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Tokyo Sonata [Blu-ray]

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Tokyo Sonata (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2008)

Kiyoshi Kurosawa branded himself one of the great new breed of Japanese filmmakers in the mid-nineties with Cure and Charisma, two of the best Japanese film of the last half of the last century. After spending some time directing horror films, which seems almost obligatory for Japanese directors these days (with a quick break in 2003 for the wonderful Bright Future), he has shown that he's still capable of directing some of modern Japan's best films with Tokyo Sonata.

Ryuhei Sasaki (Hero's Teruyuki Kagawi), unsatisfied with the direction his company is taking, walks out on his position as the head of the administration department. While this is initially a liberating thing, he quickly runs into the big question: how's he going to tell his wife Megumi (Kyoko Koizumi, recently of Adrift in Tokyo)? This is not an uncommon question for salarymen who have quit, or lost, their jobs in Tokyo, it seems; the park where day laborers go to pick up work is chock full of guys in three-piece suits just like Sasaki. In fact, one day he meets an old school chum of his, Kurosu (The Great Yokai War's Kanji Tsuda, who also acts opposite Kagawi in the 20th Century Boys film series), in the food line. The two of them make a pact to help the other hide their unemployment from their families, but Sasaki quickly learns the truth of the matter--everyone knows Kurosu is unemployed except his wife. Sasaki fears the same may be true of his two sons, Takashi (Clearness' Yu Koyanagi) and Kenji (Inowaki Kai in his first screen appearance), but it seems his family is too busy falling apart to notice. Takashi is convinced his destiny lies with joining the American military, while Kenji is obsessed with the idea of learning to play the piano, a discipline his father strictly forbids (one of the film's few shortcomings is that the why of this is not clear; I inferred he thinks it's a girly thing to do, but I'm not entirely sure). With all the pieces in place, Kurosawa simply lets them fall where they may.

The reasons I spent my time watching this thinking about Yasujiro Ozu's great Tokyo Story have more substance to them than the obvious title parallel, but I'm not sure how easy it's going to be to put them into words. It's not so much a style or a feel as it is an emotion; that same feeling of resolution in the face of existential despair, or even terror. There are other, more obvious parallels, such as the caliber of the actors (watch for Inowaki Kai, for if his performance here can be used as a benchmark, he's the next Tadanobu Asano) and Kurosawa's finely-detailed direction, but whereas Ozu was interested in telling a straightforward, simple story, Kurosawa can never resist taking things out to their logical, and often glorious, conclusion. If you've seen any of Kurosawa's movies, you'll know that things tend to go nuts about two-thirds of the way through the film. Tokyo Sonata is no exception to the rule, as everyone involved in this drama pretty much snaps (save Takashi, but that's another story). Everything blows up, and in another of those touches that make Kurosawa such an amazing director, the events at the end of the movie are in no way ambiguous; the ambiguity arises from the viewer trying to decide whether it's a happy ending or not. That's pretty amazing.

Tokyo Sonata cements Kurosawa's place at the top of the heap, assuming such a thing was still necessary. Very few Japanese directors are capable of this level of work, especially on as consistent a basis as Kurosawa delivers. And trust me, you'll ever see anything that manages to be both this ludicrous and yet this noble at the same time. This is a movie that will stay with you a long, long time after you pop the DVD out--or, if you're lucky enough to manage it, after you leave the cinema. One of the first truly great movies of the new millennium. **** ½

Kiyoshi Kurosawa's latest film speaks directly to contemporary issues, that are relevant both in Japan and around the world: the economic crisis and corporate downsizing, a growing identity crisis within the so-called "nuclear family," increasing uncertainty regarding gender roles, and political uncertainties in the wake of terrorist scares and the wars in the Middle East. When a large corporation decides to ship most of its jobs oversees to China with its less expensive labor force, a middle manager is left without a job and without a clue how he can break it to his wife without losing face. So he decides not to tell her. It turns out he's not alone. As he discovers, there are hordes of out-of-work businessmen who also couldn't break it to their wives and pretend to go to work but wind up wandering parks and loitering daily in lounges, until they can safely return home without arousing suspicion. This is an alternately heartbreaking, horrific and funny film about the slow unravelling of a family, that remains together only to maintain appearances, and raises the question whether there is any possibility of starting over, of becoming a new person, of choosing for oneself rather than living by habit and to keep up appearances, and especially if such a thing is possible in an increasingly uncertain political and economic climate.

