In 1998 the Japanese director Hirokazu Koreeda astonished those of us who feel passionately about the expressive power of cinema with "After Life" a film about the hereafter that I would claim to be one of the masterworks of the past decade. The effect of this was so mesmerising that for some time I completely forgot about "Maborosi" an earlier work that I had caught up with only a few days before. Although not in the same league, it is worth a look if only to trace the origins of the later piece. Just as "After Life is a meditation on life from the point of view of the dead, "Maborosi" reverses the process and meditates on death from the living's perspective. A young girl feels somehow responsible for the death of her grandmother whom she cannot persuade to return to the family home after she wanders off one day. As a young woman she again is unable to escape a feeling of guilt when her husband is unaccountably struck down and killed by a train. These events happen fairly quickly in the first third of the film. The rest is an elegiac account of her second marriage to a widower with a young daughter and their life together in a remote fishing community as far away from the cramped streets of the city as it is possible to imagine. With the baby son by her first husband now grown to a small boy the new family feels complete. And yet the woman still exists in a state of unease. Although there are no more disasters, there are continual reminders of the frailty of life. An elderly woman, not unlike her grandmother, takes a boat out in a storm but returns unharmed. On a later occasion she watches an anonymous funeral procession which seems held in longshot for an eternity. "Marobosi" which means "The Beckoning Light" - a clear reference to death - is full of the influences of other directors. There is that of Ozu in the many domestic interiors where the camera seldom moves, Angelopoulos in the many long held exterior vistas and even Hou Xiaoxian in the way the audience is made to concentrate hard to work out character reactions and situations given a minimum of verbal and visual information. One curious fact about the film is the way the characters either appear in shadow or middle distance so that their emotions are hard to recognise. In the end this effect of deliberately distancing the protagonists is the film's essential weakness. It gives a sense of detachment and uninvolvement that Koreeda was to overcome triumphantly in the marvellous "After Life".

The Japanese film Maboroshi no hikari was shown in the U.S. with the title Maborosi (1995). It was directed by Hirokazu Koreeda.

This is a unique film. There's almost no direct action in the movie. Bad things happen. In fact, the plot is based on the reaction of the protagonist to bad events in her life. However, all of these tragic events take place off screen. Some of them are implied and never stated.

At the very beginning of the movie, a young girl named Yumiko pleads with her grandmother not to leave their home. The old woman walks on anyway, and, that evening, she is still missing. In the next scene, Yumiko is a grown woman with a husband and a three-month old baby. We have to assume that her grandmother never was found.

The cinematography was very unusual in the film. Scenes progress very slowly. For example, in a typical U.S. movie, we would see a train in a long shot, then much closer, and then pulling into a station. Not so here. We see the train in a very long shot, and then we watch for two more minutes as it comes closer and closer, and finally arrives. All this is done using the same camera and the same lens. The train comes closer as it would if we were actually watching it arrive in real time.

In addition, for indoor scenes, director Koreeda uses the technique of setting up his camera close to the floor, so we see the actors as we'd see them if we, too, were sitting on the floor. Director Yasujirō Ozu used this device to great advantage, as does director Koreeda.

Again, like Ozu, Koreeda makes the location of a scene as important as the actions of the actors at that location. He may show us a room into which the actors enter and interact. After they leave the room, we still see some frames of the room. When you think about it, the room has been there before the people enter, and will continue to be there after they leave. We don't normally think of it that way, but that is the reality. I don't normally mention cinematographers in my reviews, but the cinematographer of this movie was Masao Nakabori, and his work is extraordinary.

This film will rise or fall depending on the acting skills of the protagonist. Yumiko is portrayed by the actress and model Makiko Esumi. She is superb in the role of a young woman who looks forward to a peaceful and relatively uneventful life. That's not how matters turn out, and the story revolves around the life that she actually receives, and how she responds to that life.

We saw Maborosi at home, on the small screen. It would work better in a theater, because there are some glorious views of the Sea of Japan (East Sea). However, unless you're very lucky, you'll have to see the film on the small screen, where it works well enough.

Maborosi is carrying a strong IMDb rating of 7.6. I think it's even better than that. It's worth seeking out and watching. Just don't expect martial arts or explosions. It's a very quiet film.

This is a most audacious debut by Hirokazu Koreeda, who hitherto had simply made a couple of documentaries. There is only a slight story and daringly long held shots but it works. From the very beginning we are spellbound by the framing and specific look of every frame. There is something of the documentary in that there is a feeling we are simply following ordinary people as they go about their lives but the look is so utterly beautiful throughout. Whether a partial facial close-up, the side of a house or street lights on a bridge, all is so framed as to transfix the viewer. A story does gradually unfold and it is as if we are part of it, bound up in the early death of a husband, the development of a young boy and the effect of the environment on the families struggling against the elements. Most impressive and beautiful film.