the sleeping father
by Douglas Messerli
Hirokazu Kore-eda (screenwriter and
director) Shoshite chichi ni naru (Like Father, Like Son) / 2013, USA 2014
Hirokazu Kore-eda’s 2013 film, Like Father, Like Son, seems, at first
to be suggesting a deep resemblance between the film’s central “father,” Ryota
(Masaharu Fukuyama) and his 6-year old son, Keita. In the very first scene, the
wide-eyed child—The New York Times
critic Manohla Dargis described him as having “enormous, startled-looking
eyes”—placed squarely between Ryota and Keita’s mother Midorino (Machiko Ono),
appears, in his black, loosely chopped hair and serious attentiveness, to be a
piece with both parents, as he is intensely queried by a series of adults in
what we later grasp is an interview for entrance to a wealthy private school.
The child, coached by his “cram” teacher, states that his father takes him
camping in the summer.
But soon after, as we enter the Nonomiya household, a beautiful
apartment in a high-rise Toyko building, we quickly perceive that Ryota’s
closeness to his son is a lie. The well-to-do architect is unsuccessful as a
family man, and his relationship to Keita consists, primarily, of forcing the
child to study hard, to learn to play the piano, and other cultural activities
that give the boy little time to imagine or play with toys. The love Keita
receives comes mostly from his doting mother.
Although Kore-eda’s work slowly builds up to the reasons for Ryota’s
distance, the plot of his film shifts suddenly and radically early on when the
couple suddenly receive a visit from administration officials from the hospital
where their child was born. Requesting that the couple receive a DNA scan, the
insensitive hospital representatives suggest that there may have been error at
the time of Keita’s birth, and that he has been mixed up with another child
born the same day, Ryusei (Shogen Hwang). Indeed, tests confirm their
suspicions, and suddenly the seemingly happy, but already tense family is
forced to consider an exchange with the other family, Yukari (Yoko Maki) and
Yudai (Lily Franky).
The Saiki family could not be more different than the Nonomiyas, the
former of which live in small quarters shared with their not very successful
appliance store. The father of three children, Saiki clearly prefers parenting
to working, and spends long hours with his children, his wife reaffirming his
somewhat childlike philosophy. Unlike the cautious, worried Kieta, Ryusei is a
rambunctious kid who loves his little brother and sister, flies kites with his
father, and spends long hours with his toys, which Saiki magically repairs when
they break.
With great tension, the two couples meet
on several occasions, the boys getting along remarkably well, “like they were
brothers,” while the parents eye one another suspiciously. As well they should,
since it quickly becomes apparent that to save them all from a Solomonic
decision, that the wealthier Ryota hopes to take both boys into his family. The
loving Saikis are understandably outraged by his presumptions that they might
give up their beloved son.
A court trial reveals that a nurse,
vaguely responding to a grudge with her own husband and children, has purposely
switched the two children, which creates even greater rancor for the two sets
of parents. On this subject the film is intentionally unclear, and we never do
quite comprehend the nurse’s motives, but the facts merely throw salt into the
parents’ wounds.
Gradually, the two mothers, both
terrified of the prospect of giving up the children they have nurtured for so
many years, bond, while the men, reiterating their differences, continue to try
to find a way to manipulate one another. Ryota attempts to negotiate the slippery
slope between nature (the ties of blood) and nurturing, while Saiki outwardly
criticizes Ryota for not spending more time with his family. All of this
becomes even more fraught, as they attempt to “trade” children during the
weekends, testing both the parents’ and the children’s abilities to accommodate
the new realities.
At first, the boys take to the experiments as a kind of adventure,
although Ryota, once again, describing the exchange as a “mission” to his son,
has taken away some of the fun. Certainly, it might be said that Keita has more
“fun” at the Saiki house than at home. Ryusei, on the other hand, is scolded
for the way in which he holds his chopsticks, and is forced to “the study” the
problem by picking up plastic letters with the chopstick as he baths.
Meanwhile, both mothers become tormented with the losses in their life.
The relationship between Ryota and Midorino becomes increasingly more tense, as
he, so she feels, blames her for not recognizing that Keita was not their son
at birth, and blames himself for not having perceived the “obvious,” suggesting
that Keita has lived up to the father’s own abilities. The visit to his father
also begins to confirm to us that Ryota hated his own father, and that the film’s
title is not, necessarily, about him and Keita, but Ryota and his selfish dad.
As I suggested earlier, all of these
feelings of guilt and frustration work themselves out, particularly in Ryota’s
case, very slowly, with the director allowing no simple resolutions to his
character’s situations. We cannot precisely know what Ryota is thinking, but we
clearly see his anguish, as he, once again, attempts to escape his house, even
temporarily abandoning his work. And, more than anything else, he sleeps. If he
has never truly been at home in his house, he is now like a depressed being,
unable to even try to explain to Keita anything about the momentous change in
his life that will soon take place. Once again, he breaks the news to the boy
by aligning it with responsibility, a “mission.”
Although both sets of parents attempt to welcome and love their switched
children, neither boy is entirely happy with the results. Keita at least has a
family who play and even bathe together, and his new father and mother lovingly
try draw him out of his lonely anger with games. Ryusei, on the other hand,
like Keita before, is mostly left alone to try to comprehend the vast changes
in his environment. When Ryota demands that he call him and Midorino mother and
father, the child can only ask, over and over, “why,” their inexplicable logic
bringing the same question to his lips in something close to terror. When his
toy ray-man breaks, Ryota cannot fix it, only commanding him to ask Midorino to
buy him a new one.
Slowly Ryota, comprehending his own
failures, tries to awaken himself from his slumbers, constructing a tent within
the boy’s bedroom, the three of them pretending to camp out under the stars.
For the first time in their lives, he actually “play” with his child, as the
two rush about the apartment to shoot each other dead. But that is just the
problem, the love the boy has known is “dead.” As Ryota again sleeps, Ryusei
makes an escape, the small child taking a train to his family so that he might
once more fly a kite.
Ryota returns to the Saiki house to pick
up his “new” son, Keita hiding from the man, who as Midorino finally expresses
it, has “betrayed” him. The increasing hostility between Ryota and his wife, as
well as his own growing perceptions, brings him finally to tears when he
accidently discovers a series of photographs Keita has unknowingly taken of
him—all of them while the father was asleep. His photographs reveal an abiding
love, almost an obsession, of a man-in-missing. Not only has he betrayed his son,
he has seldom been there for him as a loving father. Like Ryota’s own father,
he has been a selfish, unlovable man.
The film ends with the rightful restoration of the boys to the families
who have raised them, not who have simply “blood ties.” But before they can
restore that order, Keita bolts, unable to accept the love of a father who has
sent him on the ridiculous “mission.” Ryota runs after, the two walking along a
parallel path, separated by a row of trees. Stubbornly, Keita trudges forward,
his small legs moving him away from the man whom he once so trusted. Only when
Ryota admits the error of his ways, admits that he too had stopped taking piano
lessons as a child, that he also had run away from home, and declares “the
mission” to have ended, are the two able to join each other once again. Of
course, in life, such situations do not always end with such amicable
revelations, and Kore-eda’s movie relies, too much perhaps, on its sentimental
conclusion. But the implications of that situation are far more profound.
Family is not about blood as much as it is about caring and love.
Los Angeles, January 27, 2014
Reprinted from Nth Position [England] (February 2014).
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