OUR LITTLE SISTER

Japanese melodrama “Our Little Sister” is the rare film that captures the everyday pleasures and anguishes of family life. Adapted from Akimi Yoshida’s serialized manga comic, writer/director Hirokazu Kore-eda focuses on three adult sisters who choose to adopt their teenage stepsister. These women are not psychoanalyzed, nor are their lives reduced to their romantic entanglements. Instead, Kore-eda  presents the lives of his heroines as unsensational, defined by small gestures. “Our Little Sister” is, in that sense, slower than most family dramas since it’s less reliant on contrived plot twists and bombastic confrontations. Instead, Kore-eda represents four optimistic women enjoying each other’s company, trying to find romance, eating good food and mourning the loss of friends and loved ones.