Your spouse left one day to not return any more. It started like any given day.
He went to his work, and soon came back in a hurry, to leave the bike and take
the umbrella: it was cloudy and windy. In the evening you washed the baby: he
was three months old. Then you laid in bed, waiting for him; sometimes he was
back very late. Two police officers came instead: your spouse had committed
suicide.

At the beginning it had been horrible. Then, some years passed - the kid was now
five. Your relatives arranged a new marriage with a widower who was having a
daughter. You moved with your son there and started a new life.

It seemed to you that the wound was now healed. Your boy and his daughter coped
immediately each other and the new spouse was a kind man. You started to feel
love for him: so it seemed.

A visit to the old place made you realize that nothing was healed actually. You
realized that it was like your life had stopped in that night. You were not
noticing anything new anymore. The same scenes were turning in your head again
and again. The same recurrent dreams. The new place was like empty for you.
Sometimes you were observing suddenly a room, a piece of furniture; only it was
having a unique function: to remind you about the past. Any man or woman, any
event, seemed to connect you to a situation from the past. You were living like
in a dream that was coming again and again. Two or three moments that were
repeating in your mind: moments of happiness with your first spouse, or other
moments that had had no significance at all - now they were carrying something
like a hidden message, in relation with the suicide that had followed.

And you asked suddenly, why did he commit suicide, I cannot understand why, this
question comes again and again in my mind.

The new spouse tried to explain to you, there is a Maboroshi, a cheating light,
that appears sometimes to beguile us, and it is hard to resist it.

And you understood that no other answers were possible: you were to live with
your wound, because your life should follow your fate. Understanding this was
the only way to come to your terms.

This is Maboroshi no Hikari, the movie directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda, with Masao
Nakabori as cinematographer. The story is told with a large economy of words, of
actions, of images: it is a supremely ascetic film. The people are always in the
distance, the images always in the dark. The only images that are clear are the
scenes remembered by the protagonist: the woman that lost her first spouse.

It is a very radical cinematographic approach. I should say that it cannot be
more radical than that. It is the movie from the mind of the protagonist.

But if you have the guts to follow this ascetic movie you'll be generously
rewarded. Because it is actually an exquisite artwork. Yes, many images are left
in obscurity: it is actually a great play of light and obscure. As for the
images that have meaning for the protagonist, the camera is in such moments like
caressing the whole: the scenery becomes then pure visual choreography.