Love Parade 
Shara almost looks like the typical japanese movie for the attendants of films festivals: traditional flats, family diners, we've all seen this before in movies of japanese cinema's golden era (Naruse, Ozu), the idea of a man's vanishing -the consequences of it on the family's daily life while the mother's waiting for a child and a traditional feast in the village is going to be prepared- is the plot of the movie- in Kurosawa Kiyoshi's and Teshigahara's movies. But if Kawase's situations aren't new, their treatment is so. Whereas Suzaku's long immobile plans seemed to be branded by Kawase's professional past as a photographer, here the filming is more documentary-like. But whereas this style of filming often seems like a new academism for arthouse movies -see Lars Von Trier-, here it's used to show Kawase's love for her characters of a small village, her need to capture their feelings, all the details of their daily life and the nature which surrounds them. This choice is more stimulating than the expected choice of contemplativity expected in a japanese arthouse movie. And if Suzaku was too long and repetitive here there's a huge variety of situations. The movie avoids the excesses oh pathos and a too cold distance. And it avoids too the trap of the evident freudian subtext potentially lying in the fact that the mother of the vanished kid is pregnant: just like Kawase brings tradition somewhere else, this birth will do so for the family's life, without replacing the kid. Less painful to watch than the anyway promising Suzaku -here it's a movie made for a major studio-, Shara is one of the year's good surprises.
