Reviewers want this exquisite and heartbreaking film to be a tightly focused wartime narrative but that it is not. We follow Suzu through several of life's terrifying (and often involuntary) leaps of faith. We leave home with her, just a girl, and to marry a boy she never recalls having met. We live with her in a marital house that is at times welcoming and at others rank with hostility. We see her reforge her attachments to family and become part of a new one; we see this house become her home, her place of work and something she will fight furiously to defend. There is the numbness and then bottomless acceleration of grief; the desensitisation to loss; a distance, a cold strength by the time more former intimates are gone. An honesty to the development of her marriage, the elements of loving warmth and explosions of tension. The imperfections of characters brought into proximity and friction. A nuanced portrayal of a perceived love-triangle and the way it is both uncharacteristic of stereotypes about this era but also entirely plausible in light of how wartime fatalism shapes emotional experience. Suzu is completely charming in her tirelessly hardworking and yet creatively daydreaming tendencies. Though her life is brutal at times, her perspective on her lot, and on the natural and human beauty which surrounds her, makes the idea of a now forgotten life of domesticity in prewar Japan almost seem appealing! To look back on her, the world that she sketched and painted in her mind's eye, the characters with whom she was co- dependent, feels like looking back with tearful nostalgia toward real friends now lost in time - the same emotions felt at the close of any great film, and in particular, most of the grown-up output of Studio Ghibli (apologies for the predictable reference). Really priceless.
