As with much of Miyazaki’s own output, the film offers a winning heroine and a joyful dip into Japanese folklore, even if it does not stand up against the studios most celebrated works.
The result is a formally loose, but dizzyingly dense and morally forthright examination of national attitudes and the myopia of nostalgia told through ranging meta-constructs and highfalutin debate.
Where Tan describes the process of making Shirkers as an exorcism (presumably of Georges), the final product is more akin to a séance, a communion with a lost soul keen to still be heard from beyond the veil.
Besides the overt journey for Christopher Robin of rediscovering some childhood joy, this film is a poignant exploration of the way in which we sideline important friendships at the behest of professional advancement.
Kelly eschews talking heads or expert testimony, and only rarely to characters flesh out the skeleton provided by occasional intertitles. When this style is employed for a single, short-term conflict, it can be incredibly powerful (just think of Sergei Loznitsa’s Maïdan) but Kelly’s film effectively drops the audience in situ at specific events within a much broader six-year framework without any context.
Di Giacomo doesn’t build sequences to heighten tension, although some is unavoidable. Often, the film follows the relatively mundane work of the Franciscan Father Cataldo Migliazzo, the film’s primary protagonist, and the otherwise everyday lives of those who come to him for help.
