Dear
Deer: Written by Noriaki Sugihara, directed by Takeo
Kikuchi. Starring: Yuri Nakamura, Yoichiro Saito, Koji Kiryu, Shota
Sometani, and Rinko Kikuchi. Running Time: 107 minutes.
Rating:
3/4
The
growth of industrialization and globalization will, I suspect, continue to give
us ample opportunities to explore stories like that in Dear Deer, a well-made balancing act between a concentrated family
drama and a view of a small country town struggling to overcome increasingly
difficult economic straits.
Our
focus is on three siblings, reuniting in their hometown for the first time in
years to visit their sick father, who’s not expected to live long. Akiko, the youngest, left for Tokyo years ago
to marry an older man. Their marriage is
now on the rocks, and she desperately wants a divorce (but he doesn’t- this
becomes important later on). The younger
brother, Yoshio, has been in and out of psychological care, although he insists
he’s been getting better lately. Fujio,
the oldest, was the only one who stayed, following in their father’s footsteps
and trying to keep the family machining shop solvent, definitely turning away
the incessant requests of a real estate dealer to sell the factory. As a result, he’s become a bit of a rallying
point for the town elders who want to push back against the planned development
of a shopping center, which its proponents bill as the only way to bring
prosperity back to the town.
It
doesn’t take long to see how strained their familiar relationship is with each
other, or with their father (he was apparently pretty abusive when they were
younger), but their angst doesn’t end there.
We learn in the beginning that they created a stir as young children
when they believed they had captured a photograph of a local type of deer long
thought to be extinct. At first, they
were praised as town heroes, with many thinking this would revive tourism to
the area. But it seems that deer was
never seen again, and eventually everyone assumed the kids had simply made it
up, and started teasing them for it.
Whether
or not this was the beginning of the various mental and emotional issues the
family has depends on whom you ask- Akiko and Yoshio go back and forth blaming
their dad, each other, their classmates from their schoolyears, and the
mystical deer itself for their problems.
Fujio just wants everyone to be pleasant with each other and for them to
enjoy being together as a family, and boy oh boy, how quickly he is
disappointed.
There
are other individuals in play as well- the persistent real estate man is an old
flame of Akiko’s, and even though he’s married to one of their classmates, they
soon strike up an affair that he, at least, takes seriously. Yoshio inadvertently kills a dog early in the
film, and later learns to his horror that it belonged to his lone schoolfriend
from way back when, who also never left town.
Fujio has been trying to expand his business by working with the head of
the town’s temple, but soon starts to suspect he’s being ripped off.
It
does take a bit for Dear Deer to get
going, but when the pins finally start to fall in the third act, the results
are truly explosive. All the pent-up
anger, bitterness, jealousy, and impotent rage that’s been building up the
whole time bursts out into the open during the father’s funeral service, and in
a single take set to the beating of a Shinto drum we see any remaining dignity
and maturity fall all to pieces.
It
is a spectacular moment, justifying every second spent leading up to it. That Akiko and Yoshio and their old school “friends”
were stretched ready to burst is obvious almost from the moment we meet them,
but the real surprise is Fujio. It’s
clear he wants to be the mature one, the one in control, the “real adult” in
the room, so it’s all the more impossible to turn away when he, too, cracks,
proving that old maxim that no apple falls very far from its tree.
Dear Deer might be small in its
ambitions and scopes, but it knows how to play its cards when the time is right,
making it poignant in the right spots and hilariously off-the-wall nutty in
others. If only every family drama could
that this kind of crass confidence in itself.
-Noah Franc
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