Viraldice

Bergman Island is a new film by the French writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve, which explores the relationship between two filmmakers – Vicky Krieps’ Chris and Tim Roth’s Tony – as they retreat to the island of Fårö to write screenplays. The pair interact with the legacy of Ingmar Bergman, spending time in his house and exploring the locations of his later films, and his shadow looms large over their nascent projects.

LWLies: Regarding Bergman Island, when was your first encounter with Fårö? When did it occur to you that you may want to film there?

Hansen-Løve: It wasn’t when I saw films that were shot there, but it was the pictures of the island that were in the book that was made for the auction of the Bergman estate. After Bergman died he wanted to sell everything because he thought it would be too difficult to divide among all his kids. And so everything was supposed to be sold and they made a book for the auction. In the book there was pictures of many of the objects like the paintings that were in his house, but also everyday life objects like lamps and clocks. But also there were pictures of the houses, of his car. I remember being impressed by the pictures of his cars. To me, it gave me a very strong feeling of the island as being a kind of haunted place – like you see in a Hitchcock film.

And that ghostliness was attractive as a film location?

Of course, it’s not what gave me the idea to do the film but I think that the attraction that I felt to this haunted place met my desire to make a film about a relationship and artistic creation. This must have been after I made Eden. Also, after Eden, I started to have this idea of making a film about a couple of directors. It was this idea that was brewing up in me but it wasn’t clear yet where it was going or where it would be set. And then I met Greta Gerwig, who has a part in Eden, in Paris for a couple of days and she was coming back from Fårö with Noah Baumbach, and they told me about their experience of their trip, and all these things at some point came together and that was the start of the process of Bergman Island.

That’s so funny that Noah Baumbach would then go and make Marriage Story after going to Fårö.

Well it was certainly not an accident, I’m sure he’s a great fan of Bergman’s. And I’m sure it was influenced by Scenes from a Marriage.

I remember seeing those same shots you talked about from the auction, and thinking he must’ve been quite a lonely guy in his later life – this hermetic existence, where he was trying to close himself off from the world.

His wife died some 15 years before he did, so he spent the last part of his life more or less alone. He had a big family but he was living there for the last years – for a long time he used to go back and forth to Stockholm where he had an apartment, but at some point he cut himself off from the city and decided to stay in Fårö. In this last part of his life he decided to live there in this remote place throughout the year, alone. He made a point of not being disturbed. He would mostly see the people on the island who would work with him to renovating bits of his house.

Do you think it’s a good skill to know how to be alone?

Yes – part of my admiration for him has to do with his aptitude for being alone. Which is actually very unusual. Of course, we know a lot of great artists who must have lived alone and faced this loneliness. But among filmmakers it is less common. Because the job of a filmmaker is a job where you are always surrounded by people – you have to enjoy being with people. And I’m sure Bergman also enjoyed that a lot. There is footage of him on his sets of his films and you can see he actually loved being there, he has this childish smile that is very seductive. But he was able to get away from that at the end of his life as he became darker or more melancholic – he enjoyed solitude more than anything.

But I admire that because I think when you make films it is very difficult to preserve that solitude and to desire it. There is a temptation when you make films to never be alone actually. That’s why we see so many directors, for instance, who write their first feature alone, then maybe a second, then that’s over, they start writing with co-writers and then they can never write alone again. I’ve seen so many of them around me.

And yet you still write alone, if I’m not mistaken?

Yes. And I think that’s partly why I’m so determined to try and still work my scripts myself, not because I think I write better than anybody else, not that I think I’m gifted or anything, but because it’s actually pretty difficult for me to write. But I still think that the kind of things you can find when you face solitude – when you go into yourself – you cannot find if you disappear among people all the time. If you do not face fears, or the meaning of your life or whatever you want to call it. I think there are things that you can face, or say or express only if you can look into yourself alone, accept the silence and the voice. It’s about silence. It’s about God. It’s about patience too. I think that the job of a filmmaker can really take you away from that if you are not careful.

It’s interesting that you say that because the island that you present in the film is very different to the one that is seen in Bergman’s films. The forbidding and bleak place where he made Persona and Through the Glass Darkly and everything. There’s a really interesting difference between the island that he saw and the one that you show us – now, it seems like a much more normal place.

Maybe it’s just because I’m a much more normal person. So it’s just the way I see it. Yeah, that’s what made the film possible – to film it in a different way to how he did it. If I’d been there and had found exactly the same places as those in his films, then I don’t think I would’ve known how to express myself or find my own voice there.

