Tadanobu Asano, Satomi Tezuka, Tatsuya Gashuuin, Tomokazu Miura.

The Taste of Tea is a rather delightful look at the eccentricities hiding just beneath the calm surface of ordinary life, touching, funny, imaginative and pleasantly low-key.

Working from his own original screenplay for the first time, Ishii shows us the everyday goings-on of the Haruno family, a quintet (mom, dad, teenage son, little daughter and grandpa) living in a small countryside town north of Tokyo, expanded to a six-piece during the stay of their city slicker uncle Ayano (Asano). The eccentric grandpa (an artificially aged Gashuin, the pipsqueak hitman of Ishii's debut film Shark Skin Man and Peach Hip Girl) is only the tip of the iceberg of the quirks that run in the family. Mother Yoshiko (Tezuka) is attempting to return to her old job as a cartoon animator by making a hand-drawn short at the dinner table, father Nobuo (Miura from A Tender Place) is a hypnosis therapist who occasionally practices on his own family, son Hajime (Sato) is a vat of raging hormones after the arrival of a pretty new classmate (half-American Tsuchiya, also seen in Kamikaze Girls), and daughter Sachiko is bothered at inopportune moments by her own giant-sized double, who hangs around sitting on buildings and staring at her.

The Taste of Tea certainly sheds new light and new promise on its director. In retrospect, perhaps Shark Skin Man and Peach Hip Girl and Party 7 were necessary hurdles on the road to finding his own voice. If that's the case, then if Ishii can curb just those few remaining indulgences there should be some delightful works just beyond the horizon.