The Mourning Forest

There are directors who write their own original stories/scripts and directors who bring to the screen works of novelists, playwrights, and even biographers and historians. The directors who develop their own scripts are not just good filmmakers but arguably potential novelists or playwrights.

One such formidable director is Japan's Naomi Kawase. Her films win awards at prestigious film festivals following which the director churns out well received novels in Japanese based on her original film-scripts. Today, like Kawase, there are exciting filmmakers such as Mexico's Carlos Reygadas and Spain's Alejandro Amenabar (The others) and Pedro Almodovar (Talk to her) who need to be appreciated as a breed apart from the regular directors who prefer to ride on the shoulders of other worthies.

Kawase's Mourning Forest, won the Grand Prize at the 2007 Cannes film festival. Many Western critics missed out on the loaded Asian/Japanese cultural subtexts in this remarkable film and even expressed surprise that it won the honor. After viewing the film at the recent 12th International Film Festival of Kerala, I applaud the Cannes jury's verdict.

Mourning Forest (Mogari no mori) is a film that centers around a 70-year-old man with senile dementia (Alzheimer's disease?) living in an old age home in Japan—somewhat similar to Sarah Polley's Canadian film Away from Home. However, the two films approach the problem from totally different perspectives—underlining the cultural divide between Western and Eastern sensibilities. In both films, young people admire the values of the older generation. Both films are indirectly family films—underlining undying love for spouses. That's where the similarities end.

Mourning Forest is a sensitive film tracing a senile old man's quixotic pilgrimage to his wife's grave in a forest interlocking a mystical relationship with nature. An old man with depleting memory is cared for by a young woman Machiko, a new nursing recruit, at the retirement/old age home. But her name, which has similar syllables to the name of his wife Mako, who died 33 years before, triggers a passion in him to visit her grave in a forest.

On the 33rd anniversary, according to Japanese Buddhist beliefs, the departed must travel to the land of Buddha—somewhat like the Roman Catholic Christian belief of the dead reaching heaven /hell after a stay in purgatory. The time has come for the couple to part forever unless he bids farewell soon before the anniversary.

Mourning Forest can be divided into two parts.

The first part introduces the viewer to the two main characters--the nurse and the nursed. Both have suffered personal loss and are grieving—the nurse has lost a child for which her husband holds her responsible; the nursed has lost his wife and evidently never remarried and keeps writing letters to his dead wife that must be "delivered." The nurse dominates the first part. We view the two figures chasing each other between rows of tea bushes, their heads clearly visible over the verdant green landscape. There is warmth of the sun. There is an allusion to life.

The second part inverses the situation. The nursed dominates the nurse. The nursed tricks the smart young woman as he trudges to his wife's grave. Whether the spot is really her grave or not is of little consequence—the act of undertaking the pilgrimage is of consequence as he has to deliver his letters to his wife before 33 years of her death are completed. The forest covers the human figures. There is cold, darkness and mystical overflowing streams that threaten hypothermia. There are definite allusions to death and regeneration. In an interview to a news agency, Kawase said "After the two enter the forest, the forest becomes the force that supports them. It watches over the two of them, sometimes gently, sometimes more strictly." The films title roughly translates to "Forest of Mogari" and at the end of the film the director states the meaning of the term "mogari." Mogari means "the time or act of mourning." Unlike "Away from Her", "Mourning forest" is a film on understanding the richer complexities of life and death. "Running water never returns to its source," says the old man Shigeki to his nurse, words of solace for a young woman to look afresh at her marriage after losing a child. "If sad things happen, you shouldn't be sad about them or fight them, but vow to make the world a better place for children still to be born. That's my message," Kawase told the Reuters news agency At the Cannes festival, director Kawase said she made Mourning Forest because "her grandmother was becoming slightly senile, and today such people are looked down upon somewhat, and pitied, forgetting that it could happen to us someday." Kawase said she hoped viewers would learn kindness and a new way of handling difficulties -- which she said could help people around the world overcome religious and cultural differences. The nurse strips off her clothes to provide warmth to her ward and protect him from hypothermia—an action that would seem unusual to Western sensibilities. There is no sex here; mere practical help in time of need. There are streams that suddenly flood as if they have a life of their own and emerge as a silent character in the film.

