Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Our Little Sister
2015 · Hirokazu Kore-eda · Our Little Sister on Sightlines
There's a cupboard in the Kamakura house with plum wine in it. The fruit comes off the tree in the garden, the recipe came down from the grandmother, and the jars carry the year they were made, so some of the wine in that cupboard is older than the girl who has just moved in. Nobody explains this to her. Someone takes a jar down at the right moment, and the date on it does the work a speech would do in another film.
Begin there and the film opens. That jar isn't a symbol of the past. It's a clock.
The story is thin on purpose. A father who left years ago dies in the mountains of Yamagata. His three grown daughters go north for the funeral and meet the teenage half-sister they've never known, the daughter of the affair that broke their family, and before they leave they ask her to come and live with them. That is the last consequential decision anyone in the film makes. What follows is a year: meals, a first job, fireworks, laundry, a grave, another death.
Gilles Deleuze split cinema in two, and the split earns its keep here. In one kind of film — most films — a character sees a situation and acts to change it, and the cutting exists to carry that chain. Deleuze called this the movement-image. In the other kind, action stops paying. Something has happened that no act in the present can reach, so people look, wait, cook dinner, and time stops being the measure of their movement and becomes the thing you are actually watching. Both parents of these women left. Nothing anyone does in that house touches it. So the film hands the job of protagonist to a watcher.
Deleuze's word is voyant, the seer: not an agent, someone who registers. Suzu is the film's seer, and Kore-eda inherited the device — Naruse routed a family's grief through a sympathetic outsider in Sound of the Mountain and let her seeing carry what the household wouldn't say. Suzu sees this house from outside it and believes, at first, that her existence is the reason it broke. Her arrival at the sense that she is allowed to be here is the whole arc, and it happens in glances and in a pause at a graveside rather than in any scene where she does something about it.
Which means the editing has to change job. Kore-eda cuts the film as a calendar rather than a causal chain: loosely linked episodes, the plum tree in blossom and then in fruit, seasons and food preparation doing the work transitions usually do. Deleuze has a name for what fills all that room — temps mort, dead time, the stretches where nothing advances and the everyday is simply held. In most films dead time is connective tissue between the parts that count. Here it is the film. A shot of a meal being made is not preparing you for anything. The sound works the same way: cicadas, wind chimes, the sea, the fizz of the café kitchen, so that the place stays audible in the gaps where nothing is said.
You could call this slow, or plotless. Both are descriptions by subtraction — they tell you what the film declined to do. Deleuze gives the positive account, which is why the lens is worth the trouble: what replaces action is time made perceptible. And the film keeps producing moments with nothing to do in them. Suzu bicycling through a tunnel of cherry blossom is a pure optical situation, an image that arrests the person inside it and offers nothing to act on. It's also a small instance of what Deleuze called the movement of the world: her own movement is minor, the world does the moving, rushing past her while the feeling changes.
Here Kore-eda amends the theory. Deleuze built the time-image out of rubble — neorealism's ruined lots, deserted streets, what he called the any-space-whatever. Kamakura is the opposite of that. It is furnished, particular, fully inhabited, and the suspension still happens. The house is crowded and the time still opens.
The debt is to Ozu, and Deleuze is a good witness: he argued that Ozu arrived at the pure optical situation before the Italians did, inside ordinary domestic banality, in the held shot of an empty room, the vase in Late Spring. Kore-eda takes the tatami-level camera and the pillow shot straight from that grammar, and takes from Tokyo Story the ellipsis of a death that happens between scenes and is felt only in the aftermath, which is exactly how the two funerals bracketing this film operate. Then he changes one thing, and it is his own invention: Ozu's held shot contains an empty room, and Kore-eda's contains a full one. Same duration, different population. Sisters cross the frame, talk over each other, carry laundry through the back of the shot. The house is never still and the drama never escalates.
That puts the film's real medium in the body. Deleuze's late cinema of the body is about attitudes and postures carrying duration instead of plot, and this is a film of hands: chopping, pouring, laying whitebait on toast, bowing at a grave. Sachi is the sharpest case. She is the eldest who became everyone's mother, and her competence is where her unforgiven anger at both parents actually lives. Deleuze would call that a gest — a bearing that exposes a social relation the dialogue keeps off the table. You can read the family's entire arrangement in how she runs a kitchen.
And the past arrives as an object rather than as a dated flashback. A jar, a recipe, a first-aid kit, a house that still holds the grandmother and the mother who were here before. Deleuze separated the flashback, a former present slotted into the film, from sheets of past, the past as coexisting layers you move around inside. One kitchen holds several depths at once. The father gets the strongest version of this. He is never present, and the film assembles him out of other people's sentences at dinner tables and gravesides. Deleuze distinguished the relative out-of-field, the room next door, from the absolute, something beyond the frame that cannot be placed anywhere in space. The father is in every scene and in no location.
Does the serenity let everybody off? Worth holding onto while you watch. The film withholds catharsis deliberately; nothing is resolved, and what changes is a feeling rather than a situation. Sachi's anger doesn't dissolve, it gets absorbed into a household that has decided to keep going. Kore-eda carried the same question about blood and care into Shoplifters three years later and removed the legitimate house from the equation, which suggests he knew what this one's comfort was worth.
The significance is this. The time-image came out of damage — war, paralysis, a world where acting had stopped working. Our Little Sister makes that same kind of time visible out of pleasure and repetition, with no irony and no despair, and that is a genuine addition to what the form can do.
Watch it again for the hands. And watch where the camera goes when someone almost says the thing.
Concepts in play
- voyant (the seer) — Suzu is the film's emotional lens rather than its agent — the outsider half-sister through whom the household is observed, a device Kore-eda takes from Naruse's use of a sympathetic in-law/outsider in Sound of the Mountain; her arc is a change of belief registered in looks and a pause at a graveside, not an act.
- temps mort (dead time) — Kore-eda builds the picture as a calendar rather than a causal chain: loosely linked seasonal episodes, scenes let to breathe past the point a plot-driven film would cut away, transitions leaning on the seasons and on food preparation.
- pure optical and sound situations — The cherry-blossom tunnel Suzu bicycles through, and the ambient sound design of cicadas, wind chimes, the sea and festival crowds that makes Kamakura an audible presence in scenes where nothing is advanced.
- sheets of past (order of coexistence) — The past arrives through objects rather than flashback — the homemade plum wine passed down through generations, the family recipes, the first-aid kit, a house whose kitchen and tatami rooms carry the memory of the grandmother and mother who preceded the sisters there.
- cinema of the body (attitudes and postures) — The ensemble is staged in continuous domestic motion — sisters passing through frame, talking over one another, cooking and doing laundry — and meals are photographed with particular care, the table as recurring compositional anchor.
- the gest — Sachi's bearing as surrogate mother: Ayase's performance makes her control the site of her unresolved anger at the parents who left, so the household's whole arrangement is legible in how she runs the kitchen.
- out-of-field (absolute) — The estranged father is dead before the film begins and never seen; the sisters' quiet reckonings with him are assembled from talk at meals and gravesides, so he is felt everywhere and locatable nowhere.
- movement of the world — Suzu bicycling through the cherry-blossom tunnel — her own movement is minor while the seasonal world rushes past her and the film's feeling shifts without any act on her part.