Late on in “Kefi,” one of its central protagonists — the youngest of three sisters — justifies a spontaneous hook-up with a random stranger by claiming that “the flow” of their chance encounter “was really cinematic.” The same, perhaps, can be said for Kisin Saito’s brazenly confident debut feature as a whole — a genre-fluid kaleidoscope of styles and storylines that frequently skirts the border of incoherence, only to right itself time and again thanks to the filmmaker’s assured command of cinematic aesthetics.
While the premise of three estranged sisters coming together in the wake of their father’s passing might sound unmistakably similar to the set-up of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s “Our Little Sister,” segments of the perpetually eclectic “Kefi” hew closer in tone and appearance to the auteur’s 1998 post-mortal drama “After Life.” At other times, the film gleefully derails itself with the same anarchic effervescence as Gen Sekiguchi’s dazzling cult favorite “Survive Style 5+.” All this unfolds in a secluded corner of the country renowned for its historic temples and prehistoric fossils, as though the secrets of the past are baked into the very ground beneath the feet of our returning heroines, just begging to be unearthed and reexamined.
