FREE ON CINEGEEK.DE Hirokazu Koreeda - Mabrorosi 

 Maborosi is a film of astonishing beauty - and very, very sad! It is the story of a woman whose happiness is destroyed in a single moment. Seemingly for no reason. Time passes, she tries to mend the broken pieces. Sometimes she can even distract herself a little. But at the centre of her life is emptiness and a question that is still unanswered. The woman's name is Yumiko (Makiko Esumi). She is tall and slender and serious. And she brings a great silence to the screen. Yumiko hardly speaks. She often sits there, absorbed in herself, lost in thought. Her clothes are long and always dark. When we meet her, she must be in her early twenties. Yumiko is married to Ikuo (Tadanobu Asano). They both have a little boy. Then it happens; an inexplicable event and Yumiko is a widow. Maborosi was Hirokazu Koreeda's first film. We ordered the DVD when the video store was founded in Switzerland by the great label Trigon Film. Trigon is an association that releases films mainly from Africa, South America and Southeast Asia. And fortunately also from Japan! I think you can immediately tell who Koreeda's role model is: old master of Japanese cinema Ozu. Koreeda also likes to place his camera at the protagonists' eye level. His figures often kneel. His shots like to begin and end in empty spaces. The characters speak while sitting next to each other, without looking at each other. Koreeda works with many long shots and few close-ups. His camera does not move. It observes. The clearest bow to Ozu, however, are the small interruptions, such as when Koreeda interrupts the action to simply look at something else for a moment. A street or a shop, for example. Once you even see a tea kettle (a clear reminiscence, because Ozu loved to insert a beautifully shaped tea kettle). Of course, these details are only incidental and yet so carefully done that they must be mentioned. They hint at tradition. In the whole film there is not one shot that is NOT graceful and very pleasing. One often imagines life full of significant, painful questions. Maborosi is one of those rare and very valuable films where you can actively put yourself in the mind of the characters. We feel great understanding and sympathy for them! We want to understand Koreeda's characters and we do. He often asks very immediate questions - but behind them are the big questions of life. Yumiko complains that everything is spinning in her head. She remarries and her second husband offers a kind of answer to her pressing question. It is based on an experience fishermen have at sea when they see a light, a mirage. It is called Maborosi and lures them further out to sea. But what is the reason for this light?