The film scores all of its thematic points early, commenting intriguingly, if ultimately rather obviously, on the demands of Japanese patriarchy. Finding that their child was switched at birth with a baby from a working-class family, an upper-crust couple, Ryota (Fukuyama Masaharu) and Midori (Ono Machiko), decides, after long deliberation, to swap the six-year-old kid, Keita (Ninomaya Keita), who they had been raising as their son, with their biological child, only to realize the inevitable folly of such an idea. While it’s rooted in a real-world setting, and apparently based on an actual case, the film offers a situation nearly as implausible as does After Life. Falling somewhere in between the two, though leaning more toward the pointless self-critique of After Life, is the director’s latest, Like Father, Like Son. Whatever the thematic implications of this setup, the film ultimately faltered in shifting its emphasis to critiquing a situation that could never actually exist.įar more successful, because more plausible, is the scenario of Kore-eda’s best film, Nobody Knows, in which the director imagines a situation where a pair of children are left to fend for themselves after their mother abandons them.

This approach found its most obvious formulation in his 1998 film After Life, in which a group of newly dead people were asked to choose one memory from their life which would be reenacted by a group of actors and which the person would then watch over and over for all eternity. Although by no means the method Kore-eda Hirokazu employs on every movie, a common strategy of the Japanese auteur is to create a self-contained, occasionally fanciful situation, then allow the setup to play out in all its manifold narrative and ethical possibilities.

The movie like father like son