25 bar rises 30.14 0mph N dewpoint 10
Waning Gibbous Moon of Winds
Naomi Kawase is a 37 year old Japanese filmmaker. This was the first film of hers that I have seen and it’s powerful. It won the Grand Prix at Cannes this year.
The film approaches the question of mourning with delicacy, but directness. A young woman, newly hired as a caregiver at a nursing home, develops a relationship with a difficult man, Shigeki-san. Their relationships proceeds through many levels, but reaches its climax after her car breaks down while she has him on a day trip. She leaves to get help and he wanders off.
She finds him in a watermelon patch and he runs away from her into the forest. He will not turn back and she becomes desparate, responsible for him, but unable to turn him back toward the car. Over a day and a half he leads her on his quest to find his wife’s grave. When he does find it, both have a revelation about their own mourning. He digs a hole and says he is “going to sleep in the earth.”
She lost her son not long before and has been enclosed in her grief, but her experience with Shigeki-san forces her out of her shell and back into the sensations of life.
Worth seeing if you can catch it.
