The Taste of Tea

The Taste of Tea (茶の味, 2004) is Katsuhito Ishii's Japanese tragicomedy, available to watch online on iFILM. Over a leisurely two and a half hours it follows the Haruno family through quiet days in rural Tochigi, where ordinary life keeps slipping sideways into the surreal.

Everyone here is stuck on something small. The mother has gone back to animating a film. An uncle, a worn-out music producer, has come up from Tokyo to clear his head. The teenage son can't find the nerve to talk to a girl, the grandfather freezes into odd poses around the house, and little Sachiko is shadowed everywhere by a giant version of herself standing silently on the horizon. There is no real plot, just a string of vignettes about these tiny snags, and somehow that becomes the whole point.

The film lives on tone — funny, strange, then suddenly tender, never pushing for it. Tadanobu Asano turns up among the faces. This is one for viewers who love slow Japanese cinema where a fantastical detail sits beside the dishes and nobody bats an eye. Stream The Taste of Tea (2004) online on iFILM.