Director – Patrick Dickinson – 2023 – UK, Japan – Cert. 12a – 94m
****
A Japanese widower comes to England to scatter his late wife’s ashes at Lake Windermere – out in UK cinemas on Friday, February 14th
Kenzaburo (Lily Franky from Shoplifters, 2018; After the Storm, 2016; Like Father, Like Son, 2013, all Hirokazu Kore-eda), on occasion abbreviated to Ken, seems somehow lost as he wanders around Tokyo, looking out over a cityscape of roofs, travelling in passenger train carriages, wandering round a food market in search of octopus for he and his wife’s anniversary meal.
He wistfully observes a live specimen in a tank. It’s not yet in season and the prices are ridiculous, so he shoplifts a packet, taking it to the restaurant where he and his wife Akiko had their first date all those years ago. She (Yuri Tsunematsu from Wife of a Spy, 2020; Before We Vanish, 2017, both Kiyoshi Kurosawa) comes in young as ever, as is he (Kosei Kudo), that pendant on her neck. He ignores the question from the present day chef (Hiroshi Okawa) as to how she’s doing.
Back at his flat, his panicking, besuited son Toshi (Ryo Nishikido) gets him ready for the funeral. At which a woman and small child are also present, later revealed as Toshi’s wife Satsuki (Rin Takanashi from Isn’t Anyone Alive, Garyuku Ishii, 2012) and daughter Emi (Hani Hashimoto), and a monk (Syuho Kataoka) gives him a letter from his late wife which his son reads to him. Her last wish. She’d like him to scatter her ashes at England’s Lake Windermere.
The son insists on accompanying him to England, wife and daughter in tow. An afternoon at a London hotel turns acrimonious as Ken doesn’t want to wait for the train booked for tomorrow, causing consternation when he goes off for hours with his granddaughter. Next, he heads to Kings Cross and, unaware of how the British train system works, boards the first train North and winds up in York.
Travelling by bicycle and sheltering from the rain under a huge tree, he drops in on a farmhouse where Mary (Aoife Hinds from The Commuter, Jaume Collet-Serra, 2018), the daughter of a farmer John (Ciarán Hinds from Belfast, Kenneth Branagh, 2021; Silence, Martin Scorsese, 2016; The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, Peter Greenaway, 1989), persuades her dad to take pity on the hapless lost Japanese. John, too, has recently lost his wife. They drive him the remaining hundred miles to Windermere, but he can’t find the spot to match his sole, old photograph of the place. They persuade him to call his son, whose family turn up to help him try to find the exact spot over several days….
The Japanese are known to romanticise certain aspects of England and English culture. As Ken chats up his wife-to-be at the food bar, he teaches her how to correctly pronounce the English word ‘rabbit’. Later, he opens a box of personal memorabilia which contains, in addition to the Windermere photograph, two iconic British books by Beatrix Potter, including The Tale of Peter Rabbit.
His son remembers his mum (Tae Kimura from Monsterz, Hideo Nakata, 2014; Hana and Alice, Shunji Iwai, 2004) reading this aloud to him in English as a child. She herself had spent time at Windermere as a child but, despite wonderful memories of that time, never really got on with her own father.
Ken, meanwhile, drifts off to more painful memories of caring for his wife as she succumbed to the onset of dementia.
Made by a British director who spent time in Japan where he got to know noted film critic Donald Ritchie, this pleasing oddity understands something of both cultures. Unlike so many low or medium budget British films, the low budget, letterboxed cinematography by Mark Wolf (Snow in Paradise, Andrew Hulme, 2014) feels composed for the big rather than the small screen, as the camera observes vistas as varied as Tokyo rooftops, food markets and food bars, London parks with ice cream vans, Yorkshire farmhouse interiors, and Lake District exteriors.
It also portrays the variations of English climate (raining again) better than most British movies. And in what is essentially a Japanese tale about a Japanese man out of his depth travelling abroad, it even manages to throw in on the train journey Northbound a rowdy hen party whose unnamed lead reveller (Isy Suttie from Pin Cushion, Deborah Haywood, 2017) is the one who explains to our hapless protagonist that he’s on the wrong train.
Nothing here is forced – the Beatrice Potter and geographical English references, the in-passing handling of the protagonist’s memories of his wife’s dementia, the farmhouse English father and daughter (memorably played by the real life Hinds father and daughter) satisfyingly either drift in and out of, or otherwise interrupt, the narrative.
This may be a small film, with small ambitions, but it achieves them in spades with seeming effortlessness. The Japanese cast, from Lily Franky downwards, are highly watchable, and the protagonist’s plight and emotions, which cover some difficult ground, highly relatable without ever descending into either mawkishness or sentimentality as they might so easily have done.
For all its limited means, this is a highly effective straddling of two very different, but on occasion very similar, island cultures: England and Japan. A rare, gentle film, with great, albeit small scale, performances, landscape and emotion, to be felt, enjoyed and cherished.
Cottontailis out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, February 14th.
Trailer: