Taste of Tea / Cha no aji (2002)

Nothing could be more ordinary yet more meaningful for traditional Japanese culture than the cup of tea. Reflecting this, the outline of A Taste of Tea is quite simple. The viewer observes a family while it passes through one spring when the son enters high school and the daughter goes to grade school, while Dad goes into Tokyo to work and Mom stays home with Grandpa and, for a time, a visiting uncle. The son falls in love, the daughter learns to do a flip on the horizontal bar, son and father play Go in the evenings, the uncle tells a story of his youth. The only big event is that Grandpa dies, but this happens quickly and quietly, off screen. In essence, it is the shomin-geki of shomin-gekis.

At the same time, the family’s ordinariness is presented in extraordinary ways. Sachiko the daughter is spied on by a giant version of herself. Hajime the son swears off women after a train takes away his dream girl, shown by a train flying out of his forehead. Father is some kind of hypno-therapist, and before the uncle leaves the adults are hypnotized while the kids watch TV. Mom spends much of her day making drawings, which we eventually find are stills for an animation project. Uncle Ayano on his visit tells the story of taking a dump in the woods that landed on what looked like giant egg and later turned out to be the skeleton of a murdered yakuza. Later, because he has a sound studio in Tokyo, he will be goaded into making a demo of a song for his other brother Todo, a manga artist. Oddest of all is Grandpa (Tatsuya Gashuin, his hair whitened and sprayed with a wandering cowlick), who poses for the animator, regularly tunes himself with a tuning fork, spies on Sachiko, sings and dances for Todo’s song, and has been working in secret on his own animated memorial of the family.

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Along the way we see sidelights that eventually turn out to be significant – a yakuza who is buried in the deserted playground Sachiko uses and emerges from the grave when she is practicing her flip, a dancer practicing in silence by the river shore, an old flame of Ayano’s, a recording session that is unforgettable in its silliness, an absurd look at the two minute animation Mother has spent months on. Todo is beaten up by one of his female assistants after he reports her affair to her husband.

The Taste of Tea is an utterly unique film, at once as ordinary as Hometown or any Ozu movie, stylistically as surreal as Happiness of the Katakuris, and yet as gentle and slow as A Gentle Breeze in the Village. It is hard to believe this is the work of Katsuhito Ishii, the writer/director of Sharkskin Man, but there it is. No old lovers have ever met more awkwardly that Ayano (Tadanobu Asano) and his unnamed old girlfriend nor revealed as much by saying nothing but platitudes. No little girl has ever come to believe in herself more quietly. No movie has featured Go more significantly and yet without any obvious symbolic relationship with the story, for no one in the family has a strategy for anything except going on as before. No family has ever been more eccentric yet more normal. No movie I can recall has ever used CGI more wittily while at the same time treating it as simply a part of normal expression, yet no movie has chosen to eventually abandon its effects in favor of simple flipbooks. Even with Asano and Gashuin in the cast, it is a completely balanced ensemble movie. It is perhaps the perfect Yamada film, adapted to fit in the 21^st century family and film world.