Cottontail
A widower from Tokyo travels to England’s Lake District to honour his late wife’s wishes.
Image courtesy of Day For Night.
The British director Patrick Dickinson was born in 1977 and his busy career has largely been focused on work for television. However, he now follows up his feature documentary Elizabeth Windsor (2022) with his first full-length cinema film with actors. Cottontail largely features Japanese characters even though the greater part of it takes place in England and it would appear that Dickinson was drawn to Japanese cinema in his youth when his mother’s enthusiasm for it rubbed off on him. It seems that the films of Ozu in particular appealed to him and that may well have encouraged him to embark on this co-production between the UK and Japan which tells a story about a family from Tokyo. His interest in material of this kind had indeed emerged earlier when in 2013 he made an award-winning short drama entitled Usagi-san or Mr Rabbit which can now be regarded as a sketch for the longer and more ambitious Cottontail.
Once it is known that Dickinson is an admirer of Ozu, a filmmaker who made studies of family life central to his work, a comparison is inevitably prompted, but that only serves to emphasise how far Cottontail falls short. That is all the more apparent because 2023 saw another outsider, the German filmmaker Wim Wenders, echoing the style of Ozu in his Japanese movie Perfect Days and doing so without putting a foot wrong. Sincere as it is, Dickinson's effort never approaches that achievement despite both films starring Japanese players. In Cottontail the central figure is a widower, Kenzaburo played by Lily Franky, and the story starts in Tokyo where we see Kenzaburo remembering his late wife, Akiko (Tae Kimura), and revisiting the establishment where he and Akiko had eaten together on their very first meeting. We share his memories through a flashback in which the couple-to-be are played by Kosei Kudo and Yuri Tsunematsu. We will see more of their life together later, but the main narrative moves forward to reveal that Akiko had left a letter with a local abbot expressing a wish that not only Kenzaburo but also his son Toshi (Ryô Nishikido) and Toshi's wife Satsuki (Rin Takanashi) feel compelled to respect.
It might have seemed that Akiko’s desire expressed in that letter – namely, to have her ashes taken to England to be scattered at Lake Windermere – was too unlikely to fit neatly with the realism of a film indebted to Ozu but Dickinson’s screenplay makes it believable. We learn that in the 1960s when only a young child Akiko had been taken on holiday to the Lake District and had loved it. That the memory should have taken hold so strongly is linked to the fact that forever afterwards Akiko had been a passionate admirer of the books of the area’s local author Beatrix Potter. Potter’s worldwide popularity makes this entirely persuasive and of course the film’s title itself provides a further link to Potter. There is another fact too that renders Akiko’s request convincing for one senses that she is aware of father and son having become distant and a trip abroad by the two of them could be a means of bringing them closer together again. Indeed, in the event Kenzaburo will set off not only with his son and daughter-in-law but also with Emi (Hanii Hashimoto) his young granddaughter.
Although the flashbacks will continue and lengthen as they depict the past including the train of events after Akiko was diagnosed with cancer, the time spent in England is now central to the narrative (when together the family speak in Japanese with their words duly subtitled but Kenzaburo, a struggling novelist who had once been a teacher of English, is able to communicate in that language with those he encounters en route to the Lake District). As the story develops two problems start to emerge, both deriving from the screenplay and not due in any way to any failings on the part of the cast. One of them resides in Dickinson falling short in depicting more fully and clearly what drew father and son apart and equally in not exploring in sufficient detail the character of Satsuki. Since a key element in Cottontail is the greater rapport that emerges when the family talk sufficiently for secrets to be shared at last, the lack of deeper characterisations of Toshi and Satsuki becomes a definite weakness.
But even more serious is the other problem that emerges. Ozu was famous for avoiding artificial plot lines and rooting his family tales in daily life. In contrast to that, Cottontail grows increasingly implausible. Just how incapable Kenzaburo is due to grief or dementia or to both is left vague, but in any case the way in which he is able to break away from London on his own and to travel north until he reaches Lake Windermere carries no conviction at all. First, he is on the wrong train, then he finds a handy bike to ride and after that he walks, a lost wanderer, into the rural home of a farmer named John (Ciarán Hinds) and his daughter Mary (Aoife Hinds who is indeed the daughter of Ciarán Hinds). Excused by the fact that John like Kenzaburo is a widower, these two don't hand over their chance visitor so that the authorities can provide help but instead drive him the hundred miles to Lake Windermere themselves! Once there he is joined by the family who have now been summoned from London, but there is fresh drama in that the old photograph recording Akiko's childhood visit fails to identify the spot on the lake where it was taken. Can they somehow chance on that very place before they must go back? Well, what do you think?
Franky is not in the same class as Kôji Yakusho, the exceptional lead actor in Perfect Days, but even so he gives a good performance in the central role and Dickinson clearly does want to pay genuine tribute to Japanese cinema. Nevertheless, ultimately there is a gulf between the tale that this would have been if treated realistically as serious cinema and the fanciful fictional tale that it ends up being. There may well be an audience who, but for some painful scenes around Akiko's cancer, will welcome Cottontail as popular drama of the kind in which some exaggeration is part of the brand. On that level Cottontail is not badly done, but I doubt that many admirers of Ozu – of whom I am one – will account this film a success.
MANSEL STIMPSON
Cast: Lily Franky, Tae Kimura, Ryô Nishikido, Rin Takanashi, Ciarán Hinds, Aoife Hinds, Kosei Kudo, Yuri Tsunematsu, Hanii Hashimoto, Dave Șimon, Ken Mitsuishi, Miki Maya, Thomas Coombes.
Dir Patrick Dickinson, Pro Gabrielle Tana, Kosuke Oshida, Carolyn Marks Blackwood and Hélène Théodoly, Screenplay Patrick Dickinson, Ph Mark Wolf, Pro Des Matthew Button and Kentaro Kosaka, Ed Andy Jadavji, Music Stefan Gregory, Costumes Mari Miyamoto and Ella-Louise Gaskell.
Magnolia Mae Films/Brouhaha Entertainment/MBK Productions/Office Shirous/Written Rock Films/West End Films-Day For Night.
94 mins. UK/Japan. 2023. US Rel: 7 June 2024. UK Rel: 14 February 2025. Cert. 12A.
