Does the past leave you?

On Christmas Eve 2021 we stopped by at the village church where my grandparents, my great grandparents and many great aunts and uncles are buried. My grandmother had died the year before, aged 101, in the local nursing home following a few years with dementia after having lived her whole life in the family home in the village where my mother grew up. Dropping by on Christmas Eve was expectedly resonant with family memories of Christmas dinners over decades - indeed the house had been sold as is derelict and neglected, yet the name on the door is still that of my grandfather who died almost forty years ago. When my aunt died a year later the lease of the grave has come to me along with the bills for maintenance and so forth. On Christmas Eve with the church ready for the Christmas service, I felt so absolutely convinced that we could get out of the car and walk to the other end of the village and the house would be warm and full of people and the smell of roast dinner and pine needles from the tree. But of course not. The reason I mention this is that that was the very sentiment that came back to me when watching and re-watching All of Us Strangers, a film loosely based on Taichi Yamada’s novel Summer with the Strangers 異人たちとの夏.

This is a film I have watched twice and I never watch films twice. Ever. Not going to happen, but well then it did because I had to have another go at working out what really happens. If you haven’t seen the film then don’t let me spoil it for you by throwing in too many hints about the story and how it ends but suffice it to say that there appears to be effortless and surprisingly normal communication with the dead. Or maybe there is, I’ll leave it with you. Mark Kermode noted that this is more common in Japanese film and literature than it is here and it certainly seems true when you think about Wild Sheep Chase by Murakami where the protagonist isn’t at all surprised to be having a conversation with someone who explains how he killed himself and the Sheep Man buried him. All par for the course of course. Is it Magic Realism or not? Really depends on what you make of the plot and it may be significant that one of the first things to happen in the film is for the film writer Adam, played by Andrew Scott, to type Exterior: Suburban House 1987. Or again, maybe not.

If you were born in the 1960s like me, the film will also sink other hooks into your skin and drag you into the past without effort. Why, isn’t young Jamie Bell (b 1986) sporting MY bright jumper and moustache of 1987 (I’ll spare you the pictures and be grateful for that) and aren’t they playing stuff I used to listen to in the 1987 Top 40? Damn right they are and it does work its magic too. How about watching a film with mild gay sex on an Air Canada flight (Copenhagen to Toronto Pearson, B787) - yeah that’s when I watched the film the first time - does it lend one some street cred? It might. Canada is a civilized country.

In need of an exorcism after watching a film about revisiting 1987? I don’t blame you. I bet the past doesn’t ever leave us and - at least in one sense - our parents and grandparents and dead friends don’t go away either. In their own odd play on AI Michael Parkinson, my grandparents are so familiar to me in what they did and what they would say in different circumstances that I can play out whole dialogues and feel fairly sure what their advice would be and whether they would approve or disapprove of what I end up deciding to do. It’s like a Super-Ego that speaks and moves and brings with it the smell of Christmas roasts past to make sure we never really walk alone. Emotionally we get it but culturally you have to be Japanese to embrace it comfortably?