Tokyo Sonata

Tokyo Sonata is Kiyoshi Kurosawa's latest film.  Unlike most of his earlier work, this film is a more traditional piece that examines a dysfunctional family crumbling under pressure, although it still continues to explore themes of isolation and loneliness.

Ryuhei Sasaki (Teruyuki Kagawa) has been downsized due to outsourcing at work.  He's unable to admit it to his family; he is so repressed and uptight that he has a hard time admitting it to himself. He spends his days queuing at the job center and standing in line for free food at the porridge kitchen, pretending to have been at work when he gets home.

Things aren't great at home either, although they maintain a facade of normalcy. Ryuhei's wife Megumi (Kyoko Koizumi) holds the place together, putting a bright face on things while she cooks. Eldest son Takashi (Yu Koyanagi) is hardly ever home, and younger son Kenji (Kai Inowaki) is completely alienated from his father. When he asks for piano lessons, his father tells him no. Kenji begins to scheme of a way to use his lunch money to pay for piano lessons on his own. Meanwhile, Takashi is hatching a plan to join the American military to fight in Iraq.

Ryuhei meets old friend Kurosu (Kanji Tsuda) in the same situation who has turned his joblessness into a job; he's programmed his phone to call him repeatedly during the day to give the illusion someone's working with him.  He even invites Ryuhei home to dinner to help him fool his wife into thinking they work together. It's funny stuff, but when Ryuhei discovers that they haven't been fooling Kurosu's daughter at all and she gives him a pitying look before she heads off to bed, you can practically feel his heart break.

Megumi spots Ryuhei in line for free porridge but says nothing. Later on at home she asks for a help up from the couch where she is laying, but he ignores her and goes in the other room. Megumi looks up and wonders if anyone will help her up. And for just a minute her facade cracks and you can see how alone she feels. It's these little moments, in between the words, where Tokyo Sonata is excellent. At least at first.

The mix of bittersweet humor, sadness, and dysfunction fades into a sort of funk partway through the movie. The dysfunctional family film has been done many times before, and while Kurosawa handles the first half with a brilliant touch that makes it seem both real, touching, and funny, it just doesn't maintain that level of quality for the whole movie.

While he does throw in a rather unexpected (and while interesting, I'd say overly long) chance event that proves to be the touchpoint for Megumi, the resolution of the film feels almost inevitable.

Despite my opinion that the end of the film doesn't live up to the brilliance of the beginning, the acting from everyone involved is top-notch and it's a beautiful and interesting movie that deserves a look from people outside of film festivals and Japan. There's a lot here that dysfunctional families from any country can relate to.