soylent Green (1973), Cornel Wilde’s No Blade of Grass (1970) or Robert Altman’s Quintet (1979) fumble in their attempts to make a lasting impact, while a host of other directors end up making make escapist, commercial, comic-book films like Star Wars or Back to the Future that will please the pop-corn eating audiences. Two major filmmakers whom I respect, attempted to make their latest films in the first category—Naomi Kawase with Vision (2018) and Cl...

M ore than half a century ago the Japanese maestro Akira Kurosawa made a classic film Rashomon (1950) about a samurai’s death and the rape of the samurai’s wife.  Different versions of what transpired are narrated by different characters. Each version made the viewer ponder over which version indeed was the truth and why each personality concocted their own twisted perspective of the truth. Many filmgoers would be convinced the tale belonged to director Kurosawa but Kurosawa had merely adapted a tale written by the “father of the Japanese short story”—Ryunosuke Akutagawa for the screen, with considerable help from Kurosawa’s trusted scriptwriter Shinobu Hashimoto, who contributed significantly to six of Kurosawa’s most famous works, including the original story of Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952). Nearly seven decades later, another Japanese director gives us a more complex film on similar lines to unravel the truth about a killing—with a major difference.   Unlike Kurosawa’s famous fi...