Akira Ogata's "Tomodachi to Aruko (Walking with a Friend)," which screened in the Japanese Cinema Splash section of last year's Tokyo International Film Festival, is one of many recent Japanese films about the problems of the elderly in this rapidly graying country. Unlike nearly all these films, its take on its two over-the-hill heroes — friends living disabled and alone in crumbling danchi (housing complex) apartments — is dryly comic, instead of earnestly serious or weepily sentimental.
Seeing it again after nearly half a year, I realized that the true key to the film is its title. There is plenty of real walking in the film by various sets of friends, old and new, but both the title and the story can also be read metaphorically, as in the saying "walk a mile in another man's shoes." The film is about how friendships deepen from not only jointly expended shoe leather, but also shared talk, adventures and pain. Being friends, it says, is not just putting up with another's foibles but feeling his aches — or his absence.
Born in 1959 and thus no spring chicken himself, Ogata has extensive experience in everything from indie films to TV documentaries, though his filmography is relatively short, beginning in 2000 with the award-winning coming-of-age drama "Dokuritsu Shonen Gasshodan (Boy's Choir)." A project born from a bar chat with scriptwriter Kenji Aoki, "Walking with a Friend" is low-budget indie filmmaking at its best, sustained more by its makers' talent and professionalism than by commercial production values.