'A Hundred Flowers': A sumptuous drama of forgiving and forgetting

Genki Kawamura has the kind of resume that could make anyone feel inadequate. As a producer, he’s been involved with some of the buzziest Japanese movies of the past two decades — from “Train Man” to “Confessions” to “Your Name.” When he turned his hand to writing, his debut novel, “If Cats Disappeared from the World,” became an international bestseller.

“A Hundred Flowers” marks Kawamura’s debut feature as a director — and it would be nice to report that he’d finally found something he didn’t do well. So it’s with a heavy heart that I confess: This is one of the most engrossing big-screen experiences I’ve had all year.

Adapted from the director’s own novel, the film may be an intimate drama with only a few significant characters, but it’s emphatically worth watching in a theater.

Kawamura seems like he won’t settle for anything less than ravishing. The film’s aesthetic is instantly seductive, with its extended, shallow-focus tracking shots — executed by Michihito Fujii’s go-to cinematographer, Keisuke Imamura — and skillful sound design, blending almost imperceptibly with the score by electronic artist Shohei Amimori.

In an opening sequence that’s both unnerving and formally ingenious, we meet Yuriko (Mieko Harada), a piano teacher who’s clearly in the early stages of dementia. When her adult son, Izumi (Masaki Suda), joins her to see in the new year, he finds that she’s wandered off and is sitting, dazed, in a local playground.

Yet, Izumi doesn’t seem particularly concerned: After letting his mother prepare him an elaborate dinner, he leaves having eaten only a few mouthfuls. It turns out that their relationship is a trifle complicated, owing to a childhood trauma that the film is slow to reveal (and which I won’t spoil here).

When Yuriko is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and moved into a care facility, any chance of reconciliation grows remote. However, Izumi’s discovery of an old diary amid the clutter of his mother’s home gives him some insight into the events that poisoned their relationship.

Harada, plastered with make-up, gets to play the younger Yuriko in an extended flashback that ventures into even trickier territory than the dementia storyline, redolent of the fiction of Italian author Elena Ferrante.

Although the cast includes Masami Nagasawa as Izumi’s pregnant wife, Kaori, and Masatoshi Nagase as a figure from Yuriko’s past, it’s left to Suda and Harada to do most of the heavy lifting. Harada is particularly impressive in the more challenging of the two roles, though Suda brings a sensitivity and restraint that makes it easier to overlook the fact that he’s a bit too young for his part.

Kawamura lays it on thick at times, especially during the film’s closing stretch. The way he interlaces scenes with bursts of impressionistic childhood memories, initially so striking, eventually grows repetitive. But there are worse things than a surfeit of style.

There is, I’ll admit, a nagging sense that the director is just serving up an extremely skillful composite of his influences. Lee Sang-il, with whom he worked on “Villain” and “Rage,” is an obvious touchstone; one of the film’s most effective techniques is pinched from Florian Zeller’s “The Father.”

“A Hundred Flowers” is a very good film, then, rather than a great one. Yet, there’s everything to suggest that Kawamura will get there soon enough.