Sweet Bean

A woman of seventy-six asks for work at a man's small dorayaki stall. The bean paste she makes turns the stall famous overnight. Then the customers hear about her past. From there the film stops being about food and looks at how Japan isolated people with leprosy by law for decades; the narrative delivers that history not in a lesson but through her life in a garden. Naomi Kawase directed, with Kirin Kiki in the lead. It opened the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes. Before watching: it moves very slowly and saves its force for the last half hour. Without knowing that history, the weight of the narrative passes you by.