Like Father, Like Son

Could you con­tin­ue to love a child whom you had raised as your own for six years upon find­ing out that they are some­one else’s flesh and blood? Would you exchange kids if the oppor­tu­ni­ty pre­sent­ed itself? This is the impen­e­tra­bly dense moral quandary at the heart of direc­tor Hirokazu Koreeda’s sub­lime domes­tic dra­ma, Like Father, Like Son, a film that in gen­tly plumb­ing the emo­tion­al depths of par­ent­hood is the per­fect anti­dote to Hollywood’s grat­ing­ly face­tious brand of ​‘baby swap’ comedy.

Ryota (pop singer-turned-actor Masa­haru Fukuya­ma) is a prob­lem solver. An archi­tect by trade, every aspect of his life is a shrine to order and excel­lence, extend­ing to the ele­gant Tokyo apart­ment he shares with wife Midori (Machi­ka Ono) and their well-man­nered, neat­ly groomed son, Kei­ta. It’s not what you might call the home­li­est of set ups – Ryota is strict and tra­di­tion­al – but theirs is nonethe­less a hap­py fam­i­ly. That is until the day the cou­ple receive an earth-shat­ter­ing call from the local hospital.

Koree­da may well be min­ing a famil­iar the­mat­ic frame­work here – fam­i­ly bonds, nature-ver­sus-nature, child aban­don­ment and social class are all recur­ring hall­marks of his work – but the result is no less affect­ing. Where Like Father, Like Son dif­fers from the Japan­ese director’s recent out­put, in par­tic­u­lar last year’s I Wish and the ear­li­er Still Walk­ing and Nobody Knows, how­ev­er, is in its inti­mate exam­i­na­tion of per­son­al conflict.

When things threat­en to take a turn for the melo­dra­mat­ic after Keita’s bio­log­i­cal par­ents – the com­par­a­tive­ly down-at-heel but whole­some and lov­ing Saikis – arrive on the scene, Koree­da shrewd­ly main­tains a com­posed, under­stat­ed tone, divid­ing his film into four sea­sons across which each adult will learn more about them­selves than their respec­tive coun­ter­parts. None more so that Ryota, whose pater­nal cri­sis is com­pound­ed by the numb­ing real­i­sa­tion that this is one predica­ment to which there is no obvi­ous or easy solution.

A failed bid to buy the Saikis out of their parental oblig­a­tions to either child ini­tial­ly expos­es Ryota’s vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty in this most del­i­cate of sce­nar­ios, but his true char­ac­ter and the root of his snob­bish, imper­son­al man­ner are more sub­tly allud­ed to in the every­day moments between a father and his son that Koree­da is such a mas­ter at cap­tur­ing. For all its warmth and the unex­pect­ed­ly wry moments under­pin­ning var­i­ous key scenes – which break the awk­ward, slight­ly far­ci­cal mood with just the right dose of sit­u­a­tion­al humour – Koreeda’s film is at its most ten­der and life-affirm­ing when fol­low­ing Ryota’s redemp­tive arc.

Though the wider impli­ca­tions of the moot­ed trade aren’t explored as thor­ough­ly as they could be, result­ing in seri­ous issues being left unre­solved or else com­plete­ly over­looked, Like Father, Like Son is a com­pelling, thought-pro­vok­ing jour­ney of self-reflec­tion and ‑dis­cov­ery that expert­ly riffs on uni­ver­sal themes.