Sarogeto (2025): we need to talk more about grief
Facing mortality is a theme for great stories. Myths, epic poems, sagas. And also for cinema. It’s interesting to watch people from diverse cultural backgrounds dealing with grief, and this can be a learning experience for the audience. We know that East and West deal differently with it, and a new film invites us to share the journey, because “Sarogeto” is not only a cross-cultural tale, but a cross-generational one, too.
Our story starts with a flashback to Japan, in 1969. A little girl drops her mother’s ashes and hears from her father: “your mother died because of you!”. Later, the father goes to his daughter’s bedroom and apologizes, at the same time communicating that the family will be separated: he’ll go to Hong Kong look for a job while the girl will be taken to America by a cousin.
In the present time, we find the little girl now a grown woman, Grace (Ykumi Yoshimatsu), with a big problem: she has a tumor that is too near her aorta to be removed. She chooses to not tell the people she loves: her husband Michael (Winsor Harmon, who looks a bit like Robert Redford) and their son Augie (Tyler Ghizel), who looks nothing like any of them. She instead decides to take control of what’s left of her life and hire a personal assistant to spend more time with her family. She hires another Japanese emigré, Mickey (Ruby Park).
Mickey discovering that she is a replacement instead of just an assistant is rather anticlimactic, culminating with her running away to a rainy outdoors. Once asleep in a motel, she dreams about her own experience with loss and grief, and comes back to help Grace with hers.
Do you remember your first encounter with death? You probably do, as it’s an important life milestone. I certainly remember mine: on the eve of my 10th birthday, I sat on my mother’s knees as she was weeping because her uncle had just died, and I could only say to comfort her: “it’s not your fault”. I didn’t attend the funeral. Seventeen years and three months later, another encounter, as my mother told me my grandfather was “nearing his end”. I was desperate, thinking he had mere hours or days to live. He lived for another three months, and I didn’t attend the funeral either. Both were pre-announced deaths, such as Grace’s in “Sarogeto”, and preparing for death can be as strenuous and stressing as grieving afterwards.
While interviewing young women for a position as a personal assistant / nanny, Grace makes them uncomfortable with personal questions such as “do you currently have a boyfriend?” or “do you plan to have children someday?” These may have been the same questions Grace heard when she got hired as a waitress dressed as a geisha in an Oriental restaurant, where she met Michael and transitioned to a privileged life. Furthermore, these questions, albeit sexist, are necessary for someone like Grace, who has second intentions.
First Grace, then Mickey, read a storybook to Augie called “The Kitten and the Dragon” that mirrors the film’s narrative and can be a conversation starter for children grieving. It’s not said in the movie, but the two Japanese women are probably Buddhists, and Buddhism believes in life after death and non-attachment to mundane things. In Japan, besides having religious rituals, death is a conversation topic like any other when someone is grieving and movies are made about the subject, among them the Oscar-winning animation “The Boy and the Heron” (2023), from Studio Ghibli.
About her tumor, Grace says: “maybe my past lives are catching up with me”. Dr Tano (Aki Aleong) then answers that a soul’s journey for inner peace is not always about the soul itself, but involves the souls nearby. This resonates one of the best films from recent years, Celine Song’s “Past Lives” (2023). This film deals with another inescapable thing in life: love. In it, it’s said that souls must share eight thousand cosmic interactions in order to someone to get married to someone else. The belief of reincarnation once more plays a huge part in their beliefs.
The writer and director of this film, Nico Santucci, has a curious background: he’s an entrepreneur, founder of both Black Door Global — a real estate development and lifestyle company — and Capo’s — a mob-themed speakeasy and restaurant that serves Al Capone’s sauces from his family recipes. “Sarogeto” is his first foray into filmmaking.
I was given a religious leaflet on my last vacation that asked “would you make a trip without knowing the destination?”. Religions aside, this is a valid question: how can we live if we don’t think about death? Film can come to our aid when discussing grief, and “Sarogeto” is a valuable conversation starter about such a painful yet necessary subject.
