RYO NISHIKIDO, LILY FRANKY IN COTTONTAIL

PATRICK DICKINSON: COTTONTAIL (2023) - MOSTLY BRITISH SERIES, SAN FRANCISCO

Lily Franky plays a Japanese widower whose sentimental journey to England’s Lake Windermere brings about a reconciliation with his son

English director Patrick Dickinson presents a Japaese tale in an English setting that begins in Japan. The main character is Kenzaburo, played by the Koreeda regular Lily Franky. As a young man he is played briefly but entrancingly by hearthrob Kosei Kudo. We see the bashful, over-modest young man meet Akiko (Yuri Tsunematsu, later Tae Kimura) at a bar because she wants him to teach her English to appreciate the Beatrix Potter Peter Rabbit books she associates with a halcyon time she spent in England with her mother and father as a girl.

Most of the focus is on the present time when Akiko has died and her wish was for her ashes to be scattered at Lake Windermere. Kenzaburo, a frustrated writer who seemed to live in his own world much of the time, has become estranged from his son Toshi (TV actor Ryô Nishikido), who has a wife, Satsuki (Rin Takanashi) and daughter, little Emi (Hanii Hashimoto). Flashbacks show when Akiko and Kenzaburo confront Akiko's diagnosis of Alzheimer's. We learn that she recorded her wish about Lake Windermere before the disease had progressed too far for her to do that. We see that Toshi often tried to help, but Kenzaburo often rejected his help.

In the wake of Akiko's demise Kenzaburo is drinking and smoking and fumbling about. A memorable early scene shows him stealing special fish for a birthday celebration. It's a very good scene, but we really don't know what's going on at this point. On the other hand, though we are always with Kenzaburo, we don't really much get to know him. The great Lily Franky is excellent in Kenzaburo's various sad scenes of struggling and trying to carry on - even, or especially, when he gets lost by himself in the English countryside in the first phase of the scattering-the-ashes project. Eventually a flashback takes us to the terrible time of Akiko's last days.

Kenzaburo's sad little odyssey of gettiing quite lost in the English countryside occurs because he insists on going from London to Lake Windermere by himself and Toshi unwisely agrees. He takes a train in the wrong direction, then nicks a bicycle and rides off into the country, winding up at a farm house (there is a horse) over a hundred miles from Windermere. The family he meets there happens to be famous Irish actor Ciarán Hinds and his actual daughter, Aoife Hinds, who is herself part Asian: her mother is Vietnamese-born French actress Hélène Patarot. They're called John and Mary.

John and Mary, who by coincidence have not long ago lost their own mother and wife, take Kenzaburo in and give him a bath, food, clean clothes, and lots of tea. They actually take him to Lake Winermere. This bridge passage revives Kenzaburo and pushes him to reach out to his son. John convinces "Ken" he should call Toshi, who conveniently appears with Satsuki and Emi in a rental car, to share in the task of trying to match up Akiko's old snapshot with a section of the lake where she wants her ashes to be deposited. In the end, they wind up at a smaller tarn surrounded by trees and seem to find the exact spot.

Allan Hunter, who reviewed this film for Screen Daily makes the valid point that the film, "while understated and full of grace, also lacks bite." The portrait of the couple winds up lacking detail about their actual lives between the first date and the onset of dementia. It's not very clear who Kenzaburo was or what his life was like. Nonetheless, Lily Franky is always great, and he is wonderful here in certain scenes. What delicacy and sweetness he has! In retrospect Kosei Kudo, ooozing delicate beauty and sensitivity, was an excellent choice to play his younger self.

With its focus on bereavement due to Alzhaimer's and the involvement of actors as fine as Lily Franky and Cierán Hinds, Cottontail film can't fail to be touching. But in the end this winds up seeming indeed like an expanded short film, which it is. Despite its wealth of incident and longer (but still compact) run time, and its very emotional and beautiful final sequences, Dickinson's screenplay doesn't delve deeply into his characters.

The film apparently grows out of Mr. Rabbit , a 24-minute film Dickinson made in 2013, which also concerns a wife called Akiko with Alhaimer's being cared for by her husband, but they are Japanese Americans living in Los Angeles.

Cottontail, 94 mins., debuted at Vancouver Oct. 2023, showing later in that month at Rome, where it won the Best First Film award. Also shown at Balgrade, Istanbul and Sydney. Screened for this review as part of the Mostly British series, Feb. 6-13, 2025 in San Francisco.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.