Going back to the auction book – it was so inspiring because these pictures, they were not in black and white, they were in colour. And most of Bergman’s films that were shot on Fårö, they are in black and white. And most of them have to do with nightmares – they have to do with his demons as he was seeing them. But the island that I saw when I went there was an island in colour. There was another way to experience the island. It could still be Bergman’s place and a haunted place, but there was a way for me to make it mine.

Your film intersects with the world of Ingmar Bergman and his legacy, and there’s almost this theme park aspect of visiting his house and doing the Bergman Safari. When you decided that you wanted to make a film there and it would be connected to all these things, did the Bergman estate need to give you their blessing?

Well I needed them to open the houses for me. I wasn’t so worried about getting authorisation to film outside, because these places don’t belong to him. But I was worried about getting authorisation to be able film in the Bergman centre and especially in two of his houses – one you see in the first part of the film and the other was where he ate and slept and spent most of the last years of his life. There was something risky about that. The first time I went there was in 2014, but that was just a way to discover the place and I wasn’t sure at that point whether I would write the film. But then I went back and stayed there for a month and wrote half of the film.

While I was writing, I wasn’t sure if I would get access to all these locations. Especially the mill, because it was crucial for me in terms of mise en scène but also in terms of the film’s structure and meaning. I needed Tony to write in the big house and Chris to write in the small mill. Symbolically it was so important for many reasons. But I had never been into the mill because no one could go there because the Norwegian guy who owns the Bergman estate today kept the mill for himself. So basically it’s the only place where guests don’t go.

There’s a sequence in the film where we see Tony’s notebook, which contains all these notes and pornographic drawings. And it looks like a serial killer’s journal. And I just wanted to know how you came up with that idea of looking at the writing process in that way?

I think this in a way was in the heart of the film even before the idea of shooting in Fårö came up. There was this idea of a couple who have a real artistic complicity, they are still in love with each other, they have a child, they are still very close in many ways. But as they are both writers and filmmakers, they each have their own world – call it a secret garden or whatever. They have their own inner worlds, you could say. They each have their own thing that they cannot really share even though later she tries to tell him a story. She is trying to be more transparent about her imagination. There is no real communication between them about their films. She tries to know more about what he has in mind, but he doesn’t want to express anything deep about what he wants to do and why. And she tries to tell him about her story but he’s not really listening.

So you can see that in many ways there is this complicity: they are both filmmakers; both Bergman fans; they have a lot in common but at some point there is a distance, something they cannot share. So this idea of the book full of notes that express something about him that’s very different, if not opposite, from what he seems to be. That tells you about the impossibility of really sharing everything. When you are in a couple where both are artists, and they write, you have to accept the fact that there’s something that escapes you, that you cannot reach, something that cannot be shared. And that’s painful in many ways. And that is I think why I wanted this notebook to be so disturbing and surprising and in a way that it tells you something about the character of Tony that nothing else tells you because he seems so nice and so easy and doesn’t seem that dark.

Which side are you on? When you’re writing and you find people asking you about certain projects, do you demure and say, “No, I don’t want to talk about them,” or are there certain important people who you tell these things to, who you trust?

I love to talk about what I’m thinking of, but only to one or two people. It’s even the same actually when I finish my films, when I’m in the editing room also. Some directors like to show a first draft to ten, 20, 30 people to test the film, like a screen test. But me no, I’m more protective. Maybe it has to do with the fact that I’m more insecure. I only show my films to one person, two and then the producers – I hate showing them to people I don’t know. And then when it’s over of course anyone can see it! But as long as I’m still working on it, I hate sharing it. But unlike Tony who seems to be keeping it all to himself from the first draft to the script, etc, I do like sharing my ideas with the person who is closest to me. I do need this dialogue. Just like Chris, you see she tries to have a dialogue with Tony. And that leads me back to this notion of solitude that at the end we are alone in this and we have to face that, and that is the only way maybe to be completely free is that we have to accept this and try to forget about the opinion of anybody else. And you can’t look at your work from anybody else’s perspective except yourself. And that’s really about that for me, is to try to get into myself and to forget about anybody else’s reaction to what I need to tell.

