For about half the running time of “Tokyo Sonata,” you might conclude that this is a typically Japanese study of a family unit, a graceful, elegantly composed look into a difficult life situation.
Then director Kiyoshi Kurosawa says: not exactly.
Kurosawa, whose best-known works are his uncannily disturbing horror films, such as “Cure” and “Pulse,” is dishing up a look at the times we live in, and what he sees is sad.
An ordinary salaryman (Teruyuki Kagawa) is laid off from his white-collar job, a victim of outsourcing. He does not tell his wife (Kyoko Koizumi), however, and still leaves the house every morning. Sometimes he looks for work, sometimes he wanders around.
His oldest son wants to join the military and serve in Iraq; his younger son wants to play piano, and is willing to lie and steal in order to pay for lessons.
As a survey of dicey economic times in today’s Japan, these early reels are effective and haunting. But Kurosawa is not a kitchen-sink chronicler of current affairs, and very subtly the film begins to go off the rails, as realism gives way to more unusual events.
No need to detail those twists; some of them are violent, some completely left-field, and some wonderful. In the case of the father, he must enact the peculiar dance of the disempowered, exerting his blustery aggressiveness within his domestic sphere, before he can come out the other side.
Kurosawa’s conclusion is musical, bordering on the trite but transformed by this director’s matter-of-fact approach to the sequence. As a director, he sneaks up on you; the scenes in his movies don’t detonate right away, they tick-tick-tick for a while.
The unease we feel during a curious dinner scene, when the unemployed salaryman visits a friend, will be explained later. A back window, located near a too-close train line, is used for a curious early sequence and then returns later during a robbery.
It doesn’t knock you out, but “Tokyo Sonata” is an assured, impressive film. And its sense of economic panic cracking through a civilized surface surely has ramifications beyond the Japanese setting, in these uncertain days.
“Tokyo Sonata”
Fascinating study by director Kiyoshi Kurosawa, about the unraveling of a family unit after the father, a white-collar salaryman, is laid off. At first calm and elegant, the movie sneaks up on you until it guides you right off the rails. (In Japanese, with English subtitles.)
Rated: PG-13 rating is for subject matter.
Showing: Northwest Film Forum
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