K. Kurosawa (no relation to Akira) is best known for his horror-themed films, and is responsible for some of the very best of the so-called "J-horror" films (Cure, Pulse, Retribution). His real interest, even in those films, seems to be more with what we think of as ordinary life, the unsettling feeling that arises when the ordinary breaks down due to social and personal changes, when the everyday no longer makes sense. Even in his horror films the most unsettling moments tend not to be those when the supernatural monster (ghost, apparition, serial killer) appears, but when a protagonist begins to suspect his own guilt or complicity with the horror, and after that the ordinary routines are no longer a refuge or comfort. Home becomes unwelcoming and uncanny. Friends and loved ones become strangers. Another thing about Kurosawa is that while he is able to create real and palpable dread, and genuine fear, he is also a master of creating the uncomfortable laugh that arises when something utterly unexpected occurs. As scary as some of his horror films are, they are also often very funny, but it is the humor of the absurd and the subtle surreal, akin to the humor in works by Bunuel but not quite so blunt, rather than the humor of the silly. He also seems to delight in the "red herring" -- elements that seem to mark a turning point but end up amounting to nothing -- as here when Ryuhei (the father) finds a large packet of money that might turn his life around but then spends the night in a roadside ditch.

What Kurosawa does with horror (and other related genre) films is to deliver what is expected from the genre (scares, thrills, etc.) but in unexpected ways. He takes the cliches (as in Pulse when the heroines find themselves compelled against all reason to go into the house where the horror resides) and turns them on their heads, showing that they are absurd and not at all inevitble but finding some way to make them fit. Here he takes the "family crisis drama" and delivers the goods, exactly the kinds of life's lessons and reconciliations you'd expect, but by a route that no one could predict and in part this is because he channels the emotional elements of that drama in ways that draw upon his mastery of the unsettling and absurd. This film, in which there are no explicitly supernatural or horrific elements (unless you count the downsized middle managers who wander the back allies and parks of Tokyo like zombies in suits, in their efforts to keep up appearances), is as laugh-out-loud funny and at times as creepy as any of his other films, but there is a greater warmth here, a depth of humanism and sympathy for the lost individuals at the heart of the story that I haven't felt as strongly in his other works. It is, probably, his most touching film, and possibly the most technically brilliant. Stylistically at moments and thematically throughout, the film bears comparison to Ozu and especially to his own Tokyo Story that also explored generational gaps and the effects of economic change on the structure of the family. Much of the film, especially the parts takes place in the Sasaki home, is shot in a series of simple compositions, capturing household rituals through windows and door frames. These mostly static shots are complemented by much more rough, handheld point of view shots that hesitate and stumble uncertaintly, as if their bearers did not know where to look and no longer recognize what they are looking at.

`Tokyo Sonata' is a very understated, yet strangely moving film.

It is gentle and slightly sad and follows a Japanese family, which includes an undervalued wife, a proud husband who loses his job but goes out each day as if he still has one and hides it from family and a son who is desperate to lean piano despite having to secretly use his lunch money to pay for lessons.

In a very bare and pared back style you experience their dreams and failures and the inner turmoil behind their everyday lives. In the main this film has no obvious musical soundtrack to augment the scenes which makes it feel more stark and sad somehow. This contrasts powerfully with the few scenes with piano playing which make these scenes soar and resonate that much more strongly than they normally would.

Everyone acts extremely well and the direction draws out every detail and nuance in the various scenes. Japanese film are noted for their attention to detail and the small touches that show a deeper meaning and this film is no exception.

I was unsure what to expect from this film and whilst it is slow paced and doesn't spell out every emotion or feeling (like many American films tend to do) this is immensely satisfying and leaves you feeling uplifted and calm at the same time. If you are fond of world cinema or Japanese films in general then you really must check this out at some point.

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I am a lover of Japanese cinema new and old, and lately we have seen a handful of really good modern films being brought to the states. This is a richly told story of a very interesting family that appears wholesome and normal on the outside but is rather... interesting when they are together.

The acting is all very good, top notch Japanese acting with very expressive styles.

Basically the story is one of starting over. All of the characters have something that they would like to 'do over' and in a way they begin the steps towards accomplishing that goal. There are some funny moments, some sad moments, but all in all the film has a message of hope and finding happiness in being together, despite the strife and turmoil of everyday life.

