Our Little Sister (2015)

Three sisters in Kamakura receive word that the father who abandoned them has died, attend his funeral, and come home with a fourth: Suzu, thirteen, their half-sister by a woman none of them has met. Hirokazu Kore-eda builds the film from small errands, shared meals, and the annual brewing of plum wine. Nothing is announced. Everything accumulates. The camera watches a household of women negotiate grief, money, and the quiet arithmetic of who owes what to whom, and it does so without raising its voice.

The arrangement at the center is a family assembled outside the usual template, and the film grants it dignity without converting it into a platform. The sisters work, drink, quarrel, and carry on. Suzu joins a football team and is folded into the neighborhood. That these are capable women running their own lives is plain, though the film never pauses to make an argument of it. There is no thesis here, no lesson, no moment in which a character turns to the audience and explains what we ought to feel.

Which leaves the modern cultural apparatus with very little to do. No identity politics of the current variety announces itself. No economic critique, no environmental conscience, no rewriting of the historical record, no instruction on how to regard our bodies or our minds. The film is too busy noticing things: a sister's affair with a married doctor, a mother's belated visit, the way a child apologizes for existing. Some critics have called the restraint a fault, an emotional reticence that withholds the gut punch. The withholding is correct. A drama that trusts its audience to feel something without being told what to feel is a rare vintage. It goes down easily and leaves no sermon behind. The classification file, accordingly, is thin, and honesty requires saying so plainly instead of inflating modest virtues into a movement.

One modest note does survive scrutiny: the household itself, four women of one family and one half, tending a house their grandparents left them. It is not a manifesto. It is a kitchen, and the plum wine is good this year. We mark it and move on, as the sisters do, to the next small thing that requires attention before the season turns and the blossoms fall again on Kamakura. The ledger closes, as ledgers must, without ceremony and without applause. The film would prefer it that way, and so, wearily, do I. A quiet entry in a loud decade, filed and shelved, deserving of a second glass and no committee whatsoever. Final dispatch, then. Nothing further to classify. Nothing further to say. The plum wine, again, is very good. That is all the culture war this film has to offer, and it offers it without a single raised voice, which in this marketplace is nearly an act of defiance, though not the kind that files neatly under any heading available to us tonight. I have nothing more to add, and the film would not want me to. Signed. Filed. Done. The blossoms fall. The sisters eat. The credits roll without a single slogan, and the audience leaves quietly, which is the correct ending for a film of this temperament, and the correct ending for this report as well. Good night. The file is closed. The plum wine, as ever, is very good indeed. Nothing further. Nothing further at all. Nothing further, and nothing less, and nothing more, and the season turns regardless of what any of us decides to write about it in the morning, which arrives, as it always does, without commentary.