With the second half of the film where we see The White Dress film playing out – I love this idea of a filmmaker who’s also a writer being able to see the film in their own head. In the end we’re seeing, rather than the film that Chris made, we’re seeing the vision inside her head. Is that something that you do when you’re writing? Do you envisage the shots and the performers and the framings and everything?

It’s like a dream. I mean I see and I don’t see – when you dream and you remember your dreams you can describe them, but when you try to get closer to them they vanish. It’s a little bit like that for me when I imagine the films – writing them is a way to try to get closer to what they are. When I write a film it is because I feel like there’s something that already exists, like it’s already there. And my work is to try to approach it, to get closer to it so that it doesn’t disappear. When you try to get closer to your dreams and express them, they vanish. You know that strange feeling when you wake up and you remember a dream and then when you try, ten minutes later, to tell it, even to yourself, it has already disappeared. For me scripts are like that because I will get haunted or inhabited by an idea for a film that’s very strong and powerful but also very fragile. So I need to find the right words and the right way to approach it so that I can catch it before it goes. And that I think is what gives me so much energy and determination when I write because I know how fragile the process is. In the film that Chris does with Mia, I enjoyed filming it and telling it because, just as you said, it was not just the film that she was going to do, but the one she was thinking of, the one that’s still a dream. Not only does the film not exist, it may never exist. But for me it was just so exciting to make the dream film into a real film, but to have it still a dream. Because there is always a transformation when you start with this film you have in mind and that’s still unreal and you make it real when you write a script and you hire actors and you go into production. Only then does it become a real film.

Bergman Island is released by MUBI and opens in cinemas on 3 June. Read our 5 star review.

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Léonor Serraille loves headstrong, emotional women. The French director burst onto the Cannes scene when, in 2017, she won the Camera d’Or [the prize for the best first feature] with her debut, Jeune Femme, starring Laeitita Dosch as a newly single redhead spreading chaos across Paris.

This time, the charming whirlwind at the core is Annabelle Lengronne’s Rose, a single mother who arrives in Paris from the Ivory Coast in 1989 with two small boys under her arm and other sons left behind at home. Unlike the cautious relatives who offers the trio a temporary home, Rose is instantly open to the thrills available to the beautiful and vivacious woman she is, and, when not working as a hotel cleaner, she enjoys an abundant sex life.

Mother and Son has a novelistic scope, with an opening voice-over from Rose’s youngest son, Ernest, creating a portent of the trials to come for this immigrant family. He is five when the film opens and 25 by the time the curtain falls. Their fortunes are dependent on the men drawn to Rose, hence the move from Paris to Rouen in the wake of a rich white man taking an interest. From this point, focus switches from the charismatic Legronne captured in a frenetic shooting style, to the boys, ten years later, as they attempt to look after themselves, for Rose lives in Paris during the week so as to continue working.

There are shades of the 1937 Barbara Stanwyck tearjerker, Stella Dallas, to Rose’s desire for her children to make good irrespective of what happens to her. Lengronne’s gutsy emotional performance weathers twenty years, doing layered work as she puts her strongest side forward for her kids. In one captivating scene, Jean spies on her as she goes from dancing alone, drinking a beer and smoking, to breaking down in tears. The precise nature of her sorrow is left obscure, as the camera stays aligned to the perspective of her watching child.

Intensity diminishes as the focus switches to the brothers for chapters titled ‘Jean’ and ‘Ernest’. We watch as older brother Jean transforms from a promising A-student with dreams of becoming a pilot to a reckless teen, confused about his place in the world. The complexity of coming-of-age as a Black teenager with no father and an erratic mother are implied to be the reason for Jean’s spiral. However the film favours vague allusion rather than raw specificity and strays into familiar angry young man terrain, despite a committed performance by Stéphane Bak.

Ernest is forged by bearing witness to the follies of his mother and brother. The final chapter finds him as a 25-year-old philosophy teacher (Ahmed Sylla), seemingly an immigrant success story. Rose visits him for a lengthy two-hander that lays bare the heartache and cost of “making it” in a country that has defeated one’s nearest and dearest. Yet the writing cannot match the poignancy of Lengronne’s performance. Her emotional immediacy is more interesting than the epic, yet comparatively muted scope of the film.Little White Lies is committed to championing great movies and the talented people who make them.

