AFTER THE STORM

"After the Storm" is just the kind of film you can imagine Hollywood making in the seventies with Hoffman or Pacino or even Elliot Gould in the role of the private investigator with his own family problems. It's low-key, character driven and intelligent but it's also a Hirokazu Koreeda film and it displays all the characteristics we associate with this director's best work. If you can trace its lineage back to another time and place it also speaks for the universality of cinema; be it, say, Los Angeles in the seventies or Japan in the present, nothing really changes.

Here, Hiroshi Abe is the failed novelist, failed both as a writer and as a husband and father, now forced to work as a somewhat sleazy private-eye, specialising in divorce cases and the film deals with his relationships with his mother, sister, wife and young son as well as his colleagues. It's a leisurely, beautifully acted picture, (Kirin Kiki is superb as his elderly mother), and it builds so much out of so little. It is neither a drama nor a comedy but a combination of both and despite the Ozu-like disappointments at the centre, it should make you feel good about life in general.