Still Is

Chichi ariki

Oldenburg Film Festival

VERDICT: This ambiguous single-take drama poignantly depicts a mundane morning in a family home, subtly exploring grief and the ways we hold on and move on.

Told in one single locked-off take (which took just three attempts to film), Toshiyuki Ichihara’s Still Is mines impressive cumulative tenderness from almost radically unobtrusive observation. With the camera situated just beyond a partition, the audience stares, with relatively little obstruction, at a family as they have breakfast on a typical weekday morning. Via the smallest indicators in their interactions as they pass in and out of the room, and the words that are spoken and what remains unsaid, Ichihara’s film accumulates an impressive – perhaps even unexpected – level of pathos. Primarily this is a result of the realisation, though it is never explicitly confirmed in the dialogue, that the father (Hajime Sakai) has died and is lingering in the family home from beyond the grave.

While it’s possible to initially think that Sakai’s father is just being ignored by his self-absorbed family members, this reading quickly becomes untenable. As the mother (Nahoko Kawasumi) prepares breakfast for her two children (Bankoku and Jun Hosoi) and a lowkey drama begins to unfold about her forgetting to collect her son’s suit from the dry-cleaner for his big job interview, the gap that has been created by his absence becomes ever more evident. This is at its most obvious – and the film reaches its emotional crescendo – when the son emerges from his room dressed in a suit. His mother mistakes it for his, but his sister, with a sentimental smile, notes that it is their father’s.

The perhaps cool remove of a static wide shot might seem ill-suited to feel attempting to parse the signs and effects of grief, but in fact, it works excellently. Still Is is less an examination of the anguish of mourning and more about the lingering ways that we come into contact with lost loved ones. The father reaches out and helps at opportune moments – pushing a bottle of soy sauce onto the table or fetching his wife’s umbrella for her – that create a lovely portrait of a family spirit, a quotidian and thoughtful twist on a haunting. In doing this, the film finds a space in which people are both gone and present, neither directly on the mind nor forgotten.

Director, screenplay: Toshiyuki Ichihara
Cast: Hajime Sakai, Nahoko Kawasumi, Bankoku, Jun Hosoi
Producer: Miho Yoshimasu
Cinematography: Yusuke Kita
Sound: Yasuhiro Konno
Art direction: Daisuke Shimizu
Venue: Oldenburg Film Festival
In Japanese
11 minutes