Maborosi
(Maborosi no Hikari)

In 1995, at a time when independent Japanese cinema was burgeoning, Kore-eda’s first feature film placed him in the line of Ozu. Maborosi recounts the mourning for a loved one, made all the more impossible as there was no explanation for the man’s disappearance. Yumiko, already haunted by a loss during her childhood, remarries, moves away and time passes, but it takes only a detail, for her to face the fact that a lost love is forever unbearable. The obstinate and composed fixity of the shots, the omnipresence of lines and frames within the frame, everything hems in her long dark silhouette in a film that is constantly on the edge of extinction (light, sound) but which nonetheless casts a distant and gentle light on a broken heart. AR