Our Little Sister (2015)

Three sisters – Sachi, Yoshino, and Chika – live in their ancestral house in Japan. Their father left with another woman, and their mother left soon after, leaving them to fend for themselves – all adults now, they still live together, orphans in a girl’s dorm. They get on with life and don’t talk about the things that brought them to where they are. One day, news arrives – their father has passed away, and he left a fourth daughter behind; Suzu, their half-sister.

In Suzu, the eldest sister Sachi sees herself – someone forced to grow up much too quickly, in Suzu’s case so she could take after her ailing father in place of her negligent stepmother, as Sachi raised her little sisters. Perhaps the sisters should feel bitterly towards Suzu, whose mother stole their father – Suzu certainly expects resentment – but they don’t. They see in her see a kindred spirit, and ask her to come live with them. The lonely, deprived Suzu becomes the new baby sister – almost a daughter – and blossoms under their care and affection.

Our Little Sister has no plot to speak of beyond the galvanising event of their father’s death. While events occur – a family friend gets cancer, Sachi’s married lover asks her to come to America with him, the sisters’ mother comes for a memorial event – they occur as part of everyday life, not in service of a larger goal. The film is consummate slice-of-life, following the sisters about their days – Sachi is a nurse, Yoshino is a bank teller, and Chika works at a sports shop – and building a cast of tertiary characters from those they know and meet, like Chika’s mountaineer maybe-boyfriend –who wants to go back to Everest even though he lost six of his toes – or the café owner who has always been a little in love with the woman who runs the girls’ favourite seafood restaurant.

The film spans a year in the lives of the sisters, with shots of the changing seasons beautifully framing the vignettes of their everyday existence. There is an easy, comfortable rhythm to the film. Its understated vignettes hone in on the minutiae of life, like the simple pleasures of whitebait fishing and the beautiful sequence of Suzu cycling in summer under a tunnel of cherry-blossom trees.

This gentle patience contrasts an underlying tension – one created by the sisters’ abandoned, quasi-orphaned state, and Suzu being the child of the woman who broke up their family. It’s been there from the beginning but it lies, almost forgotten, until Sachi, Yoshino, and Chika’s mother comes to stir it up again. Till then, true to people’s wilful avoidance of what is unpleasant, Suzu and her sisters have rarely talked about their situation, the dialogue gently tiptoeing around acknowledgement even as they live in a house filled with memories of a broken family.

The director Hirokazu Koreeda uses silences, compositions and immaculate framing to full effect in communicating how the sisters are trying to keep their family together while the internal stresses threaten to push them apart – not just those of their past, but of their present, with three adult women living together, each itching for personal independence but reluctant to leave their family behind. Suzu’s homecoming gives them someone to care for and raise, uniting them.

Our Little Sister is a work of simple, eloquent beauty, both in subject, treatment, and visual flourish. It explores sisterhood, growing up, and moving on, with naturalism and sensitivity, conjuring a rich world and even expressing a sort of humanistic philosophy  - graceful acceptance of what you can’t change with a relish in the texture and joys of life. It may not aspire to grandness in scope, but it’s a great film nonetheless.