‘After the Storm’ another Kore-eda complex family drama
Toward the end of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s latest complex family drama, “After the Storm,” an aging matriarch muses, I wonder why it is that men can’t love the present.
Either they just keep chasing whatever it is they’ve lost, or they keep dreaming beyond their reach.
Unlike the completely winning “Our Little Sister” from last year, Kore-eda’s latest effort is decidedly more downbeat, his characters more inscrutable and his pacing more languid, even by Kore-eda’s usual standards.
Fifteen years earlier, his novel won a prestigious award, but he has yet to follow up on that success.
With no follow-up novel in the works, he has taken a job with a private detective agency.
“I’m the ‘great talents bloom late’ kind,” Ryoto tells his mother, Yashiko (Kirin Kiki, who is excellent).
Unable to move on, Ryoto utilizes his private eye skills to spy on his ex-wife and her new boyfriend, who seems to be everything he is not — and a nice guy to boot.
What could be a creepy sort of plot twist is, in Kore-eda’s hands, more of a sad desperation.
G. Allen Johnson is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer.