Showing @ Filmhouse, Edinburgh, Tue 28 Feb only

Ryosuke Hashiguchi / Japan / 2008 / 140mins

Marriage is so often the end of the story in film, but in director Ryosuke Hashiguchi’s wise and tender picture we see past the happily ever after fantasy to the pain and joy, and occasional banalities, of married life.

Tightly wound Shoko (Tae Kimura) and unreliable Kanao (Lily Franky) have married each other with little to bind them other than Shoko’s unplanned pregnancy and a love of art. But their respective family history and the tragedy of Shoko’s miscarriage keep them together over the eight year span of this film which watches them grow, change and ultimately become more than the sum of their parts.

The fraying of Shoko’s psyche following her child’s death carries the emotional weight of the film and Kanao’s work as a court artist, sketching witnesses and defendants, underpins his development from callow youth to compassionate adult as well as giving a snapshot of a little shown  part of Japanese culture and history. The film also has a cast of great supporting characters such as Shoko’s mother, still pining on the memory of her baseball star husband and Kanao’s hardbitten press colleauges.

Both central performances are top notch with Kimura’s decent into pain and madness wholly convincing and painful to watch whilst Franky with less emotion to play with delivers his character’s development in a beautifully unstated style. What isn’t here is any sense of high drama in the traditional three act structure sense; instead Hashiguchi’s film is a slow, well crafted, observational and non-judgmental picture which, while possibly lacking incident, certainly doesn’t lack human interest. It’s a portrait of marriage as it often is, an organic thing rarely melodramatic or clichéd, which makes this film unsentimental and unhurried but still well worth watching.