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There are few cinematic joys that match the arrival of a new film by Kelly Reichardt, a director who, across a career of eight features and numerous shorts, has developed an affecting signature of movement and steadiness, solitude and community. In her latest, Showing Up, the Portland-based filmmaker brings levity and incisiveness to her portrait of sculptor and teacher Lizzy (played by frequent collaborator, the captivating Michelle Williams) whose artistic practice allows herself to lean into a life of loneliness and occasional bitterness.

Lizzy’s sculptures are free-flowing and gestural, something she struggles to be herself as the pressure of each passing day pushes her shoulders down even further and darkens the bags under her eyes. She wanders from classroom to classroom looking at what other people are making – it recalls the Mitski lyric, “I cry at the start of every movie / I guess ’cause I wish I was making things too.” She bemoans the lack of hot water in her apartment and huffs at the thought of having to take care of an injured pigeon when she should be making art.

And yet, she does take care of the pigeon with the exact concern and gentle touch she applies to her work. The same delicate fingers that press together limbs in clay stroke the bird’s head with tender affection. Is it procrastination that Lizzy seeks here, or simply her duty as a creative to nurture something? Beyond all the spite and frustration that simmers on her surface, she’s a caring soul. As she prepares for an exhibition of her work, she labours over her creations and is generously supported by the colleagues around her including a blissful André Benjamin who plays kiln master Eric.

Showing Up is perhaps Reichardt’s funniest film to date, closest in tone and style to something like Old Joy, her second feature length, in its candid simplicity and dryly comic matter-of-factness. It’s also perhaps the closest to being an autobiographical project in her oeuvre, in the sense that Reichardt is both filmmaker and teacher within a university space and seems astutely aware here of the dynamic that pervades such a lifestyle.

She is playful with costume — Lizzy sports Crocs for most of the film—and embraces the quintessential art teacher uniform for her characters who wear loose, earth-toned culottes and oversized shirts. Her setting, too, is a haven: the Oregon College of Art and Craft and surrounding community, which is another level of Pacific Northwest idyllic, even by Reichardt’s low-and-lazy standards.

Lizzy’s neuroses come to a head around her showcase, compounded by the fact that her fragile brother Sean (John Magaro) seems to be having an episode of mental ill health and she still hasn’t managed to get landlord Jo (Hong Chau) to fix her boiler. Compliments seem to fly over her head; the arrival of a New York gallery owner garners little excitement. Lizzy fixates on the pigeon, the one sculpture that was damaged by the kiln and the countless other things that have in some way hindered her progress.

Reichardt’s portrayal of the claustrophobia of giving yourself to others and to your work constantly is delicate and amusing, but never flippant. Showing Up feels like a moment of release for the filmmaker, a knowing reflection on past work and artistic growth while leaning in to all the beautiful elements of sound, colour and texture that have come to be expected from her work. The air lifts, the pigeon flies away, the conversation becomes easy. A balance is restored. The artist enjoys the moment of lull before the creative process must, inevitably, start all over again.

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When it was announced that the Spanish filmmaker Albert Serra was set to premiere his new feature, Pacifiction, in the Cannes competition, the instant and obvious reaction was, “Oh, he’s finally made ‘one for them’.”

A longtime prowler of the margins and sidebars, Serra’s slow, concept-driven and historically-entrenched cinema is programmed in such a way that it provides a measure of caution to the uninitiated festival patron. His non-narrative previous film, Liberté, for instance, ran at close to three hours and consisted of an 18th century woodland-based orgy captured almost in real time.

It’s a rare joy to report, then, that his acceptance into the festival’s highest echelon is not cover for a cinematic softening exercise, as Pacifiction is a 100 percent pure uncut Serra – accept no substitutes. It is challenging and dreamlike in its presentation, a grand tragedy charting the downfall of a man and, quite possibly, mankind in toto.

It’s a film that is connected very much to the geopolitical now, and the notion that however big or important we may feel we are inside a certain system, there’s always someone bigger, stronger, and possibly madder lurking in the shadows, waiting for their moment to put you in check.

Veteran French actor Benoît Magimel dons a loose-fitting cream suit, Hawaiian shirt open to the chest and a pair of blue-tinted dark glasses as French High Commissioner to the Republic of Tahiti De Roller. He is an operator of the utmost poise, slinking between the backstage area of a local nightclub where he delivers detailed feedback on cabaret performance rehearsals, to meetings in far-flung locales where he suppresses dissident behaviour, or makes sure the fix is in on his favoured mayoral candidate.