It's not the easiest movie to get into, but it rewards the patient viewer. It is also one of the rare modern Japanese films that lends itself to watching more than once. Fantastic film, and one of the best Japanese family dramas in recent years.

Tokyo Sonata is about a family going through a crisis. Each of the members are slowly unraveling and have to confront secrets or make tough decisions. The husband has just lost his job and is too ashamed to tell his wife, the wife is goinf through a crisis of her own, the eldest son is contemplating joining the military but afraid to tell his parents and the youngest son is a musical prodigy but afraid to ask his parents to send him to a school for the musically gifted. I liked the movie. 4 stars. 12/7/10

After a retreat to the atmospheric and spectral Loft and Retribution that reinforce Kiyoshi Kurosawa's reputation as a horror filmmaker, Tokyo Sonata continues in the vein of his idiosyncratically personal (and arguably, more interesting), yet equally unsettling films that began with Bright Future. As the film begins, the family patriarch, middle-aged senior administrative manager, Ryuhei (Teruyuki Kagawa) has been notified that the company has outsourced his job to China (where his salary would pay for three language-fluent office workers) and, without portable skills that could be applied to another department, will be immediately laid off from work. Reluctant to tell his family for fear of undermining his authority, Ryuhei continues the pretext of leaving for work with his briefcase each morning, spending his days alternately lining up at a job placement office and a charity lunch service on the park. Meanwhile, his stay-at-home wife, Megumi (Kyoko Koizumi), has begun to feel trapped in her unappreciated role of keeping the household together, her newly obtained driver's license symbolizing her liberated, if guilty step away from the familiar routines of domestic life (a search for identity implied by her intended use of the license as a form of identification). Their university-aged son, Takashi (Yu Koyanagi) is similarly adrift in his part-time job distributing flyers on the streets, and sees a provision for foreigners enlisting in the U.S. military as a means of asserting his independence. Younger son, Kenji (Kai Inowaki), having been caught passing a manga book in the classroom, stages his own minor rebellion: exposing the teacher's own penchant for reading erotic themed manga on the train, and subsequently, taking piano lessons against his father's objection. Inspired by the four-movement structure of a sonata, Tokyo Sonata is a humorous and incisive modernist (and globalist) evocation of the shomin-geki salaryman picture popularized by Yasujiro Ozu, chronicling the increasingly divergent lives of the Sasaki family who, like the families in Ozu's cinema are on the verge of disintegration. However, while both filmmakers reflect the inevitability of this dissolution, Kurosawa paradoxically sees the rupture as a necessary trauma towards rebuilding - a sense of renewal that is reflected in the parting image of the family leaving the stage, figuratively stepping away from the performance to forge their own path in the uncertain darkness.

"Tokyo Sonata" is an introverted family drama directed and co-written by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who is best known for horror flicks. So it is perhaps surprising that he approaches this material with such realism and sensitivity. Mr. Sasaki (Teruyuki Kagawa) is at loose ends when he is laid off from his corporate job in administration, a result of downsizing. He doesn't tell his wife (Kyoko Koizumi) while he looks for another job, eats free lunches in the park, and commiserates with an old friend (Kanji Tsuda) who is in a similar situation. Mr. Sasaki dresses for work every day and comes home for dinner, as usual, but his growing anger and helplessness find an outlet in increasingly inflexible behavior toward his grown son Takashi (Yu Koyanagi) and young son Kenji (Kai Inowaki).

Mr. Sasaki's actions and emotions drive the plot, but Mrs. Sasaki is no less significant. Her role is passive for most of the film, as she senses that something is wrong with her husband and sons but doesn't know what. Life is acting upon her, but she can't get a clear picture of it. The audience's experiences are more aligned with her emotions until the film's third act, I think, even though we have a better understanding of what's happening than she does. Kyoko Koizumi pulls the audience in, though Teruyuki Kagawa and young Kai Inowaki also do an impressive job. The third act is improbable and contrived before it rebounds at the very end, but, excepting those parts, "Tokyo Sonata" presents a thoughtful, understated picture of a modern Japanese family adapting to changing expectations in a stagnant economy.

