I love Koreeda -- "Afterlife" and "Maborosi" are two movies I'll watch over and over, and Afterlife actually changed the way I look at my own life.
But I don't understand what happens at the end of DISTANCE. I've read all the other members' comments, and none of them really seems to work for me. Even if the mystery man is the cult leader's son and he's only pretending to be the dead girl's brother, who's the old man he visits at the hospital, whom he claims as his father, although he isn't? Who's the family whose photo he assembles on his computer? And how long has he been friends with the other pilgrim to the pier? And why make the point that the ashes of the cult members were never found? (Normally, I wouldn't even worry about that, but in a movie this bewildering it's hard to know what is or isn't important.)
Anyway, that's enough of that. For most of this film I was completely engaged. The long setup pays off by delivering the characters to a sort of enchanted forest, where they shelter in the cottage that housed the cult to which their dead brothers, sisters, wives, etc., belonged -- and with them is the man who fled the cult before it committed its crime, who betrayed them. The night passes in alternations of rain and moonlight and the people gather, regather, make fires, and smoke (and smoke) and very slowly begin to try to make some sense out of the mystery that crashed over them and washed away the people they loved and thought they knew.
Every element in this section of the film, which fortunately is the longest, works to put you into the rooms these isolated people briefly share, to put you into the rhythms of their conversations and the pauses that punctuate them, and to give you the feeling that you have been part of this improbable, somehow magical, night. The acting, the hand-held camera, the mostly natural light, the absence of any kind of frills, focuses you on the extraordinary actors and beyond them, to the reverberations of fading tragedy that vibrate through these lives like a gong.
And then, when the film's characters finally return to the garish, amphetamine-paced hurry of their daily lives, for just a moment you realize what drove the cult into the forest in the first place.
It's a great film with an absolutely impenetrable final 15-20 minutes. I'd love to hear some other theories. I don't suppose Koreeda has written anything about it.
But I don't understand what happens at the end of DISTANCE. I've read all the other members' comments, and none of them really seems to work for me. Even if the mystery man is the cult leader's son and he's only pretending to be the dead girl's brother, who's the old man he visits at the hospital, whom he claims as his father, although he isn't? Who's the family whose photo he assembles on his computer? And how long has he been friends with the other pilgrim to the pier? And why make the point that the ashes of the cult members were never found? (Normally, I wouldn't even worry about that, but in a movie this bewildering it's hard to know what is or isn't important.)
Anyway, that's enough of that. For most of this film I was completely engaged. The long setup pays off by delivering the characters to a sort of enchanted forest, where they shelter in the cottage that housed the cult to which their dead brothers, sisters, wives, etc., belonged -- and with them is the man who fled the cult before it committed its crime, who betrayed them. The night passes in alternations of rain and moonlight and the people gather, regather, make fires, and smoke (and smoke) and very slowly begin to try to make some sense out of the mystery that crashed over them and washed away the people they loved and thought they knew.
Every element in this section of the film, which fortunately is the longest, works to put you into the rooms these isolated people briefly share, to put you into the rhythms of their conversations and the pauses that punctuate them, and to give you the feeling that you have been part of this improbable, somehow magical, night. The acting, the hand-held camera, the mostly natural light, the absence of any kind of frills, focuses you on the extraordinary actors and beyond them, to the reverberations of fading tragedy that vibrate through these lives like a gong.
And then, when the film's characters finally return to the garish, amphetamine-paced hurry of their daily lives, for just a moment you realize what drove the cult into the forest in the first place.
It's a great film with an absolutely impenetrable final 15-20 minutes. I'd love to hear some other theories. I don't suppose Koreeda has written anything about it.