Sooner or later, many Japanese directors — be they internationally acclaimed auteurs or industry outsiders — end up making what Sion Sono (a noted auteur/outsider himself) once described to me as "a real Japanese film." To put it simply, this sort of film is aimed squarely at the domestic audience, especially folks looking for a good cry.

Naomi Kawase is a Cannes Film Festival regular whose work to date has often taken an autobiographical slant — in her 2003 film "Sharasoju" ("Shara"), she played a woman graphically giving birth, which foreshadowed her own real-life pregnancy. But her newest film, "An" (literally, "Red-Bean Jam"), which opened the Cannes Un Certain Regard sidebar this year, is one of these "real Japanese films."

Kawase again focuses on people at the margins of Japanese society and investigates their place in the natural order, as she did in her 2007 Cannes Jury Prize winner "Mogari no Mori" ("The Mourning Forest"). But she has based "An" on Durian Sukegawa's novel of the same title, instead of writing — as she has always done in the past — an original script. Also, she shot the film in Tokyo, which is another first for the director, who has set many of her films in her native Nara Prefecture.