TIFF Review: TOKYO SONATA

The latest from hugely acclaimed Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa has been hailed as a major departure for the man behind existential horror gems such as Cure and Kairo (Pulse). And in most ways it is, Kurosawa seeming to have wrapped up the horror phase of his career with Sakebi (Retribution). Tokyo Sonata leaves the genre trappings behind entirely, operating instead as a low key family drama but if you leave the genre issue aside it is pure, one hundred percent recognizable Kurosawa and a sort of spiritual successor to Bright Future - a more mature, farther down the road of life look at the same issues of identity and purpose (or lack thereof) that drove his earlier hit film.

The Sasaki family is, in many ways the typical Japanese family. Father has a good job as a lead administrator for a major corporation. Mother stays home to take care of the children and keep an orderly house. Elder son seems to be drifting somewhat but is good natured and will surely sort himself out, younger son is preparing for his coming qualification exams. It’s a typical Japanese family unit living a seemingly ideal life until the day that Dad is unceremoniously downsized and dumped from his company.

Surprise? Anger? Depression? Dad experiences them all while carrying the contents of his desk out of the office where he was worked for years in a pair of paper bags, but what he mostly seems to feel is shame. Shame that prevents him from telling his wife or children that he is out of work, shame that gets him out of bed every morning to put on his suit and tie and pretend to be heading to the job he no longer has when he is really spending his days at an employment office being offered insultingly menial jobs for horrible pay and hanging out in the park and library with scores of similarly suited and tied downsized executives.

Perhaps it is that shame that leads to him to overcompensate by becoming overly controlling of his children. After complaining that his eldest son lacks discipline and focus Dad throws his child out of the house for saying he wants to join the US military – the first concrete plan he’s had. And when the younger son decides he’d like to learn to play the piano the answer is a blunt no for seemingly no reason other than the fact that Dad was able to say no.

But kids are kids, right? And just because your father won’t let you do what you want doesn’t mean that there aren’t other ways of doing it, such as using your lunch money to pay for lessons yourself and cutting classes in the afternoons to attend music lessons instead. It all comes out in the open of course, and the resulting explosion leaves the younger son unconscious at the bottom of the stairs and Mother wondering why the hell she’s still in this marriage at all.

Kurosawa’s films have always had a sort of existential edge to them, a sort of concern with the ennui that grips society in general and the Japanese in particular. In Bright Future he explicitly tackled this issue in the younger generation, exploring the aimlessness and lack of purpose that grips so many in their twenties who have simply lost faith or interest in the lifestyle that their parents pursued and idealized before them. In Tokyo Sonata he does the exact same thing but instead of characters in their twenties he instead looks at the issue from the perspective of fully grown adults who have spent their lives serving a sort of social ideal only to find themselves failed, abandoned and forgotten by it. How do you respond when you have lived your entire life believing that making certain choices, living a certain way, will lead to certain desired ends only to arrive in your forties or fifties and discover that you were wrong?

A quiet and subtle film Tokyo Sonata is unlikely to find much of an audience outside of the festival circuit simply because nobody out there will know how to sell a movie about an unemployed fifty (or so) year old man, which is a shame because this is an elegant, insightful piece of work that stands among the best films he has made throughout his career. For my own selfish ends I hope that Kurosawa hasn’t left his genre roots permanently but this is a much needed change of pace for a man whose skills clearly run wider than the confines of the film that built his name.