Fantasia Festival Report: The Taste of Tea

Here's Mark Mann weighing in from Montreal on a film that we've reviewed here before - The Taste of Tea, starring Tadanobu Asano. I absolutely adore this film, to the point that if Mark had said anything bad about it I'd have had to slap him on my arrival in Montreal tomorrow. Luckily for him he loved it, too.

Imagine if a Japanese Doppelganger of Jean-Pierre Jeunet had a love child with Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Now imagine if that kid grew up to be a Japanese filmmaker, but the only films he'd ever been exposed to were The Royal Tenenbaums, Princess Mononoke, and the British television comedy The Office. Well if you can picture the sort of film such a person might make, then you should be pretty close to picturing Katsuhito Ishii's latest film The Taste of Tea.

Another beautifully wrought and perfectly delivered film for this year's Fantasia fest. The Taste of Tea is an intricate, magic-realist excursion through the fractured lives of one very imaginative family as they make small movements toward or away from each other and daydream endlessly. When this family daydreams, however, you're never sure what's real.

The Taste of Tea (unlike Mind Game, the other triumph of the festival thus far) is perfectly delicate, a warm breath on the back of your neck. The film lets you meander along with the family or just sit silently with them on the porch for a while, and then it lightly shifts away. No overarching story ever materializes out of their separate fantasies or obsessions. Ishii takes the separate threads of their lives, and instead of weaving a tale he makes a cat's cradle.

All the characters in this movie lead magnificent yet anguished private lives that they seem unable to share with each other. If the movie does have a direction, it would be towards everyone's unveiling, toward release from excessive (if delightful) introspection. The movie itself feels like one of its characters; it doesn't seem to notice the viewer, and so the disclosures feel preoccupied and accidental. This effect is probably a function of the profound intimacy that is created on screen. Watching The Taste of Tea is like petting a stray cat: the feeling is light and fleeting, but it's nice anyway that it condescended to give you its attention for two hours. One has the constant impression of being told a secret. I walked out feeling like I had just sobbed my guts out (I didn't, I swear).

Having seen the trailer I was expecting something like origami – finely architected images and characters - so I was surprised to discover that this movie is also deeply hilarious. Much of the humour derives from the peculiar fixations of every member of the family (eg. the youngest girl believes she must do a back-flip over a handlebar in order to get rid of the giant version of herself that won't leave her alone). They're all also tremendously awkward people, and their social confusion (or sincerity) makes for some very funny encounters. At other moments, the writing and acting is uncomfortably realistic, especially with the teenage boy Hajime as he learns to play Go so he can impress a girl.

The film is shot almost languorously, with long still images of pastoral landscapes and people staring dazedly at things. The background is usually fairly plain, the perfect relief for their delusions and fantasies. The camera rarely moves; Ishii often just finds the right off-kilter angle and lets the action play out. I'm not sure how, but there is something in the filming itself that accentuates the sensation of being a voyeur.

The beautiful thing about The Taste of Tea is that the resolution contains the film really well and yet still points beyond itself. You're not really sure what happened, and yet you're deeply satisfied. The feeling of continuation and open-endedness is really strong. It might not change your life, but I'll be damned if you won't be feeling a lot more poetic when you walk out.

Review by Mark Mann.