Distance (2001)

I was a bit sleepy and inattentive during the first 20 minutes of Hirokazu Koreeda's Distance. I had basically no clue about what direction the film were to take or even what it was about. At one point I also had a quite uncharacteristic moment of anxious frustration: what the hell is going on??? What I saw in these first sleepy moments was an urban drama transmuting into something which resembled the tropes of the horror films and then the film shifted gears again. There were a bunch of people doing different stuff and all of a sudden we see them celebrating some kind of mournful anniversary. Gradually, the contours of the story became clearer. The central characters are relatives to people in a Japanese sect which committed a horrible act. There is nothing sensationalist in this slow-paced film. Koreeda focuses on flashbacks in a way that actually works. The loosely associated scenes are a collection of stories about people who have trouble coming to terms with their families or with themselves. A handheld camera follows the events that conjure up an everyday urban world in which the horrible can't be revealed directly. Instead, Koreeda approaches what is painful through people's memories and the relations that evolve between the people who have come to mourn in this anniversary. Distance is not a perfect film and sometimes I feel that a sharper perspective could have been carved out. However, the fragmented and a bit peculiar way of telling this story was striking and even a long time after watching the film I remember several scenes that made an impact on me without rubbing my face into the tragedies evoked. There are many aspect of Distance which I think prominently demonstrate some of Koreeda's strenght and personal interests as a director. Not only do we see lots of scenes with trains (it seems as if Koreeda builds almost all of his stories around trains) - the film features his combination of compassionate evocation and patient observation. Among the themes tackled in the film, I appreciate the way family relations are connected with corrupt critique of 'the establishment' and what it means to exit from 'the establishment'. At the same time, Distance holds up the images of conflicts and alienation and it provides no easy solution for anything. Thumbs up also for Koreeda's excellent understanding of images: as in many other of his films, he shows the edges of urban life, the situations in which urban life are unsettled and questioned.