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#+title: Talking About The Asadas (2020)
#+author: Jacob Janzen
#+date: <2024-03-22 Sun>
I finally got around to re-watching this movie last night after watching it on a plane one time. It really stuck with me because of a scene near the end that made me Feel Things. I usually don't really talk about movies all that much but I felt the need to discuss this one.
On re-watch, the film did not hold up as well as I remembered. I still enjoyed it, but I found the plot and pacing to be somewhat odd. It felt like two disjoint movies, one about a struggling photographer trying to follow his dreams and one about trying to find hope in the aftermath of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake. I think both stories worked well on their own, but I think that they failed to transition effectively between the two.
The first half of the movie shows Masashi taking up photography after seeing his father gifts him the old family camera. He is very interested in photography as a child before becoming directionless after graduating from his university with a prestigious award for a family photo he took. Years later, he becomes inspired once again and begins taking many family photos, each with funny themes where the family pretends to be in various different scenarios such as pretending they were all on a car racing team or that they were a family of gangsters. He publishes a book of this photography and initially has little success before winning an award for it and achieving a lot of success. I found this section to be very poorly paced. He pretty quickly goes from his book being an abject failure to a huge success. It feels like it was missing something, but the family photos were cute and fun and the struggles of wanting to do something, but never doing anything to satisfy that urge to create is immensely relatable to me.
The second half of the movie was significantly more emotionally stimulating and I think that it deals with the devastation of such a natural disaster very well. In particular, I appreciated how it dealt with a young child who had lost her father in the earthquake. After his death she was very distraught because she could not find any photos of her father in the collection of photos that protagonist Masashi Asada and other volunteers had helped salvage. At the same time, Masashi's father was having a medical emergency and his family thought he may pass away. Similarly, there were few photos of him before Masashi took up photography as his father was always the one behind the camera. Realizing this, Masashi quickly comes back to Tōhoku to take a family photo for that child. Wearing the father's old watch to take a photo, he made the family realize that their father was actually in every single one of those photos, just behind the camera instead of in front.
The movie ends with a fake-out about the father's death. It shows the family surrounding him as he lays down as though dead. His wife falls forward to sob, and then you hear a camera shutter and the family all start laughing. This was just another of Masashi's fun themed family photos. The scene gave me a good chuckle.
Overall, I found the movie to be very cute and I found that it did a great job of dealing with the tragedy of natural disaster. I really wish that it did a better job of pacing the first half and tying the themes of the first half to the second half. It felt disjointed and that is disappointing to me because I think it could have been a really fantastic movie if those issues were worked through with a little more script editing.
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