Flashback: Wild Berries – Miwa Nishikawa’s dark family comedy
Nishikawa’s films are filled with frauds, fakes and phoneys, starting with this, her debut, screening as part of the Hong Kong Asian Film Festival, in which the secrets and lies of the Akechi family unravel
In this writer’s view, Miwa Nishikawa is the leading Japanese director of her generation, full stop. Given her long list of awards, as well as her themes since debuting in 2003 with this dark family comedy, the qualifier “female” is both unneeded and misleading.
Unlike fellow directors Naoko Ogigami and Naomi Kawase, Nishikawa has mostly shied away from subjects that might be considered woman-centric. Instead of a quirky cat lady renting her felines to the lonely (Ogigami’s 2012 Rent-a-Cat) or a pregnant woman still mourning the long-ago loss of a son (Kawase’s 2003 Shara), Nishikawa’s typical protagonist is a fraud of one sort or another, such as the phoney physician in Dear Doctor (2009), the con artist couple in Dreams for Sale (2012) or the celebrity novelist who fakes tears for his dead wife in her latest, The Long Excuse (2016).
Her fascination with the many ways people deceive themselves and others is also evident in Wild Berries, a film about a seemingly average middle-class family whose deceptions turn destructive. Based, like all her films, on her own script, Wild Berries reveals its secrets in finely plotted stages while hinting from the beginning that not all about the Akechi clan is what it appears.