Tokyo Sonata

Kiyoshi Kurosawa
2008

After earning a reputation as one of J-Horror's top directors with a steady output of pictures ranging from fair to excellent (most notably "Cure" (1997) and "Pulse" (2001)), Kurosawa blew my mind with the less genre-oriented but no less fantastic "Bright Future" in 2003. Though he would return to horror, "Bright Future" was a promising example of what Kurosawa could do outside generic confines. "Tokyo Sonata" is the most straightforward drama the director has made since his rise in popularity, and despite the change in subject matter, it's all Kurosawa. The Sasaki family is an apple with a rotten core. Patriarch Ryuhei avoids telling his family that he's recently lost his job, housewife Megumi coasts through her days on loveless autopilot, eldest son Takashi works crap jobs and looks for an out, while Kenji, the innocent youngest, simply tries to navigate an oppressive home/school atmosphere. The family's inevitable disintegration is monitored with a combined tone of sincere honesty and wink-and-smile irony. This duality is separated and expressed on a character by character basis: Ryuhei experiences an increasingly failed city with heaps of humiliation and comic injustices thrown his way. Unfortunately the inevitable outbursts caused by Ryuhei's suppressed rage makes him a far less sympathetic or even understandable character than Kurosawa would like, inevitably leading to a less appetizing redemption. Megumi and Takashi suffer society's decline with a profound melancholy. Takashi makes the alien proposal of joining the American military, and Megumi proves to be an all too-willing hostage for a knife wielding home invader. Kurosawa's trademark style of filming shocking or violent scenes with minimal cuts and a distant camera remains intact, as does his talent for entropic storytelling, but "Tokyo Sonata" remains rather rough around the edges. At times the dark humor seems to dip uncomfortably into sadism, yet there are plenty of other instances where Kurosawa doesn't go nearly far enough, leaving the viewer with an end that seems hasty and incomplete. The picture is a lesson in maturity for an already established director - I'd love to see what he's doing three pictures from now.