You rarely get a wholesome movie that celebrates the family out of depraved Hollywood, so I'm glad for Japanese cinema, because they can tell authentic, thoughtful, emotionally touching, human stories really well. This one is a bit slow at times, perhaps it could have been slightly shorter, but all in all it's a nice mix between drama and family comedy, without those two elements ever becoming too pronounced and taking it off balance.
2 Reviews
Heir Tomorrow
politic198310 February 2017
Warning: Spoilers
'The Mohican Comes Home' follows a similar fish-out-of-water theme as Shuichi Okita's earlier films, 'The Woodsman and the Rain' and 'The Story of Yonosuke'. But, slightly unusually, this time around it is returning home that sees the protagonist seem out of place, to start with at least.
Eikichi is somewhat distant from his own life. The front man for a death metal band, he seems to let life pass him by with a rather casual, absent-minded stare on his face. His band is struggling financially, his girlfriend whom he plans to wed is pregnant, but these don't particularly seem to be key things on his mind. When he returns home with Yuka to visit his family home in a sleepy, seaside town, therefore, announcing his current life stage seems like nothing to him, but, of course, is much more to his parents. However, his aging father is suffering; his body riddled with cancer. At this, Eikichi is rather glum-faced, to start.
But, the more time he spends with his sick father, the more he feels that there is perhaps more that he should be doing in life. He makes it his aim to help out at home and fulfil his father's dying wishes, resulting in a strange pizza-eating scenario, improvised musical performance and masquerading as his father's hero, Eikichi Yazawa, his father's singing idol whom he was named after.
But this is not an altogether serious film, and Okita finely balances each and every scene with enough comedy to take it away from over-sentimentality; but enough seriousness to stop it becoming too farcical. A stand out moment when Eikichi takes his father to the beach, with his father's deteriorating state becoming evident as he talks to Eikichi as if he has yet to leave for Tokyo, still a teenage boy. While a failure in the eyes of many, his father still wants his son to keep trying to succeed at what he does.
While 'The Mohican Comes Home' has good balance, it does leave it not veering one way or the other, left as a 'nice' watch, lacking in a well-executed ending, as in 'The Story of Yonosuke'. In fact, the ending is perhaps the film's weaker point: the hastily put-together wedding scene stretching a bit too far in to 'goof-ball' comedy, out of sync with the rest of the film.
The line 'go back to Tokyo' is a recurring one, with his mother keen for him to get out from under her feet and his father wanting his new-found kindness to stop reminding him he is about to die. Eventually he does, realising he is not so out of place in his hometown after all, leaving with a new sense of purpose for when he returns.
politic1983.blogspot.co.uk
Eikichi is somewhat distant from his own life. The front man for a death metal band, he seems to let life pass him by with a rather casual, absent-minded stare on his face. His band is struggling financially, his girlfriend whom he plans to wed is pregnant, but these don't particularly seem to be key things on his mind. When he returns home with Yuka to visit his family home in a sleepy, seaside town, therefore, announcing his current life stage seems like nothing to him, but, of course, is much more to his parents. However, his aging father is suffering; his body riddled with cancer. At this, Eikichi is rather glum-faced, to start.
But, the more time he spends with his sick father, the more he feels that there is perhaps more that he should be doing in life. He makes it his aim to help out at home and fulfil his father's dying wishes, resulting in a strange pizza-eating scenario, improvised musical performance and masquerading as his father's hero, Eikichi Yazawa, his father's singing idol whom he was named after.
But this is not an altogether serious film, and Okita finely balances each and every scene with enough comedy to take it away from over-sentimentality; but enough seriousness to stop it becoming too farcical. A stand out moment when Eikichi takes his father to the beach, with his father's deteriorating state becoming evident as he talks to Eikichi as if he has yet to leave for Tokyo, still a teenage boy. While a failure in the eyes of many, his father still wants his son to keep trying to succeed at what he does.
While 'The Mohican Comes Home' has good balance, it does leave it not veering one way or the other, left as a 'nice' watch, lacking in a well-executed ending, as in 'The Story of Yonosuke'. In fact, the ending is perhaps the film's weaker point: the hastily put-together wedding scene stretching a bit too far in to 'goof-ball' comedy, out of sync with the rest of the film.
The line 'go back to Tokyo' is a recurring one, with his mother keen for him to get out from under her feet and his father wanting his new-found kindness to stop reminding him he is about to die. Eventually he does, realising he is not so out of place in his hometown after all, leaving with a new sense of purpose for when he returns.
politic1983.blogspot.co.uk
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