Naomi Kawase is a Japanese director whose films command respect for their visual beauty and deeply felt reverence for the natural world. I admired this in Still the Water, Hanezu and her award-winning The Mourning Forest, while worrying about a certain fey self-consciousness. This is impossible to ignore in her latest movie, An, or Sweet Bean. The film has an impeccable technical finish but it is insipid, contrived, sentimental, and ever so slightly preposterous.
An old lady, Tokue (Kirin Kiki) one day shows up at a little street-food stand run by Sentaro (Masatoshi Nagase), a dour, silent guy with troubles. He specialises in dorayaki, little pancakes filled with an, or bean paste. A regular customer is Wakana (Kyara Uchida), a teenage girl who is concerned about him. Tokue timidly but persistently asks if she can have a job working in his kitchen, and thrusts into his hands a batch of an made to her own secret recipe; this of course is life-affirmingly wonderful and redemptive in the accepted foodie film manner. Despite her elaborately constructed frailty and vulnerability, Tokue is of course pretty well superhuman in her goodness and peaceful acceptance. Films which reject cynicism are to be cherished, but there is something complacent and cliched about this one.
