Movie Review: Maborosi (Maboroshi no Hikari) (1995)

I was very excited to watch Maborosi (Mirage) because I really liked all of Hirokazu Koreeda's films I've previously watched. The movie is slow, quiet and contemplative. The way it was shot is interesting, and the theme of the movie was explored cleverly.

The film follows Yumiko (Makiko Esumi), a happily married woman with a 3-month-old baby; however, she is haunted by a nightmare in which her young self is watching her grandmother leave for good, saying that she (the grandmother) "wants to die at her birthplace."

Everything goes smoothly until the day her husband, Ikuo (Tadanobu Asano), doesn't come back home. The police come to her house to deliver the news that he died hit by a train in an apparent suicide. Years later Yumiko re-marries a widower who lives in a fishing village for a fresh start...

The movie is very subtle, many questions are purposely left unanswered to mirror the grief Yumiko feels about her husband's sudden and unexplained death and her grandmother's departure. Koreeda is the one who truly shines in this delicate work of art. 

Everything in Moborosi works to express Yumiko's grief, from the title (Maboroshi no Hikari can be translated to "Illusory light" or "Mirage") to the extreme long shots and wide shots, the use of natural lighting (therefore very dark) all combined with a melancholic soundtrack. There are few dialogues thus making the actors rely mostly on body language and facial expressions.

Maborosi embodies all things I usually appreciate in a movie but something didn't feel quite right... While it is definitely an interesting, thought-provoking watch, it failed to reach me (maybe because the DVD's quality was very poor, or my high-expectation that ruined it for me). Actually, I think Maborosi is one of those movies that  you need to watch more than once to fully appreciate it!

The fact that there are unexplained events in life that no matter how much you try to find an answer, you won't get any and that uneasy feeling of uncertainty that comes with it is well portrayed in this movie.

TRAILER:

MY RATING:

Director: Hirokazu Koreeda | Writer: Teru Miyamoto (novel), Yoshihisa Ogita | 1995 | Genre: drama | Country: Japan