Still Walking

2008 [JAPANESE]

Action / Drama

28
Rotten Tomatoes Critics - Certified Fresh 100% · 65 reviews
Rotten Tomatoes Audience - Upright 90% · 2.5K ratings
IMDb Rating 7.9/10 10 18423 18.4K

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Plot summary

Twelve years after their beloved eldest son, Junpei, drowned while saving a stranger's life, Kyohei and Toshiko welcome their surviving children home for a family reunion. Younger son Ryota still feels that his parents resent that he isn't the one who died; his new wife, Yukari, is awkwardly meeting the rest of the family for the first time. Daughter Chinami strains to fill the uncomfortable pauses with forced cheer.


Uploaded by: FREEMAN
March 14, 2018 at 05:13 AM

Top cast

720p.BLU 1080p.BLU
972.4 MB
1280*682
Japanese 2.0
NR
23.976 fps
1 hr 55 min
Seeds 20
1.83 GB
1920*1024
Japanese 2.0
NR
23.976 fps
1 hr 55 min
Seeds 54

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by crossbow0106 9 / 10

Pretty Wonderful Ozu Like Film

This film by writer/director Koreeda is a triumph of simplicity. Telling the story of a family who meet annually to mark the death of oldest son Junpei at the parent's house, you're struck by how well this flows. The acting is uniformly very good and the story never lags. The best thing I found about this film is how it could have been done without a script, if the actors were given this scenario. There is bitterness, pettiness and even selfishness here, all earmarks of the subject matter. I found the stylistic similarities to Ozu films to be very touching and not a bit off putting. When I watched this film in a theater in New York, people applauded at the end. This is about as real life as it gets. Its a universal theme, not a Japanese one. My hat is off to the writer/director, its a fine film.

Reviewed by gbill-74877 9 / 10

Quietly brilliant

Oh, my heart. This is a quietly devastating film about family dysfunction. The elderly parents in the story are deeply sympathetic and yet also deeply flawed, caring more for their dead son than their living son or daughter, both of whom bring their families over for a mini-reunion of sorts. We gradually see the cracks in the various relationships, and that events of the distant past are still top of mind for all of them, leading to a family gathering that's civil but not joyous, all of which I could relate to. Kore-eda tells this poignant story masterfully, with restraint and simplicity, and the cast is strong from top to bottom (Kirin Kiki as the mom, and Hiroshi Abe as the son in particular).

Part of what makes the movie so good is that the characters feel so authentic, and nothing is black and white. The mother is sweet and hospitable but has a lot of negative things to say, displaying some of the rougher points of her character when she talks about putting the guy her son saved through the annual torture of visiting them, or when she says she doesn't want to be cramped by her daughter or her noisy grandkids living with her. The father, meanwhile, is gruff and emotionally distant to say the least. And yet, they also have their own stories - she sings along fondly to a song playing that reminds her of a time when life was still so full of hope, but she tells her husband she first heard it when she discovered his past infidelity, dropping quite a bomb on him when he's in the tub. The couple are still together but they bicker, and we see various uncaring behavior such as him not recognizing her housework as ever having "worked" (ha!), not helping her across the street, or her only finding out he goes off to karaoke by reading Christmas cards sent to him.

Maybe the film is just showing that this is what was "normal" for families in that generation (the word "normal" is used a few times), but also what the consequences of that are. The parents both express disappointment in so many ways, rather than embracing the people their kids turned out to be (and in turn, their spouses and kids as well). It's so sad, and so cautionary. Like the song says, the love you take is equal to the love you make - instead of the reunion making the kids want to come more often, it has the opposite effect. Sometimes someone has to take the first step or make an effort, beyond saying it will happen "one of these days," as the son puts it. Maybe that's how many grown-up kids and families are, I don't know. I felt my heart in Kore-eda's hands throughout the whole film, but rather than squeezing it mercilessly he just made it ache, and in the gentlest way possible, part of his talent.

Reviewed by dromasca 9 / 10

in the footsteps of Ozu

Coincidentally, I viewed 'Still Walking', Hirokazu Koreeda's 2008 film the day after viewing 'Tokyo Story', Yasujirô Ozu's masterpiece. The two films are made 55 years apart, but they are very close in terms of dealing with the relationships between generations, between aging parents and children who have become parents, the time that passes irreversibly and the lost opportunities to express feelings and fix the mistakes of the past. However, the two films are more related to each other than by the subjects, because in this film Koreeda reuses some of Ozu's cinematic techniques. The films seem related in terms of topics and style, and I suspect that 'Still Walking', was conceived by Koreeda as a tribute to the master of himself and of an entire film school in Japan.

As in 'Tokyo Story', the film centers around a family reunion that brings together three generations. The occasion is sad, because the gathering is about the commemoration of the death of the eldest brother of the three children of Dr. Kiohei Yokoyama (Yoshio Harada), who was supposed to continue his work taking over his clinic, and who died saving a boy from drowning. The event occasions the confrontation between the elderly father, retired from his practice, but 'still walking' and the second son, Ryota (Hiroshi Abe) who lives in the shadow of his missing brother, of his father's disappointment and of the insecurity in his personal life. The dialogue between parents and children highlights the differences in style and pace of life between generations and the effect of the passage of time marked by unfulfilled expectations and missed opportunities. As in Ozu's movies, the heroes fail to translate their feelings into words, but are ultimately united by simple shared memories and by gestures that are sometimes part of ceremonies designed to pass from one generation to another the respect and the memory of those who no longer are.

Among the excellent acting performances, I have especially noticed that of Hiroshi Abe, who injects complexity and veracity to the role of Ryota. Cinematography often quotes Ozu, especially in the indoor scenes, with the fix camera and the characters building the entire dynamics of the scenes through their movements in the rectangular space. Quotes can also be considered to be the connecting frames - trains, the sky, the sea that describe the social background in which the action takes place. Hirokazu Koreeda proves with 'Still Walking', that he assimilated the lessons of his predecessors and continues them with respect, talent and sensitivity.

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