Family: I Wish

Hirokazu Koreeda's I Wish is a major motion picture with a budget and a relatively big cast, but it isn't dissimilar to the family home videos that we watched in class this week. In fact, it's startling how clearly Koreeda understands familial interactions and the bonds that shape them. There's an effortless nature to the way his actors respond to each other, and the mundane slice-of-lifeiness dominates the movie, even when it threatens to turn into an adventure.

As we watched home movies in class, the thing that stood out most was how comfortable the people behind and in front of the camera are with each other. We open up as both subjects and filmmakers when we share a close bond with whoever is on the other end. That’s exactly why our faculty so often reiterates that our home movies may be the most important work we ever produce. There’s an intimacy that is difficult to replicate in any other medium, and it’s something that we can’t fabricate — it’s part of our most basic nature.

There’s a particular shot in I Wish that erupts with this sort of intimacy. In a flashback to Koichi and Ryu’s lives before their parents’ divorce, the family sits around a dinner table when their father mentions leaving his job. Their mother responds harshly and both parents begin to yell at each other. The camera remains at a distance, and Koichi tries to intervene as his parents overturn the dinner table. But the younger Ryu runs into the foreground and covers his ears, trying to escape to no avail. He’s trapped in the frame, just as he’s trapped in the house, but the camera affords the opportunity to stare deep into his eyes as he edges towards sobbing. This scene understands the particular way we are trapped by our families, for better or worse, and represents the entire film in a microcosm.

Even in moments that aren’t as fierce as the aforementioned example, the profound connections between the characters is visible. When Koichi and Ryu call each other on the phone, there’s a casualness to the conversation that makes it seem like two kids talking over a great distance. There’s no pretense or push to have narrative tension — it’s simply them living their lives. The factor that brings it together is the implicit love on display, the same that we saw in our own home movies. It’s something difficult to quantify, which makes this a particularly abstract bit of writing, but it’s easy to make family relationships seem forced or insincere, and Koreeda’s film is so close to a natural dynamic that it seems more documentary than fictional film.