Written and directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda
Ryota spends a lot of time at the office. The way he sees it, he is a good provider: his family lives comfortably and his son goes to a private school. A staunch believer in the virtue of hard work, he is intent on instilling the same in the boy. When his wife suggests he should give Keita some slack, he cuts her off. “It’s enough that one of us pampers him.”
We sense in Ryota a vague sense of discontent. Outwardly affectionate, he nevertheless finds Keita lacking in drive and competitiveness. He does not put it that way, of course: that would be too heavy a psychological burden for a six-year-old boy. As far as being a parent goes, Ryota can do better, but this is Japan, and, hey, who’s perfect?
The family hears from the hospital where Keita was born. There had been a switch, they are told. A DNA test confirms that Keita is, indeed, not their son. The news devastates the wife, Midori. For Ryota, it brings into sharp relief his misgivings about the boy, and three words uttered in the silence of a parked car seal Keita’s fate. Or do they?
Two families meet, and they can not be more different. When he realizes that his biological son’s family has limited means, Ryota sees an honorable way to resolve his dilemma: he offers to “adopt” Ryusei. The boy’s parents are well and truly insulted. Yudai may be a simple shopkeeper, but he adores his children. A bit like a kid himself, he is intent on spending as much time in their company while he still can — or, more like it, while they still will.
The mothers sit off to the side. “I didn’t think he looked like us,” Yukari says of Ryusei. “A friend accused me of having had an affair. I found that very cruel, but I never imagined something like this.” To lose a child, not through death or alienation but the brute logic of DNA — is there consolation in that? I was reminded of the quote that opened Ozu’s The Only Son (1936), from the writer Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, himself a tragic figure: “Life’s tragedy begins with the bond between parent and child.”
There is no textbook for parenting, much less this kind of predicament. A decision is made to swap the boys. What do they think? Nobody asks them, or tells them much of anything to make them question the arrangement, because, really, where to begin? There are no anguished farewells; director Hirokazu Kore-eda tells his story with a level gaze and great respect for his characters. In the silences you can hear their hearts break, mend, break again. In the hands of a less assured filmmaker this story would have been milked for sobs, but as Kore-eda has shown with Nobody Knows (2004), Still Walking (2008), and last year’s Our Little Sister, he is master of the quiet drama, with a keen eye for casting (notably children) and a patient, almost effortless style of stripping away the layers of artifice and self-deception that people wrap their sorrows in, to show us how, in the end, there can only be empathy, acceptance, love. Above all, love.
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