Last Letter

Yuri comes back from her sister's funeral. She sees the invitation to her sister's school reunion and goes; she cannot tell anyone that her sister is dead. There she meets an old acquaintance: Otosaka, who was in love with her sister in his youth and later became a writer. He takes her for her sister. She does not correct him. They begin to write to each other. Her daughter and her sister's daughter get drawn into the correspondence and the letters start circulating among four people. Shunji Iwai writes and directs. Iwai filmed the same story twice, first in China and then in Japan. This is the Japanese version and both come from the same script. The narrative runs in two times: the letters now and the school years in the nineties. In the past the younger selves are played by the daughters of the present, and that is deliberate. The subject is how a person remains in other people's memory; we never see the woman who died and know her only as much as four people describe her. The letter form is at the centre; inside the age of email and telephones the film deliberately uses handwriting. Iwai's visual language is plain here too: soft light, summer landscapes and school corridors. Who it is for: viewers who like Japanese melodrama and narratives built on memory. Who it is not for: there are many characters, the two times are confusing, and the emotional register stays high.