Cha no aji – The Taste of Tea (2004)

I’ve heard a lot of great things about this family drama (if you can call it that) from the directory of Sharkskin Man and Peach Hip Girl, Katsuhito Ishii. I wasn’t a huge fan of his previous film, but I was curious to check this one out because of all the great reviews.

This is one of the more bizarre and quirky films I’ve seen. It tells the story of a Japanese family living in the countryside. Each family member has their own strange issues to deal with and the movie devotes an almost equal amount of screen time to show us the internal world of each character.

There are a lot of truly surreal visual moments in the film, the youngest daughter, for example, is being followed by a huge version of herself who keeps popping up in various situations. The seemingly nutty grandfather (a very cool Tatsuya Gashuin) steals the show and is actually more sane than he appears, some of the later scenes with him in the end were genuinely moving. My favorite sub-plot is the one belonging to the lovelorn young son, the girl he loves (but never confessed to) has just left the area (with images of leaving trains coming out of the young kid’s mind, of course) and he is slowly coping with it while at the time developing a crush and also an unusual relationship with a new student in school (The very cute Anna Tsuchiya from Kamikaze Girls).

All together I’m pretty mixed about the movie. It’s a huge improvement over the director’s previous work and I was really moved by some of the stories and visual choices. On the other hand, I didn’t really get some of the jokes and kind of felt left out in certain scenes. I also felt that it ran way too long (almost two and a half hours). There is plenty of good stuff in Taste of Tea, but you just need to be patient with the movie and give it it’s time. If I had a chance, catching this one on the big screen is probably preferable.

The train is leaving the station…

~ by bettertomorrow on March 24, 2007.