Dir: Naomi Kawase. Japan. 2003. 100 mins

The third feature by Japanese director Naomi Kawase, Cannes competitor Shara is set, like Suzaku (a Cannes Camera d'Or winner in 1996) and Hotaru (2000), in the director's home province of Nara. Like the previous two, it deals with themes of separation, the continuity of tradition, and problems of communication within families and couples. Here, it is told via a story of a family riven by the sudden disappearance of one of a pair of young twin brothers. Like her characters, Kawase's films always seem to be holding something back, and Shara is no exception. But this reticence, though it tests audience patience at times, is so delicately managed that it appears in the end as a gesture of respect, an unwillingness to patronise with easy solutions. Still, Shara is a resolutely arthouse prospect, even at home in Japan.

Kawase makes the camera a narrator, sometimes as baffled about certain events as the audience are, sometimes more confident. In a marvellous, uncut, three-minute opening sequence, shot on digital video, the hesitant lens explores what seems to be an abandoned print works, before being attracted by the voices of two young twins playing in a courtyard. It follows them when they start running at breakneck speed through the narrow streets of this modest provincial town. Even though the camera never loses the two, it is still difficult to pinpoint the moment when one of the boys vanishes. It seems like a temporary absence, a boyish distraction: but Kei is lost forever, and the severance marks the life of his brother, Shun.

Five years on, Shun is still withdrawn, and unable to reach out to his parents; only Yu, who becomes his girlfriend despite Shun's apparent indifference, offers a way out of the emotional impasse. While Shun paints a life-size portrait of his missing twin, his father prepares a traditional street dance festival, and his pregnant mother tends her plants. These are small things, so small that it is difficult to work up much enthusiasm.

But more often, deeper currents can be sensed behind the apparent banality of the events, with the sense of a symbolic framework only partially accessible to Western audiences. Nara is one of the cradles of Japanese Buddhism, and the film is underpinned by ritual, such as the high-pitched chiming which accompanies much of the early action, which turns out to be the striking of a small temple gong during the Buddhist All Souls' festival.

It is never really clear what happened to Kei, though his body is found by police years later; and when Yu's mother tells her that she's really her aunt, this revelation too is left hanging. But by now we have grown used to the director's habit of holding back, her search for emotional and symbolic resonance rather than conventional dramatic satisfactions.

Prod co: Real Prods, Nikkatsu
Int'l sales: Flach Pyramide International
Prod: Yoshiya Nagasawa
Scr: Kawase
Cinematography: Yutaka Yamazaki, Yuzuru Sato
Ed: Shotaro Anraku, Tomoo Sanjo
Music: Ua
Main cast: Kohei Fukunaga, Yuka Hyoudo, Naomi Kawase, Katsuhisa Namase, Kanako Higuchi