Ray Pride

Adult fears, childhood fears: c'mon, one's not so different from the other.

An adult should know how to cope, has seen and listened and experienced a world larger than one's own bedroom or playlot. Things go astray? Losses mount? The world seems senseless? You've heard the words, repeated them, perhaps. You've at least seen others make their way through mistakes you know better than to copy.

The great, relatively young Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda, whose quiet, assured movies include 1995's "Maborosi" and 1999's "After Life," has made his most tender and wrenching film. "Nobody Knows" (Dare mo shiranai) finds an ideal setting for dealing with childhood fears that never go away, unto death: Abandonment. Failing. Falling. Poverty. Shame. Loneliness. Dishonor.

Kore-eda took inspiration from a real event known in Japan as "The Affair of the Four Abandoned Children of Nishi-Sugamo," which took place almost two decades ago, in 1988. He wrote a first draft fifteen years ago, but worried when he took it up again that the story would no longer make sense. He shouldn't have feared: it is painfully timeless, endlessly topical. Born of different fathers, four children live happy as can be in a small Tokyo apartment, never having gone to school. Their mother, Keiko (You), hides the existence of three of them from the landlord, insisting they stay quiet. The apartment is their domain, they play and study and wait for mom to return from her work at night, sometimes very late at night. The space turns inward as the story takes its steady toll--you'd almost swear the walls of the set grow increasingly close--like a Nautilus shell, like a deprived adolescent's imagination.

But 12-year-old Akira (Yuya Yagira, an intense, brooding boy who became the youngest actor ever to win the Best Actor prize at Cannes last year) has to take charge when Keiko leaves, for several weeks it seems, leaving a flighty note and a few thousand yen. The others must stay in. They seem used to her mercurial departures and arrivals, welcome whatever affection they can get from her. He can't go to the authorities: it's suggested the quartet were separated once before. Akira finds ways to get handouts, visits the father of one of the others, resorts to petty theft. The gas is cut off. The electricity. There's no money left for food. The water. Mom doesn't return. The landlord grows suspicious. Summer turns the apartment fetid. Piles of garbage seem almost comforting.

Kore-eda shot with the seasons, editing each segment as he went along from autumn 2002 to summer 2003. The changes in each child's behavior and physical growth become part of the story; it's not only a matter of hair growing longer, costumes being dirtier and rattier. "Yuya grew taller and his voice changed," Kore-eda says in the press kit. "His initially shy personality gradually gave way; in the second half of the filming to a boy who could lead his younger brother and sisters. The story is fictional, but a part of my own life and a part of Yuya's life are indelibly recorded in this film." (As is an indelible, contemporary, urban parallel to the "songlines" which Australian aboriginal children were sent along in order to "invent" their world.)

Kore-eda's documentary impulse leads to an exceedingly subtle, mature and masterful 141 minutes, finding a rhythm that goes beyond Japanese culture to the universal impulses of a child to grow beyond solitariness, to fiercely protect one's family, to prevent a life of loneliness.

There is more gesture and behavior than dialogue. The sound is acutely worked, and the spare score evokes Jim O'Rourke-style guitar plonking. Kore-eda works with acute framings, with forceful geometry as well as an eye for light and shadow. In his earlier, equally reserved "Maborosi," the beam of a tiny bicycle headlight swaying alongside a roaring commuter train becomes a profound vision. Here, near the end, the gentle arc of an airport monorail on the edge of a body of water is his own transformation of an earlier clutch of Ozu-like shots of passenger trains cutting through a city center into something lonelier. Images like these are suggestive, concrete, but not specific. The same description applies to the final shots, open-ended, hopeful, embracing the spirit and survival instinct of a few unsullied souls, yet still reinforcing that lovely, terrible, and even at the end of the movie, true title: Nobody knows, which also serenely, angrily, righteously earns the concomitant and nobody cares. This is beautiful, humanist work, worthy of every moment it will haunt you afterward. Who wants for horror when real life is right behind every closed door?

"Nobody Knows" opens Friday at the Music Box.

(2005-02-15)

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