I Was a Simple Man

Yogi unfolds the characters’ intimate stories and the region’s history in sharply textured details and rapturous images; he blends social practicalities and metaphysical mysteries with a serene, straightforward astonishment.

I Was a Simple Man is a slow-burning walk toward the light, a paean for life, and the land and people that shaped it. It's the kind of love letter that only a lifelong resident of Hawaii like Yogi could make, to a resilient land whose scars will take long to heal.

Layering the spectral hush of “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” over the elegiac domesticity of a late Ozu film like “An Autumn Afternoon,” the Honolulu-born filmmaker’s singularly Hawaiian second feature is haunted and haunting in equal measure — a reckoning pitched at the volume of a whisper.

All Yogi’s actors work in subtle, effective deference to his natural command of atmosphere and place: This is a film where Hawaiian rainfall has as prominent and evocative a voice as any human presence, and where the growth of a tree marks time as clearly as the deepening crevices in a character’s face.

The edges are perhaps rougher and the narrative more structured, but the film carries echoes of the work of Asian contemplative cinema maestros Tsai Ming-liang and Apitchatpong Weerasethakul, both of whom Yogi cites as influences.

The film’s quietly uncanny narrative wondrously depicts not only a dying man’s reflection on his life, but also the very nature of Hawaii itself.

Yogi brings us close to Masao’s personal tragedy while at the same time pulling back to see life and death at a cosmic level. The movie delves into the cycle of life and death enough so that that audience members can understand and accept the beauty of the process.