Kamihate shoten

Chiyo runs a store, the same small place where her mother, now deceased, once sold baked goods of local renown. Her daughter, however, lacks the strength to continue the tradition. Instead, like the other people who live nearby, she blunders along, bound by her phobias and tired of a life filled with conflict rather than with people close to her heart. But how are the lone inhabitants of the hamlet and its visitors to find a way to connect when they merely brush past one another, unable to communicate, let alone express any goodwill? The characters’ behavior reveals just how much their pasts have marked them, just as it clearly points to the overall emptiness of their lives. And in the absence of some instigation there is nothing to alter their fecklessness. Such an impulse must come in the form of another person, someone close – and love needn’t enter the question simply because “people die in solitude.” Despite its calm and conciliatory tone, the movie offers up an intense portrait, not only of its heroine, but of the overall situation in which the participants seem somehow so familiar. (Karlovy Vary International Film Festival)