Innocence: All in delicacy and harshness, a poignant Kore-eda (review)

Hirokazu Kore-eda tells the mysteries of childhood like a detective thriller, in a film with a convoluted structure, but which ends up shocking.

Big winner of the 2023 Cannes Film Festival (Queer Palm and Screenplay Prize), the new Kore-Eda evokes the explosions of school bullying. Here is our favorite review, initially published during its visit to the Croisette.

Hirokazu Kore-eda does not lose the rhythm: after his Palme d’Or for A family matterin 2018, which marked not only a consecration but also the apogee of an aesthetic system patiently put in place for twenty years, the Japanese director made detours through France (The truthwith Catherine Deneuve), Korea (The Good Starswith Song Kang-ho) and on the TV series side (Makanai: in the maiko kitchenon Netflix). Way for him not to rest on his laurels while looking for a second wind. Innocence marks his return to the archipelago, but not necessarily to his usual habits, since, something rare, he did not write the script for his film himself – this had not happened to him since his first feature, Maborosi, in 1995 – preferring to work from a script by Yuji Sakamoto. However, it was he who found the title, not Innocence (which is called like that only in France) but, in original version, Kaibutsuwhich can be translated as ” monster “.

Who is the “monster” here? The term will come up several times during the film, built around a narrative “à la Rashomon » (as they say), which multiplies points of view to tell a few days in the life of two CM2 children, their parents and their teachers. Something intense is playing out in their lives, but so indescribable, so imperceptible, that it will take a lot of time, detours and false leads to understand it. At the beginning, we are in the fog… A mother raising her child alone is worried to see him adopting increasingly strange behavior: young Minato says that he had a pig’s brain transplanted into him, comes home injured from school, throws himself from the moving car… The city itself seems to vibrate with bad energy. One evening, a building catches fire. Soon, a typhoon threatens.

So what ? Is Minato the victim of mistreatment by an abusive teacher? Or is he harassing Yori, one of his classmates? Kore-eda piles up the clues, complicates the case by creating narrative and poetic rhymes (stories of dead cats, absent fathers, reincarnation, etc.), in a plot that is almost like a detective film, and where the spectator himself- even is invited to carry out the investigation and find his way through the narrative maze. We are like the mother and the teacher, in a key frame of the film, frantically removing the thick mud that obscures a window, in the hope of seeing more clearly.

The side roads that the filmmaker takes to reveal the key to “mystery” seem at first excessively tortuous, the script’s tricks a little too convoluted, to the point of giving the impression of preventing the whole thing from breathing. But once the pieces come together, in the third act, Innocence ends up being struck by lightning. Kore-eda is shocking by depicting the escape of the two children into the forest adjacent to the city, their Huckleberry Finn days spent in an abandoned school bus that looks like a magic cabin. Far from the world, from others, from this “monster” that is society and which condemns hasty judgments and half-truths.

As always with the filmmaker, the delicacy of the line does not prevent, far from it, a harshness and bitterness in the societal observation. At the end, after a heartbreaking ode to the power of music in a classroom, and to the sound of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s piano (the last work for the cinema of the brilliant musician, who died last March), the rain stops, the sense of the fable is revealed, the film itself seems to free itself from the scriptural corset in which we thought it was bound, and Kore-eda’s cinema triumphs, once again.

By Hirokazu Kore-eda. With Soya Kurokawa, Hinata Hiiragi, Sakura Endo… Duration 2h04. Released December 27, 2023