earthy, self-consciously aspirational vs.

They go head to head on all the essential points: rich vs. His screenplay is a neat scheme that sets up the two families in question as opposing teams. He takes for granted that, like sex and politics, it’s a topic that is the surest path to an uncivilised argument between the properly good-natured. Kore-eda has a lot of fun at the expense of parenthood and parenting. It’s a relief when the folks here find that they can laugh at their own foolishness. In a way, this is a straight-faced social comedy. Still, that same energy is the source of the film’s considerable humour.

This repression of genuine feeling gives the film an exquisite tension, a terrible emotional claustrophobia. Polite entreaties of forgiveness are sought.

The inevitable explosions of disquiet amongst the casualties are dismissed as mere aberrations. Like a room full of bad news, the characters here retreat behind their bewilderment into silence, at least, at first, before turning to the law or each other for answers and retribution. Its subject -a story of two boys swapped at birth and the agony that follows when their parents discover that truth-is shattering, but it’s a quiet movie. That thought is the haunting centre of this fine melodrama from esteemed Japanese director Kore-eda Hirokazu ( I Wish). And what matters most in the best pictures about family is the way in which mothers and fathers prepare to do battle for what they claim as their own, to have and to hold. In the movies, as in life, family matters, whether we like it or not, so we’re stuck with it.

Japanese movie like father like son