Distance Hirokazu Kore-Eda. (Toronto International Film Festival)

While the majority of films made in the last few decades seem to have adopted a sesame street/mtv approach to editing and pacing let alone plot, there still remain a few filmmakers who aim their works at a mature audience capable of savoring the intensity of the slow moment and the introspection demanded by such films. Hirokazu Kore-eda is one of these, his reputation solidly built on two films that attracted international attention; Maborosi (1995) and After Life (1998). The earlier film follows a young woman trying to come to terms with her husband's unexpected and seemingly unmotivated suicide. The later one continues the themes of memory and loss from an inverted perspective; that of the recently dead, who are asked at a way station to heaven to select the one moment from their lives that they would most like to remember and relive for eternity. The film's plot revolves around Mochizuki, a young worker at the way station who over the course of assisting an elderly gentleman find his 'favorite moment', di scovers a memory/meaning of his own that enables him to move on to his afterlife. This past September, Kore-eda sent to the Toronto International Film Festival his most recent film, Distance (2001). Unlike the other two, this one came with mixed to poor reviews. As with other major Asian directors whose work had screened earlier at Cannes (Hou Hsiao Hsien's Millenium Mambo, Tsai Ming-liang's What Time is it There and Shinji Aoyama's Desert Moon), the lack of a 'buzz' from the French festival was surprising. So many important and innovative directors; so little (good) being said about their most recent work. The Film Festival's press screening of Distance that I attended was perhaps two-thirds full, an auspicious beginning given the universal praise given to After Life. By the film's end the theatre had emptied out considerably, the press tending to vote with their feet. While the film is 2 hours 12 minutes, its length is not out of whack with the prevailing running times for major films, and Aoyama's Eureka' from last year's festival clocked in at over 3.5 hours; nevertheless, many of the negative reviews referred to it as too long and too unengaging... 'distanced', as it were. For me, the experience of watching this film was revelatory. Distance requires a lot of concentration to detail; in fact it warrants multiple viewings as its layers unfold gradually with much work left to the viewer to piece together the parts. While the film unfolds as a linear narrative, it is interrupted by dangling shot inserts and flashbacks that aren't always clear as to who they are about or what order they're occurring in, and at least two of these flashbacks are unreliable as they are contradicted by the plot's turn at the end. The ending especially requires a re-visiting of the narrative in order for the viewer to make sense of the actions of one of the main characters just as the film's four protagonists revisit the past in order to try to make sense out of the actions of their departed loved ones. Like the film's characters however, we are left at the end without concrete answers to our questions about motivation. There are no easy answers. Life isn't that simple, Kore-eda seems to be saying. Distance opens with a tv news report marking the 3rd anniversary of a terrorist attack in which some members of a cult called the Arc of Truth poisoned Tokyo's water supply killing over 100 people and injuring thousands. However and unexpectedly, the film is about neither the victims nor the perpetrators of this terrible deed, who killed themselves afterwards and whose bodies were cremated by remaining cult members. It is concerned instead with four 'ordinary' individuals, each marked out by their familial connection to one of the perpetrators. We are introduced to Atsushi/Arata, (2) a young man who works in a flower shop, who has lost his sister; another young man, Masaru/Iseya Yusuke, a swimming instructor, whose older brother, a former medical student was involved; Kiyoka, a schoolteacher with a young child who has lost her husband, and Minoru/Susumu Terajima, a middle-aged salaryman who has lost his wife. …

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