Un Certain Regard review - SWEET RED BEAN PASTE by Naomi Kawase

Redemption is a dish served with the right consistency of bean paste in Sweet Red Bean Paste, Naomi Kawase's sweetest film, presented in the Un Certain Regard section of the 68th Cannes Film Festival.

Naomi Kawase is arguably the most prominent and consistent female contemporary Japanese director. Her filmmaking style is of required taste and defined by a type of seriousness that, particularly as a follow up to her previous work Still the Water, makes the saccharine melodrama Sweet Red Bean Paste all the more peculiar - but thankfully lacking in animal cruelty this time around.

This is the story of the meeting between three characters, of three different generation, who have been more or less marginalised if not downright forgotten by society. Saturo is a man who is forced to pay his debt by running a little unsuccessful creperie. One of her only customers is Wakana, a schoolgirl who might quit school to start earning money for her careless mother, that seems to be particularly sympathetic towards him. But the pivotal character in the story is an old and visibly frail lady named Tokue, who applies for the underpaid job as Saturo's assistant and after initial reluctance, Saturo immediately changes his mind and hires her after trying her apparently sublime bean paste.

Sweet Red Bean Paste is overtly sentimental, and readily resorts to the usual elements of cherry blossoms and heavy string scores. There's something off putting about the character of Tokue, who despite her visible fragility, comes across as a being with supernatural powers and even the narrative gimmick of her final shot at redemption is slightly implausible because it unfolds too rapidly and without a hint of mystery neither storywise, nor on a psychological level. This latter point is also an evident cliche of cinema likening people suffering from disabilities as beings of endless wisdom - secluded sacrificial lambs for the sinners roaming free. 

Such quickness in character development is unimpressively unbalanced by the story itself. In other words, so little is actually explored of the their background away from the central narrative, such as Wakana's relationship with her mother and Saturo's one with the owner of the creperie, to whom he owes money. Nevertheless, it is also true that the characters are quite familiar, in fact overtly so, and as a result, it's easy to predict their personal developments. Despite all this, the film is not without its touching moments. A later meeting between the three characters at Tokue's place of quarantine is quite powerful. This is also the moment in which we get to admire Kirin Kiki's likeable performance as Tokue the most. 

Admirably, Sweet Red Bean Paste also looks at a particularly delicate history of Japan, one of which not much is known, therefore once again linking a physical bond between nature and humanity as representatives of historical identity and delivering a blow to Japan's historical conscience. The moments in which this representation is shown, even at its most romantic stages, are the most charming in the film. But perhaps Kawase, in her first literal adaptation, is all too taken by the structural transition from book to big screen, and the end result is far from making any type of significant impact.