Our Little Sister – Film Review

Director: Hirokazu Koreeda
Writers: Akimi Yoshida (manga), Hirokazu Koreeda (screenplay)
Stars: Haruka Ayase, Masami Nagasawa, Kaho

This is the story of three sisters, all in their 20s, who live together in a house in Kamakura, Japan. They receive the news that their estranged father has died and travel to the funeral. They haven’t seen their father in fifteen years since he left their mother to start a new life with another woman. This was a short lived affair as the other woman died, but there was a child, a half sister to the other siblings. After a brief meeting at the funeral, the sisters decide to take the unusual step of inviting their new sister to live with them.

This film is based on the manga series Umimachi Diary by Akimi Yoshida and converted to the screen by director Hirokazu Koreeda. It’s an unusual work as the pace of this film is quite unique. The film does not have a straight forward plot but aims to represent the lives of the various characters. The average film takes many liberties with the complexity of life to allow it to tell a story in a limited time. Characters are massively reduced to a number of key facets, and our mind fills in the various gaps. While this is still the case in this instance, it does at least attempt to show the many strands of an individual’s life.

We get to see many scenes of the characters walking and talking on various subjects, playing football, making plumb wine and other trivial aspects of life. There is also a huge amount of food preparation and eating, as the girls sit around the table in their old house. A plot does develop in the later part of the film, but the four women are right at the centre of this tale, and their characters are more important than the story.

It is a film that blows the Bechdel test out of the water, with a mainly female cast. It is a rare sight on screen and it should be celebrated for this alone. The slow pace of the plot may leave some uneasy in their seat, and it is certainly not aimed at the more bitter amongst us. It could easily be described as ‘heart warming’ which will send some running for the hills but it is never overly sentimental. As a depiction of life in Japan, it give a flavour of an unknown land and shows that their problems are similar to our own.