This sweetly tender movie from Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda is superbly unforced and unassuming, finding delicate notes of affirmation and optimism and discreetly celebrating the beauty of nature and family love. It is watercolour cinema with nothing watery about it, in the classic “family drama” vein that you might associate with Yasujirô Ozu, though in conversation at Cannes last year – where I first saw this – the director told me his inspiration was more Mikio Naruse. Our Little Sister is not as challenging and overtly painful as his previous films I Wish or Like Father, Like Son, and there might be some who find it a bit tame or even sentimental; I can only say there is something subtly subversive in the emotional dynamic Kore-eda creates with having three or four women on screen.
It is adapted by Kore-eda from the manga Umimachi Diary by Akimi Yoshida, and tells the story of three twentysomething sisters, who live together in a handsome house originally belonging to their grandmother. Yoshi (Masam Nagasawa) works in a bank and is reasonably happy with her job and her single status but drinks too much. Chika (Kaho) works in a sports shop and is the baby of the group. Sachi (Haruka Ayase) is a nurse at the local hospital: beautiful, poised but emotionally frozen, unhappily involved in an affair with a married doctor. She has recently been offered promotion, which would mean working in the terminal ward – perfectly sensible of how honourable and worthwhile the job is, but unhappily aware of it being somehow ominous for her personally.
All three have long since been estranged from both parents. Their father left them to live with another woman, with whom he had a child before moving on to wife number three. Their mother walked out, too, leaving them in young adulthood in the family home. But, when they receive news of their father’s death and go to the funeral, they meet their sweetly charming teenage half-sister Suzu (Suzu Hirose) and decide on the spot that she must come back and live with them.
Their new little sister is a complicated miracle in their lives: she diverts them, pleases them, almost like a grownup doll. She is remarkably well adjusted, happy in her new home and happy at school. They adore Suzu and love looking after her; she gives them a new purpose in life and a new kind of personal direction, and yet her existence reminds them of their own orphaned situation and weirdly infantilised existence, babes in a gradually shrinking wood of their own making. Suzu might actually be making this worse. Even before she showed up, they were emotionally stagnant and becalmed. They are hardly more grown up than Suzu. Are their lives going backwards?
It is a richly pleasing film, bringing in the classic imagery from the Japanese provincial family drama: rural train journeys, group meals, and discussions linking family and food, thoughtful bucolic walks uphill – denoting humility and patience – melancholy funerals and some wonderful seasonal compositions.
Self-effacingly and unobtrusively, the director gives an easy swing to this quartet’s life, moving calmly from the home to the school, from the private sphere to the fraught public world of the workplace. Nothing is emphasised too much, voices are not raised very greatly, even in moments of great stress; nothing in the drama or the direction is very strenuous, and yet it accumulates in power. Just as when I saw this the first time, I loved Suzu’s innocently ecstatic ride on the back of a bicycle, turning her face to the sunlight. Watching this film is a vitamin boost for the soul.
