floats like a feather, plunges like a dagger.

Kore-eda Hirokazu - "Nobody Knows"




I finally watched this after holding on to it for weeks. A part of me could not wait to be mesmerized by what the reviews I've heard promised, and another part knew it was going to be heart wrenching - films about childhood never fail to strike the tear ducts in me. I supposed it's the innocence and the line drawn between that and the adult world. Sometimes I think I'm trapped in between.




I read a review on indiewire, and the film was described as one that 'floats like a feather yet finally plunges like a dagger'. There is no better way to describe the film in one phrase.




The four children, all from different fathers, were left to survive on their own in a small apartment after their mother abandoned them before Christmas. Over the four seasons, we saw how their physical and emotional fronts changed. Their hair grew, clothes worn out, became visibly thinner and a glimmer of hope dying into an almost oblivion. They had to be remained unseen by their neighbours - nobody knows of their existence, they don't go to school, their births undeclared; somehow I feel it is a social commentary in a claustrophobic urban city like Japan - and staying together. The loneliness is indeed overwhelming.

The Cannes 2004 Best Actor, Yakira Yuya, who played the eldest son Akira, stood tall above all the children. He was responsible for all of his siblings and is unbelievably resourceful; he hunted down all the possible fathers of Yuki - the youngest one - to collect their individual material responsibilities. As the days go by, it is clear that the situation becomes increasingly helpless. You wonder how the pyschological trauma that will probably take effect on them.





The film screams with silence. Their pleas for help that goes unheard, yet that was subtly played out with their everyday lives. Their innocence so gentle - they still held on to the possibility that their mother will return - I cannot describe. Right to the tragic climax, (I shan't spoil it for you here.) not a single one of them shed a tear. Life goes on and nobody will ever know.





And the film ended as it is, their plight goes unspoken, their future questionable and unanswered.