Film review: Like Father, Like Son (Soshite Chichi ni Naru)

The Nonomiyas seem like the perfect Tokyo family. Dad Ryota (Masaharu Fukuyama) is a successful and important architect. Mum Midori (Machiko Ono) good-humoredly chops vegetables for nourishing soups in their swanky show home. And six-year-old Keita (Keita Ninomiya) diligently practices the piano, lies dutifully to the school inspectors about bogus family time, and is cute as a button.

Problem is, Keita is no Nonomiya. A routine blood test unearths a maternity ward mix-up, which saw two newborns handed over to the wrong parents, meaning that the Nonomiyas’ biological son has spent the last six years across town being raised by another family.

And the two families are by no means alike in dignity. While the middle-class Nonomiyas are genteel, disciplined and aspirational, the working-class Saikis are a rambunctious bunch, and young Ryusei (Hwang Shogen) has had a rough-and-tumble childhood above dad Yudai’s (Lily Franky) scruffy repair shop.

Where do they all go from here? Does six years of love and nurturing count for more than accident of birth? Or is blood always thicker than water? The stage is set for an involving and moving drama which, while not breaking new narrative ground, deals sensitively, calmly and thoughtfully with material that could easily have been milked to melodrama in the hands of a lesser director.

But Hirokazu Koreeda allows the story to speak for itself, and even derives some humor from the painful situation: we feel bourgeois Ryota’s horror when his boisterous birth son fumbles with his chopsticks and, immersed in a lowbrow computer game, shouts “Oh my God!” in English.

Class clearly interests the director, but he doesn’t resort to easy stereotypes. Working-class values are neither demonized nor romanticized: while unkempt Yudai initially seems more interested in the potential for squeezing financial compensation out of the hospital than the likely trauma for the boys, he is later shown to be a warm and involved father. Meanwhile, salaryman Ryota’s discipline and drive, while securing his family a very comfortable existence, have made him a somewhat distant parent.

The other main theme is the nature/nurture debate. At six, the boys are old enough to have absorbed their families’ values. As the parents get to know their respective biological sons, scenes of quiet, well behaved little Keita bewildered by the noisy horseplay chez Saiki are some of the film’s most touching, while Ryota and Midori struggle as the peace of their plush apartment is shattered by the cuckoo in their nest.

Koreeda is probing what it means to be a father, and if the film has one flaw, it is that the respective mothers – for whom the shock of the switch would arguably be worse, given the psychological impact of labor – are not really developed as characters. Perhaps the director will remedy this in another film. If his future efforts are as assured, poignant and discerning as Like Father, Like Son, they will be a pleasure.

Director: Hirokazu Koreeda
Starring: Masaharu Fukuyama, Machiko Ono, Yoko Maki, Lily Franky