A Conversation With "Maborosi" Director, Hirokazu Kore-Eda - Part I

by Mark L. Feinsod

"Maborosi", the first feature film by Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-Eda, begins with a 12-year old Osakan girl named Yumiko watching as her grandmother leaves to return to the village of her childhood to die. Years later, Yumiko (Makiko Esumi) is waiting for her husband and childhood sweetheart, Ikuo, to return from work, when she is informed by a policeman that Ikuo has committed suicide. Despondent, Yumiko nevertheless marries a widower she has never met, Tamio, who lives in the seaside village of Noto, and soon thereafter Yumiko and her son travel there to start their new life. Yumiko and Tamio's marriage flourishes, except that she cannot stop grieving for her late husband, and is unable to comprehend Tamio's ability to overcome his own grief.

indieWIRE: What about "Maborosi No Kikari" [the novel by Teru Miyamoto upon which "Maborosi" is based] inspired you to use it as source material?

Hirokazu Kore-Eda: About five years ago, for one of my documentaries, I interviewed a woman whose husband had committed suicide. Through this interview, I took a deep interest in how people cope with the loss of someone close, how they work through their grief and mourning. The story by Teru Miyamoto was also based on this theme of mourning. I read the story at twenty, and liked it. It was my interest in death and grief born from that documentary, along with my love for the original story, that prompted me to make the film.

iW: I was impressed by your use of lighting and sense of composition. How do You feel such elements fit into narrative cinematic storytelling?

Kore-Eda: The way I envisioned the film was not to show Yumiko's change of emotion through narration, or to explain her feelings through close-ups. I constructed every scene in this film not for the purpose of telling her story, but to invite the audience to feel the light, the sound and the darkness that Yumiko was feeling at that moment. I wanted to portray the change within her by depicting the changes of light and shadow that surrounded her. The lighting and the composition of the shots were not intended to tell the story, but to evoke Yumiko's interior landscape.

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iW: Do you think that the subtleties of your film, and it's sense of composition and lighting and cinematography, enhance or detract from it's treatment of suicide, loss, and poverty? Kore-Eda: I had no intention of using obvious lighting devices such as bluish light to evoke suspense. I wanted to shoot the film in natural light. As a concept, one thing that I was thinking about was, in the first half of the film, Yumiko is surrounded by a womb-like darkness. When she begins her life with her second husband, light begins to seep into her surroundings. It's not so much that the lighting is there to reinforce the theme, rather the gradual change in the light itself was a theme of the movie. iW: You use different types of shots -- the long shot between Ikuo and Yumiko At the factory, for example -- to convey elaborate emotions. Kore-Eda: There are upwards of 300 shots in this movie. I did the story board for every single one of them. I planned what kind of light there would be and what kinds of sounds would be heard in each of the shots. I had a great time doing it. Using the sound of the bicycle, the bell, the wind and the light of a bulb; using things that surround us in everyday life, I attempted to portray the space and time inhabited by Yumiko. In the scene where Yumiko goes to visit Ikuo at the factory, they look at each other through the window. This is [sic] the one scene where I changed my style of shooting. This is [sic] the only moment in the entire movie Yumiko and Ikuo face each other-- and I wanted to emphasize this moment by breaking the style of the film and going in closer on each of them. This is the only place I use a medium shot in the movie. Most scenes where you see the two them, I had them together in a long shot and did the whole scene in one shot. But in this scene at the factory, not only do I use a medium shot, but I also intercut between Yumiko's and Ikuo's shot. I wanted to make an impression on Yumiko and the audience with the expression on Ikuo's face in that medium shot as he looks out at Yumiko from inside the factory. To read the rest of this article, click here... posted on September 5, 1996 |Share