Look Back

Look Back is at its best when it stays with the simple, painful truth at its center: that the people who change our lives are not always the ones who remain in them. Sometimes a friendship is measured not by how long it lasts, but by how permanently it alters the person who has to go on without it.

It is the kind of film that appeals to virtually all ages and will certainly bring a smile to Kore-eda fans.

As often happens in Kore-eda’s child-focused body of work, there’s a moment when, unexpectedly, what’s on screen suddenly hits a point of transcendence and resistance falls away. That moment can take a bit of time to come, but the payoff is worth the wait.

This slender, but visually and emotionally captivating story takes its cue from the poetic changing of the seasons that mark its passage of roughly a decade in the lives of two gifted young artists.

Kore-eda is a master of the unstated, this time around focused acutely on the sound design of creation, which almost seems to subconsciously cue a Pavlovian response with a myriad of pencils scratching paper and whops of moist paint stirring on canvases.

Despite its lovely tone, the picture proves too slight – and, at the same time, too emphatic in its emotional bludgeoning – to achieve its desired tearjerking effect.

It feels a bit wrong getting so salty about something as overwhelmingly sweet as “Look Back,” but the film is all sugar with no nutritional value. Someone like Kore-eda is capable of committing to a peaceful, wholesome energy without resorting to such denial of reality’s complexities. A film need not mirror childhood bliss and naïveté this closely to capture its charms.