The arrival of a submarine sparks rumours that the French plan to reinstate nuclear testing in the relatively-stable region for the first time in 20 years, and try as he might, De Roller can’t seem to get the inside track on what’s actually going down. he entire film hangs on Magimel’s jittery and detailed performance, a mess of tics and pouts in which he exudes soft-spoken confidence and a benign personability while clearly masking the realisation that he’s almost reached the limit of his jumped-up professional usefulness.

While this sounds on paper like boilerplate John le Carré or Graham Greene territory, Serra rolls out the story in such a way which foregrounds the crushing existential weight of the situation. Lush widescreen panoramas of shorelines, jungles and domestic encampments are filmed so the sun glimmers from them, making them appear as an ethereal paradise on Earth. The skies are streaked with tangerine hues, a portent of the fiery apocalypse that sits just beyond the horizon.

Serra’s experiments with duration and the way he paints with bodies in the frame in certain sequences add to an overall transition towards the surreal in the film’s second half. And the dry ironist of yore is still very visible, mainly in the way that De Roller adopts a different guise and a different way of communicating with every person he encounters. Pacifiction is by far Serra’s most serious and sombre film to date, an epic of neutered power and human expendability – a death-knell for humanity that’s rendered as a tropical daydream.

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When I was younger I remember hearing that a broken bone heals back stronger than before. When school friends would inevitably turn up in casts after injuring themselves during sports or climbing trees or wrestling with their siblings, I would dutifully sign their cast and think to myself, “Broken bones heal stronger.” I know now that’s only true for a few weeks during the healing process. Broken bones are only stronger for a little while.

In Lukas Dhont’s second feature, Close, 13-year-old Léo (Eden Dambrine) breaks his wrist during a game of ice hockey. This incident takes place quite late in the film’s narrative, after a tragedy involving his best friend Rémi (Gustav De Waele) has already cast a long shadow over Léo’s idyllic life on a flower farm in rural Belgium. Over the course of a school year, Léo attempts – in his own rudimentary way – to process his emotions about what happened to Rémi. Broken bones might heal back stronger at first, but what about the rest of the human body? How do we process catastrophic loss at a point in life we’ve barely learned to process any other sort of emotion?

The passage of time in Close is marked by the flower harvest. Léo helps his father and brother process the delicate poppies they cultivate, impossibly small against the whirr of heavy machinery. Life goes on, like always. But Léo can’t forget how the transition to a new school changed his close bond with Remi – suddenly he felt self-conscious about their closeness as other children started to comment and make fun of them. Suddenly he felt the need to push Remi away, and as a result blames himself for the catastrophe that followed. Cinematographer Frank van den Eeden, who previously worked with Dhont on his previous film, Girl, captures a child’s eye view of the world, bursting with colour and light, typified by shaky handheld camerawork and the frenetic, fast-pace of an attention span split in myriad directions at any one time.

Many are rightfully skeptical about Dhont’s work after the polarising reaction to his first feature, Girl, which drew both positive reviews and criticism for its portrayal of a trans teenager attempting to fit in with the high-pressure, body-obsessed world of ballet. These responses have sparked important conversations about who gets to be the steward of other peoples’ stories. I went into Close with reservations about Dhont – having disliked Girl and been unsatisfied with his response to criticism around the film – but found clear-eyed tenderness in this portrayal of playground love and grief that comes on like a sudden summer thunderstorm.

The way we’re taught to process our emotions and talk about them has lasting ramifications. I spent eight years in therapy from the age of 13 to 21 because I wanted to kill myself and I didn’t know why. If I’m honest about it, I often still want to do that. The best answer I have as to why is a chemical imbalance barely altered by heavy-dose psychiatric medication. Dhont’s film reopened old wounds, confronted my own childhood spent in and out of hospital rooms, trying to not be so fucking sad anymore.

Close is a film about the people left behind, about the gulf between seeing and understanding as a child. Feeling bone-crushing guilt for the first time. The sort of love that we don’t know always identify until it slips through our fingers, and the banality of playground cruelty – how children are conditioned to recognise difference as weakness and zero in on it, expose it, for the sake of safety in numbers.

Dhont’s nakedly evocative approach to filmmaking, including Valentin Hadjadj’s soaring orchestral score, can’t hope to resonate with everyone, and what I find emotionally honest and effecting, others may read as cloying or manipulative (though I think to some extent I often see filmmaking as a process of audience manipulation, of trying to use every tool at your disposal to create something that resonates with the people staring up at the screen). The script is a little clumsy in the direct connection it draws between the fracture in Léo and Rémi’s friendship and the tragedy than ensues, but given that Close is seen from the perspective of a 13-year-old, this can perhaps be understood as a pre-teen’s understanding of the ultimately unthinkable.

