Like Father, Like Son
We hold storytellers to a pretty high standard of not revisiting the familiar.
I am a big defender of Sofia Coppola who, in her original scripts, has taken upper crust boredom to task in multiple different corners of the world: Japan, France, Los Angeles (and in the case of The Bling Ring, I’d argue the world wide web). The Dardenne Brothers have spun some very engaging, rich and humane films via unwanted children in The Son, The Kid With a Bike, Rosetta and L’Enfant.
Unwanted children finding moments of happiness amidst boredom are central to the family films that Hirokazu Kore-eda has been making since for the past 15 years.
Kore-eda’s an incredible director of children. He even directed 13 year-old Yûya Yagira to a Best Actor award at the Cannes Film Festival, for the remarkable Nobody Knows.
In that film, a 13 year old takes care of his siblings after his mother abandons them in a Tokyo apartment. As they hide from the building manager, and thus everyone outside, it becomes the longest and most devastating game of hide and seek, but it’s not about condemning society for not paying attention to fringe children. That’s because Kore-eda makes powerful films without moralizing.
Perhaps this is enhanced by his choice of centering on younger protagonists. His characters exist free of knowing that a larger system is failing them and that is why they can find moments of joy. That space, where the younger characters are unaware of the dire straits that the audience is viewing, is where Kore-eda is a compelling filmmaker.
All this to say, Kore-eda has inverted Nobody Knows in his new film, Like Father, Like Son. He’s upped the eye level to adult characters and thus he loses any distanced viewer devastation. Adults explain their devastation, and so here, it’s sadly less interesting to watch.
Like Father, Like Son does expose interesting gender dynamics of family, however, giving us mothers who are able to nurture any child as their own, and fathers desiring a fulfillment of their own bloodlines.
There are two fathers in Father: one is an architect (Masharu Fukuyama) who spends very little time with his son; the other (Rirî Furankî) is a shopkeeper. It turns out that they’ve each been raising the other’s child for the past six years, due to an incorrect switch at the hospital. Fukuyama sees this as a chance to see if his real son is more like him: resolute, rigorous, and structured.
The first half of Like Father, Like Son sets up a great familial analysis in a patriarchal society, but after revealing how the children were switched, the film loses the forward momentum that the trial provides. Son reveals itself to be a too steeped in contrast and thus, a little too apparent. Turns out that for a father to love his son, he’d have to actually spend time with his son.
By aiming the camera primarily at the parents Kore-eda can’t seem to find the joy that he injected in Nobody Knows, Still Walking and After Life. His directing is still assured, and he gets very good performances from his actors, but adults, man, all they do is work and judge others. They’re no fun.
Brian Formo is a featured contributor on the CraveOnline Film Channel. Follow him on Twitter at @BrianEmilFormo.
