There are directors who write their own original stories and scripts and there are those directors who bring to the screen works of novelists, playwrights, and even biographers and historians. The directors who develop their own scripts are not just good filmmakers but arguably potential novelists or playwrights.
One such formidable director is Japan’s Naomi Kawase. Her films win awards at prestigious film festivals following which the director churns out well received novels in Japanese based on her original film-scripts.
The Mourning Forest (Mogari no mori) is a film that centers around a 70-year-old man with senile dementia (Alzheimer’s disease?) living in an old age home in Japan—somewhat similar to Sarah Polley’s Canadian film Away from Home. However, the two films approach the problem from totally different perspectives—underlining the cultural divide between Western and Eastern sensibilities. In both films, young people admire the values of the older generation. Both films are indirectly family films—underlining undying love for spouses. That’s where the similarities end.
The Mourning Forest is a sensitive film tracing a senile old man’s quixotic pilgrimage to his wife’s grave in a forest interlocking a mystical relationship with nature. An old man with depleting memory is cared for by a young woman Machiko, a new nursing recruit, at the retirement/old age home. But her name, which has similar syllables to the name of his wife Mako, who died 33 years before, triggers a passion in him to visit her grave in a forest.On the 33rd anniversary, according to Japanese Buddhist beliefs, the departed must travel to the land of Buddha—somewhat like the Roman Catholic Christian belief of the dead reaching heaven /hell after a stay in purgatory. The time has come for the couple to part forever unless he bids farewell soon before the anniversary.
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