Fridae

I think it was a character in Sandman who tells us the bonds of family bind both ways; they bind us up, support us, help us, and they are also a bond from which it is difficult, perhaps impossible to extricate oneself.

In Yoji Yamada’s latest film, characters are desperate, even eager to sever ties with each other. A couple who tie their nuptials in the first act gets divorced by the start of the second, no thanks to the drunken antics of the bride’s disreputable Osaka comedian uncle who is himself excommunicated decades ago by the family and shunned by everyone except her mother.

While the unhappy couple does not patch up by the end of the movie (and indeed, make no attempts to patch up at all), it is the disreputable rogue of an uncle and the black sheep of the family who shows just how inseparable the bond of family is. Make no mistake here: the man may be kind-hearted and genial, you’ll rue the day you met him. The man lies and cheats but by the end of the movie when he lies dying of a terminal illness, you too will weep for his passing and miss his “lively antics”.

Director Yoji Yamada has been making films for several decades, and it is no wonder that his script for this drama is finely honed, eschewing all the possible melodrama and emotional manipulation one could wring out of the premise.

Uncle Tetsuro (Tsurube Shofukutei) is a life-like character whom no easy judgement can be made – he’s not completely horrible, but he doesn’t have that many redeeming characteristics to make you forgive him instantly, or even in a few years. That’s why when his closest and most estranged sister and niece (played by Sayuri Yoshinaga and Yu Aoi respectively) do forgive him and accept him warts and all, it feels more like real life – with all its unresolved hurts and disappointments – than a pat teledrama for housewives.

About Her Brother manages to wring true-to-life lessons and emotional realism from a melodramatic set-up that far lesser directors would miss.