The DVD (E1 Entertainment 2010): Bonus features include a theatrical trailer (2 min) and 4 featurettes. The "Making Of Documentary" (1 hour) is too long but interviews the director and cast about the performances, characters, and themes, concluding with some segments on technical elements. There is a "Q&A" with the director and 4 cast members that is more about the film's reception than the film itself. "Premiere" (15 min) is the introduction given by director and cast at the film's premiere. "DVD Discussion" (8 min) interviews the director and Mr. Kagawa and Ms. Koizumi about their views of the film and favorite scenes. This serves as a mini-commentary on the film, as there is no feature commentary. Bonus features are in Japanese with English subtitles. The film is Japanese with optional English subtitles.

I wanted to like this film more than I did. For anyone who has been downsized, let go, fired, quit a job - while at the same time supporting a family - this film has considerable emotional and dramatic potential. In a culture where the "authority" of the breadwinner is maybe more critical than elsewhere, this theme provides the thread for most of the film. It accounts for why the husband keeps his family from knowing that he's lost his job, why his wife does not confront him when she finds out, and why he physically abuses his younger son who challenges his judgment. But the film takes a long time to set this all up, while never really exploring it very deeply. The tension in the story is about his keeping his job loss from his family.

Besides a humiliatingly comic job interview and the decision of the man's older son to enlist in the American military, what happens in the first hour of the film is not uninteresting, but fairly predictable. He meets an old out-of-work schoolmate whose ruse is even more exaggerated and inventively complex, though we do not sense until it happens that he's riding the ragged edge of disaster. Instead of exploring the implications of this family crisis, Kurosawa punctuates the second hour of the film with unexpected turns: a home invasion and abduction, abrupt shifts in time, an asthmatic runaway boy being pursued by several adults, plus other discoveries and revelations. After a night of adventures, the family is reunited around the breakfast table - as if it had all been a bad dream from which they've awakened and learned, like Dorothy in "The Wizard of Oz," that there's no place like home.

What Kurosawa seems to be saying at the end is that the rituals of family life (stultifying and unfeeling though they may be, especially as compared to Ozu's families) are what keep these people intact as individuals. The film ends with the soothingly slow playing of Debussy's "Claire de lune," which brings together three of the four members of the family in yet another ritual - public this time - a piano competition before a respectfully silent audience and panel of judges. What to make of this denouement? Depends on what you've made of the preceding two hours, and that seems to be the point.

This is only the second Kurosawa film I have seen, and please don't confuse this name with the great Akira Kurosawa, whose films are in a different world. But the film I saw was Bright Future, about these poisoned jellyfish, and I hated that strange movie.

If you don't know the work of Kiyoshi Kurosawa, be prepared for some strangeness, unanswered questions, and just plain bizarre happenings. However, this film is about the already-dysfunctional family that bears the brunt of the father's sudden downsizing from the corporate world. So, consequently, an already-dysfunctional and basically screwed up family manages til they all crash and burn. There are some far-fetched events, some unexplained events, and some bizarre too.

This is a lengthy movie, and at the beginning it seems normal, laid-back story as the father of a middle-class family got downsized at his corporation. He hides this information from his wife, teenage son, and young son. His wife finally discovers that he is in a food line, and nothing ever gets discussed. The later half of the movie, things starts unraveling, as this unemployed lifestyle and deception creates new hardships. The dramatic action is quick, unexplained, little far fetched, so pay attention. Kenji, the young son is on the way to being a gifted pianist, and somehow this light in the family and the son serving in the U.S. military provides some normalcy and balance to the bizarre family.

This is a type of film that as watching it, creates a lot of silly conversation between viewers, and at times questioning and ridiculing the scenes.

Kurosawa is a great filmmaker; if you like his style and can prepare yourself for the strange. Included are some features on making of the film, plus other features that tend to go rather long, praising the actors and the film. ...Rizzo

The previous reviews did an exemplary job of summarizing the film, so I'll be brief and simply say that while the first half of the film was stunning -- a cinematic left hook to the bland sterility of post-modern culture -- I found that the movie fell into the same cliché-ridden traps and seemingly mandatory scenes that plague so much of Japanese cinema: the boob-grab scene, the sexual assault scene in which the female invariably comes to enjoy things, the junior-is-a-prodigy character, and the ending scene whereby life may not be all peaches 'n cream but at least it's livable. I had great, great hopes for this film -- from the time I first read its review in the New York Times until it was at last available for purchase -- but the best I can give it is a weak 3 stars. It SHOULD have been a 5-star film -- the potential was there and the first half of the movie was outstanding, but I can't overlook the rest of it. I wish that I could, but I can't.