I suppose what I mean to say is that I know Léo and Rémi, played with a sensitivity and sweetness that feels heartbreakingly authentic by Dambrine and De Waele. I’ve been Léo and Rémi, angry and sad and scared and secretive and reaching for connection beyond articulation.

When I think about cinema, I always come back to that much-cited quote by Roger Ebert – “the movies are like a machine that generates empathy”. Sometimes the experience of watching and responding to a film offers us a chance to gain an insight into someone else’s life or worldview. Sometimes, if we’re lucky, we’re able to understand something about ourselves and see an experience or an emotion we recognise reflected in what’s up on the screen. This is what makes criticism hard – how do you separate your worldview from the film? The truth is you can’t. Everything you know and are has led up to the words you will write about something you watch. For me, Close gets to the heart of something I know all too well: a bone-deep loneliness, grief, sadness and desperation that is hard to articulate, much less as a young child.

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Deep in Hirokazu Koreeda’s typically gentle yet piercing new-normal family drama Broker, one character listens to Aimee Mann’s hushed ballad “Wise Up.” Like any red-blooded citizen of the planet Earth, she immediately thinks of Paul Thomas Anderson using that soundtrack cut for the emotional climax of his mosaic masterpiece Magnolia, referred to as “that movie” which didn’t totally make sense but nonetheless connected on a deeper level of personal resonance.

There’s nothing so baroquely metaphorical as a rain of frogs in Koreeda’s latest, linked instead by the imperfect relationships between lonely people in search of someone to hold on to in a chaotic, indifferent world. The woman having a moment of introspection with Mann is Soo-jin (Bae Doona), a law enforcement official investigating a doozy of a moral thicket, in which abandonment can be an act of conflicted compassion and child trafficking might just be an expression of love. She monitors and later inserts herself in this criminal scheme with uncommonly decent intentions, its financial motives melting away little by little to leave a naked grasp at nurturing, in whatever form it may come. She’s duty-bound to break it up; Koreeda wouldn’t dream of casting such stark judgement on his characters, doing the best they can with what little they’ve got.

In the opening minutes, So-young (Lee Ji-eun, her eyes going on forever) has left her infant in one of the ‘baby boxes’ found at churches around South Korea, no-questions-asked drop-off points for mothers unable or unwilling to raise their offspring themselves. She leaves a note that she’ll be back for little Woo-sung, unaware that this means he will be made ineligible for adoption and most likely live out the rest of his boyhood in an orphanage. Sang-hyeon (the great Song Kang-ho) and Dong-soo (Gang Dong-won) have built a spottily ethical hustle around this counterintuitive quirk of protocol, selling these bundles of joy to loving parents instead of letting them languish in the system — except that unlike most of the mothers who promise to return, So-young really does.

Sang-hyeon convinces her to go along with their enterprise, explaining that finding a good home is much easier when potential adopters can see that the mother’s on board. (A chunk of the sale fee sweetens the deal for her.) So begins an improbably heartwarming road trip, as the three set off en route to Woo-sung’s prospective parents, joined by a seven-year-old escaping the same group home they’re all trying to avoid. The chance at collective redemption presents itself almost too tidily, though the messiness of the follow-through counteracts any inkling that Kore-eda’s gaming the narrative for easy poignancy.

Three adults and one child, all bruised in their own apprehensively revealed ways, take refuge in each other’s slow-forming surrogate love without melodramatics or pathos-baiting contrivance. The serene acoustic guitar plucking wafting through the scenes perfectly matches the low-key devastation that germinates as the film progresses, sweet and sorrowful while stopping short of browbeating sentimentality. When Soo-jin finally steps in and gets So-young under her thumb, we realize just how invested we’ve become in the success of what the cop must remind us — and herself — is technically a human smuggling operation.

But nothing’s so black-and-white in Koreeda’s universe of softened greys, whether it’s a more complicates stance on abortion than a first glance might suggest, or the fleshing-out of the new parents eventually entering the picture for Woo-sung. Everyone’s reaching for a solid system of support. In the most merciful cases, allowed by Koreeda with admirable generosity of feeling, their outstretched lives can latch on to one another.

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