cattuongmaixuan Maborosi reminds me of the blue light in The Great Gatsby. They share the same elegiac connotation, same amour fou acts, but each are depicted in different ways. Needless to say, both are visually stunning and thought-provoking. As tender as the sea in cinematography and processing images, and as powerful as the sea in the reverberation it leaves.In Maborosi, the flashbacks of a previous honey-like marriage life will haunt you to the end of the film. They would blob up in your head at every scene, force you to find the protagonist's new life not so credible. But you can't help but feel genuinely happy for her.The plot may seem to be a straightforward no-brainer, yet, as Roger Ebert has put it perfectly, "Maborosi" is not going to insult us with a simple-minded plot. It is not a soap opera. Sometimes life presents us with large, painful, unanswerable questions, and we cannot simply "get over them."This is a must-see film, though not so much about loneliness as it is about a haunting never-to-be-answered question, a distant but torturing question. A life-long question that everyone once had, or is having, or will have. If some day you have found that question, watch Maborosi again.

pontram I first liked the silence in this movie, but later I decided that it tells us about speechlessness, especially connected with the occurrence of sudden death. As an European, or simply feeling with Yumiko, I often said to her by myself "lets go and cry the hell out", but she didn't or it wasn't shown and I interpret this as Japanese behavior. She seems to be very smart and holds her feelings back. She adapts to the situation and won't allow any grief to take her over. But sometimes - I personally think - you should let you been overpowered by grief and sadness, so that the inner pressure can find a valve. Otherwise you could be damaged. When Yumiko visits her mother after a time, she looks like she came over. But she didn't. The barkeeper in the little coffee/tea shop tells her that he had seen her husband just before the incident, and he says that he looked and behaved as usual. This brings back the whole thing to Yumiko, and I felt a big power in this scene. I feared she would go back to their common apartment unprepared, and so she does, and so she is punished by the unmanaged remnants of her lost past.I liked the look of the movie, but I could not adore some painting-like stills or wonderful shots. Therefore I have seen too many movies in such a style, especially from Japan or Korea. And I don't give much about the style when I see such a movie, because a deeper going movie doesn't need style to reach me. I liked that the pictures weren't so beautiful, as in other Japanese productions. More or less, I had a good impression to see real places and follow real people in real life. Real life is often dull, gray or sad, especially when you lose your beloved partner. The reason is not that important, because what lasts is the partner's absence.Thus the causing of Yumikos first husbands' suicide is not important, and it is clear from the beginning that she never will find out. It is a constructed event that should lead us away from every disturbing explanation. The try to explain it on the end with some mystical light is a crutch, formed from helplessness. Instead, her new husband - how he lost his former wife stays in the dark - should have had a serious talk with her, about hers and his feelings, about life and death, about their inner movings. Isn't it strange that she only wants to speak with him when he is very drunken and not able to answer ? I identify the lack of discussion, the lack of review (which is fascinating for many viewers of the movie) as the real sadness, and the movie wants to tell about what happens if everybody keeps calm as required in Japan - nothing spectacular, but probably nothing enjoyable.We are helpless against fate - more modern: statistics - and helpless against the fragile illusion of a stable life and continuity, but not with our inner worlds. Being together means also sharing thoughts, not only relatives or day-work.

Alli Antar I rarely watch the same movie more than once, but this one was so beautiful, I simply had to watch it again, paying full price to see it on the big screen each time. What I love the most about this film is the way that director Hirokazu Kore-Eda captures nature and humans as part of it, perhaps most eloquently portrayed by the scene in which rain drops on a window frame the face of the grief-stricken stoic-countenanced protagonist. The film begins with the story of a little girl's loss of her grandmother, and continues on with the story of the same little girl, now a young woman and the film's protagonist, whose life is again dramatically altered by the sudden death of her husband. Throughout the film, as a way of coping with the loss, she attempts to understand why he killed himself. My favorite scene in the film occurs near the end, when the protagonist watches a distant funeral procession by the sea. One has to wonder if it is Kore-eda's reflection of the woman's psyche - it is as if the funeral procession is a dream - and she is watching herself grieve from a distance? However, the organic nature of the scene seems to point to the fact that death, though often not explainable, is also a part of nature that humans must learn to accept. This film portrays the woman with exquisite sensitivity. I highly recommend this film.

DefiantCorpse Koreeda does an amazing job of portraying a woman's grief over her husband's death, and the rediscovery of love, peace, and happiness. One of the previous posters commented that the "quality" of the video wasn't very good, that is incorrect, as I will explain why. Koreeda used natural lighting in the film rather than artificial lighting; the lighting was done this way so as to keep certain things out of focus at times, to keep them indistinguishable. The lighting is a major part of this film, Koreeda uses the lighting to symbolically represent Yumiko's(Protagonist) mood. During certain parts of the film the lighting will almost always be dim and indiscernible, and in other parts it will be more clear and illuminated, the lighting follows the storyline, and Yumiko's progression and digression.