Fact-checking biopics is an easy game for critics to play since nearly all films about real people fudge facts or even outright lie to tell a story. I¡¯ve played the game myself, but in the case of Shuichi Okita¡¯s delightful ¡°Mori, the Artist¡¯s Habitat,¡± it¡¯s almost beside the point.
Celebrated in Japan for his late-career paintings of flowers, insects and other natural phenomena in a childlike style, Morikazu Kumagai (1880-1977) isn¡¯t well-known abroad. So Okita¡¯s film, which is based on his own script, is a welcome introduction, though it focuses on only one day in the then-94-year-old artist¡¯s life and never shows him actually painting.
The story is as simple-seeming as one of Kumagai¡¯s cat paintings but goes beyond the surface of his obsessions and quirks, the best known being his reclusion, to pointed, affectionate dissection of his character and world.
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