Remembrance

This plotless movie, obviously autobiographical in origin, charts a young man's coming-of-age in a small country town in the early 1950s: familiar territory for anyone who has seen films like Muddy River and Warming Up for the Festival (the latter scripted by Nakajima, here a first-time director at the age of 53). It's thoroughly amiable, and persuasively acted by its young lead Nishikawa, but fatally lacks the underlying toughness and sense of larger perspectives found in an equivalent Chinese movie like The Time to Live and the Time to Die.