One that made me feel for its characters. (They're played, respectively, by Masaharu Fukuyama and Machiko Ono.) It's all an empty ritual that has nothing to do with the sweet and eager child Keita reveals himself to be in the bosom of his family, and the wonderful child he continues to be when the switched-at-birth plot line kicks in.Hirokazu Koreeda's Like Father, Like Son is a very emotional movie. Still, his architect father, Ryota, and his self-effacing mother, Midori, seem pleased by his scary performance. Round-faced and unwaveringly focused, Keita would be adorable were it not for his robotized demeanor and his tense, metallic voice.
The would-be first-grader, Keita (Keita Ninomiya), sits between his parents, responding to fatuous questions from a pair of admissions officials. The film opens with an interview that should ring a bell-an alarm bell-with American parents seeking to get their kids into the right private school at any cost. Beyond that, he uses his case to dramatize the plight of a rigid, driven father trapped by conventional notions of family and success in a culture that has enshrined work as a national religion. Kore-eda has a rare gift for working with children-in this case two 6-year-old boys-so the what-then part is especially affecting.
Hirokazu Kore-eda's "Like Father, Like Son," in Japanese with English subtitles, follows the pattern fairly predictably at first, then transcends it with tenderness, humor and exquisite depth of feeling. And the subtext is similar as well: the mysteries of nature vs. The accuracy of the genetic evidence is emphasized in the face of shock and grief, which give way to a what-then section that fills the rest of the narrative. Genetic tests are performed, for one reason or another. Stories about babies switched at birth follow a familiar pattern in the era of DNA.
0 kommentar(er)
