Like Father, Like Son

'Switched at birth' is a dramatic trope as old as time immemorial, but Hirokazu Kore-eda is the kind of filmmaker who can grant even the most questionable premise – like Air Doll's blow-up-sex-doll-comes-to-life hook – cinematic grace, thematic weight and dramatic depth. Turning, as ever, away from the sensational, Kore-eda settles his story in the domestic: the swapped sons having spent six years being raised in contrasting situations (one in a rural, middle-class shambles amidst many children, the other in a single-child, upper-class, high-rise apartment of quietude and order). What we're essentially circling around is the old 'nature vs nurture' debate: whether it's the genes or the environs that shapes a child, and bonds a family. Kore-eda is most interested in what that means in patriarchal Japan, where the first-born son is still a totem, and is unafraid to suggest that fatherhood may be, for some, work of pure vanity. But Kore-eda is a deft director of children (from Nobody Knows to I Wish), and the film, eventually, becomes about the feelings of the children being thrown into the middle of this 'debate'.