There is one Japanese film that is somewhat similar in spirit and content—the 1983 Cannes Golden Palm winner Shohei Imamura's "Ballad of Narayama", where an active and useful old woman is forced to make a last trip up a mountain to fulfill local traditions and her consequent interactions with younger generations in the village. While Imamura used a famous novel to build a film classic, young Kawase has made a rich film using her own story. Kawase is treading in the footsteps of directors Terrence Mallick, Reygadas and Tarkovsky when the forest itself is transformed into a metaphor of memories and traditions, becoming a source of eternal strength. Kawase represents the finest in contemporary Japanese cinema blending nature and tradition in storytelling.

Machiko is a caregiver at a nursing home, Shigeki is one of the residents. Machiko is grieving the (apparently recent, though it's unclear) death of her young son, while Shigeki still mourns the loss of his wife, 33 years earlier. Their relationship to each other and to their grief during an excursion when they get lost in the woods. Their bond is complicated by Shigeki's dementia, whose often childlike behavior surely resonates with Machiko. It's an interesting, contemplative and spiritual exploration of grief with some lovely moments. Without spoiling anything, a charming early scene of Shigeki at the piano takes on a heartbreaking twist. Later, as Machiko desperately tries to control his reckless quest through the forest, we get hints of how she lost her child and the unresolved feelings she has.

Although there are gorgeous scenes (the two playing amidst rows of geometrically carved hedges, for example) the hand-held cinematography isn't doing the film any favors. It may have been more appropriate in the latter half, as their journey takes them deeper into the wild. But the shaky camera-work throughout the entire movie adds nothing. Maybe it just comes naturally to Naomi Kawase, whose work is primarily in documentaries (although she's no stranger to drama).

I don't know if this is an accurate representation of a Japanese senior facility, or an idealized one. I know that respect for elders is more ingrained in their culture. The home certainly appears to be a great deal more comfortable, dignified and serene than what we have. Perhaps it's a very expensive one, though we get no hints that Shigeki is particularly wealthy.

I thought it could have explored its themes a bit deeper, and there are the aforementioned camera issues, but overall I liked the film a great deal. It ends on a strikingly beautiful note. I'd like to see more by Kawase.

Second only to The Limits of Control (or as I like to call it, The Limits of My Patience), this is the most excruciatingly boring and constipated film I've ever seen. Had it not been for the fact I had to watch this for a Japanese Film Club, I would have given up after the first 15 minutes. I regret not giving up, and am considering not going to Japanese Film Club next week to save wasting another 60 minutes of my life energy on it.

Machiko starts work as a caregiver in a rural Old Folk's Home, seemingly setting out on a new life after the traumatic loss of her child. There she meets Shigeki, who seems to take to her because her name is similar to that of his beloved wife who passed away 33 years previously. Thirty-three years is an auspicious time, says a Buddhist priest to Shigeki, because his wife can now enter nirvana. The priest's words, the arrival of Machiko, and another birthday seem to spark something inside the mentally diminished Shigeki. When Machiko takes him out for the day, a car accident sets off a chain of events that will push both Shigeki and Mahciko to extremes, and respective epiphanies.

That is as much conventional narrative interpretation as this episodic, dreamlike piece can sustain. The set up is deftly handled, with the protagonists' tragedy revealed in violent confrontation with Machiko's husband, and opaque but insistent resistance from Shigeki. Makiko Watanabe exemplifies the low-key, naturalistic performances from the actors, seemingly in balance with the amateur octogenarians around them. A game of hide-and-seek in tea fields is endearing.

However, the best and worst of art-house is on display here. The mountains, forests and streams of Nara look magical and immortal. The sense of timelessness set in contrast to the fading mortality of the care-home residents is profound. However, once the story moves towards Machiko and Shigeki's journey through the forest, the shots are held longer, the lines become sparse and difficult to fathom, and there is a lot of walking, walking, walking... I get that these two are on a journey that will help them realise, for Shigeki, that his life has had meaning, and that for Machiko, there is a way to go on through human connection. Somehow this is brought to them by hugging a large dead tree. And falling in streams. And digging. And walking, lots of walking.

It looks beautiful, the actors are charismatic, but I am not sure there is really anything else there. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia dealt with similar themes, but more poetically, with more startling, painterly images, and with a deeper resonance. The Mourning Forest opens with a promise, but ultimately it does not live up to it.

I love asian movies. But this is not the case. The photography is good, the actors are decent, but after 20 min, you realise the story is empty, very superficial. Can you visualise a good looking person with no charm? Or the picture of a nicely arranged fruit salad that actually has no taste at all? The movie lacks substance. Sometimes, in Cannes, they reward movies merely by aesthetics. This is the case. Movie has little or no soul.