‘A Hundred Flowers’: San Sebastian Review

Dir: Genki Kawamura. Japan. 2022. 104mins

At once delicate and oddly overwrought, Japanese drama A Hundred Flowers is an earnest but somewhat mawkish attempt to convey the nature of dementia. Cinema’s most successful recent approach to this topic has been Florian Zeller’s The Father, and aspects of Genki Kawamura’s drama will inescapably remind viewers of that film’s simple but effective strategies for mapping the shifting terrain of the afflicted consciousness. But despite an eminent cast and undeniable poetic sensibility, Kawamura’s film is never quite distinctive enough to rise above a certain preciousness. Following its early September release in Japan, a San Sebastian competition slot may mark its most significant global visibility.

As perhaps befits a novelist’s film, A Hundred Flowers very much places its faith in symbols

Debut director Kawamura is best known as a producer – notably on anime hits Belle, Weathering With You and Your Name – but also as the novelist behind If Cats Disappeared From the World. He is also producer on the Netflix TV series The Makanai, with Hirokazu Koreeda as showrunner – and Koreeda’s own gentle, introverted family dramas very much seem like a model for A Hundred Flowers.

The opening image, in fact, is of a single flower, wilted in a vase; the first visual metaphor for the mental state of middle-aged piano teacher Yuriko Kasai (Mieko Harada). As she sits to play a Schumann piece, the notes begin to fail her, while a complex long take – showing Yuriko entering the room she’s already in – is an example of the clever spatial shifts, not dissimilar to Zeller’s, by which the film evokes the slow erosion of memory, space and the sense of self.

Later, Yuriko’s adult son Izumi (Masaki Suda) finds her in a playground at night, and before long – after an incident in a supermarket reveals the extent of her confusion – learns that his mother has Alzheimer’s. Yuriko moves to a care home by the sea, while Izumi and wife Kaori (Masami Nagasawa) await the birth of their first child – hope for the future, while fragments of a half-forgotten past intermittently re-emerge in the family’s life. Brief bursts of flashback gradually burgeon into full-blown narrative sections, notably recounting Yuriko’s relationship with Asaba (Masatoshi Nagase), the man whose all too brief presence in her life has continued to haunt her.

As perhaps befits a novelist’s film, A Hundred Flowers very much places its faith in symbols, but is finally too awash with highly charged images and resonant leitmotifs to really stand up as an organic drama. The title turns out to relate to Yuriko’s obsession with what the English subtitles mysteriously term ‘half-fireworks’, and which prove to be themselves a figure for the complex blossoming of memory. There’s also some oblique business involving handful of animal crackers, while the most laboured image involves a computer-generated synthetic pop star that Izumi’s company is developing but which, someone objects, comprises “random memories… but no real identity”.

Some clever effects are deployed to evoke Yuriko’s disorientation: notably that opening and a slyly choreographed supermarket sequence in which her experience appears to be running on a Moebius-like loop. But it often feels as if director Kawamura is not entirely sure what to do with Keisuke Imamura’s camerawork, which feels needlessly restless, reluctant to simply let us watch the characters.

There’s also a structural problem, in that sometimes we’re experiencing the story from Izumi’s perspective, and sometimes from Yuriko’s – not in itself an insuperable issue, except that the narrative eventually loses its way in a clutter of flashbacks within flashbacks. Similarly, Shohei Amimori’s score is a little too assertively ingenious: it involves looping pieces by Schumann, Bach et al as they disintegration in Yuriko’s mind, but the device feels overinsistent and finally not a little kitsch.

Holding the film together nonetheless is a controlled lead from veteran Mieko Harada, who made her mark in Akira Kurosawa’s Ran; her performance here shows her empathetic understanding of dementia, following her own documentary (2020’s Actress Hisako Harada) exploring her mother’s experience of the condition. Harada shows grace and understatement playing both the older Yuriko and her digitally-tweaked younger self.

As her son, Masaki Suda (whose films include Tetsuya Mariko’s aggressively outré 2016 Destruction Babies) doesn’t quite match up to Harada, his Izumi coming across as something of a callow hipster – which also makes for shaky chemistry with his wife, played as a conventionally simpatica figure by Masami Nagasawa, herself a Koreeda alumna (I Wish, My Little Sister). As the man from the past, Masatoshi Nagase looms in shadowy fashion but doesn’t get to display the charisma that gave him his international profile in work with Naomi Kawase (Sweet Bean, Radiance), Jim Jarmusch (Mystery Train, Paterson) and the neo-noir ‘Mike Hama’ films.