Fleapit revisited:Monster.

"If only some people can have it, that's not happiness. That's just nonsense. Happiness is something anyone can have"- Makiko Fushimi

Happiness IS something anyone can have but life is difficult and confusing and though happiness is there it's not always the easiest thing to find. Us adults have made the world such a bewildering, confusing, and, sometimes, hateful place that many of those who find it hardest to find happiness now are children. The people on the planet who deserve, and should feel, the most happiness.

For that we should hang our heads in shame. Single parents, usually mothers but sometimes fathers, probably feel the burden of creating happiness and safety for their children more than anyone so how would it feel if you were a single mother and your young son (roughly about ten/eleven years old) came home one day, having chopped lumps out of his hair, having lost one of his sneakers, and told you that he didn't have the brain of a human but that of a pig.

That he was neither human nor pig - but some kind of monster. That's what happens to Saori Mugino (Sakura Ando) in Hirokazu Kore-eda's excellent, yet slow burning, new film Monster (written by Yuji Sakamoto). Her son, Minato (Soya Kurokawa), has befriended another boy at school and that boy, Yori Hoshikawa (Hinata Hiiragi), is being mercilessly bullied by other boys because he's effeminate, possibly gay, and because his father, Kiyotaka (Shido Nakamura), is an abusive drunk.

Kiyotaka does nothing to protect Yori. Instead he tries to pile further misery and shame upon him. But Yori is tough and, despite everything, manages to keep up his happy-go-lucky persona as he skips down the corridors at school and explores abandoned train tunnels in the countryside near his home.

Minato finds it less easy. He's afraid of the bulllies and tells Yori not to talk to him during class, he jumps out of his mother's car when it is moving (shades of Greta Gerwig's Lady Bird), and worries that he may not grow into the same kind of man, a heterosexual one, that his now dead father was. 

He reports to his mother that his bandaged ear and bloodied nose come from a result of bullying and abuse by his new teacher Mr Hori (Eita Nagayama) so Saori goes to the school to register a complaint where she is met with a frankly bizarre response from Mr Hori (who sneakily eats candy from his jacket pocket during the meeting) and the school principal Mrs Fushimi (Yuko Tanaka) who, it soon transpires, is dealing with her own demons.

Initially, it's hard to work out what's really going on but the story is told three times from three different perspectives. Saori's, Mr Hori's, and, finally, Minato's. It is, as you might expect if you are familiar with Kore-eda's work, Minato's version of events, the "shrewd perspective", that makes the most sense. Kore-eda seems to have a deep affinity with, and understanding of, what it feels like to be child. Both the awe and the fear.

Among the beautiful cherry blossoms, we find a burning building, a 'hostess bar', a potentially disturbing (for a 12A film) cat cremation scene, a mudslide, a child playing a trombone, and something that comes close to a suicide attempt (12A?) and yet, with Ryuichi Sakamoto's elegiac score (he died in March last year so possibly his very last) acting as a kind of salve, none of these things seem sensational or exploitative but merely part of Minato's and Yori's life.

For it is, ultimately, a story about Minato and Yori and it's a sweet and tender one too. At their young age the idea of sex is clearly inappropriate but the film bravely suggests that they are starting to have feelings for each other that they know may cause them problems later in life and this is at the core of the entire film.

In Monster, it rains a lot. The rain falls hard and often and in a film that's not short of symbolism the precipitation seems to act as a metaphor for life itself. You can drown in the rain or you can sing and dance it. You can let the rain wash away your sins. Even when you have not sinned. A minor classic and one that leaves you thinking about it long after you've left the cinema.