The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, March 8-14
Maborosi (1995)
Directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda
Kore-eda’s extraordinary first narrative feature bears signs of his previous work in documentary—a patient eye for lighting and timing, a knack for framing resonate spaces and sounds—while moving uncommonly ahead, fashioning a lyrical cinema of love, loss, and the sublime. Widowed after the sudden and unexplainable death of her husband, struck by a train as he walked home on the tracks, Yumiko remarries and finds real happiness in her new life, her husband’s home on the windswept coast far away from her prior life in Osaka. Yet moments of reverie, shot in stunning natural light, betray the intimacy of her doubts and grief. Not so much about what is gone but what remains and keeps coming back, Maborosi sits with the rhythms of life and death, finding them echoing all around, from the waves of an ocean to the close of day to the schedules of buses and trains—even as you move ahead, time keeps forever returning. Jeremy Polacek (March 10, 7pm at Japan Society)