Tokyo Sonata

More famous for his work in the thriller and horror genres, Tokyo Sonata sees Japanese filmmaker Kiyoshi Kurosawa take a radical departure into family drama. Here, he leaves behind his familiar style and focuses more tightly on the more humdrum and everyday – although there is a touch of horror to the escalating and inevitable chain of events at the film’s centre. Focusing on how redundancy can affect a family, the film is just as relevant now as upon its cinematic release – when it won an audience award at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival.

Loyal company man Ryuhei (Teruyuki Kagawa) loses his job thanks largely to a management shake-up which he was partly responsible for. Too ashamed to admit the truth to his wife, Ryuhei instead stages an elaborate charade designed to fool her into believing nothing has changed. Each day he dresses for the office, leaves home and spends hours applying for jobs he’s unlikely to get.

Despite his pretence, wife Megumi (Kyoko Koizumu) soon realises the truth. Rather than embarrassing her husband with this knowledge, however, she feigns ignorance in an attempt to preserve Ryuhei’s pride. Their sons, meanwhile, shoulder burdens of their own: Takashi (Yu Koyanagi) is also struggling to find work and applies to become an international volunteer for the US military – an implied challenge to his father’s patriarchal role as chief provider. And their younger son, Kenji (Inowaki Kai), leads a similar double life to that of his father – sneaking out to buy piano lessons with his lunch money despite having been strictly forbidden not to do so…

Tokyo Sonata is an interesting, if not entirely successful film. Where Kurosawa has succeeded is in the creation of the world in which the film is set. It’s a bleak and depressing place filled with corrugated iron, trains roaring past just a little too close for comfort, and suffused in dull grey. This visual style extends to the filming of shots which are usually framed geometrically – and often filmed through angular objects like banisters and bookcases. It’s oppressive and depressing – exactly the background required for the narrative.

At the centre of this dull world is Ryuhei: a thoroughly strange character. His plight is hard to comprehend – he seems unemployable after losing his job despite having held a position with some prestige. Perhaps he’s been institutionalised after years of service for the same firm – a little more exposition would be welcome.
His unravelling is easier to understand. Despite being a meek and mild character in public, Ryuhei is a strongly proud and patriarchal figure at home. Admitting how far he’s fallen never seems like an option for him – but this creates a strangely paradoxical figure. The first problem with the character is that he’s almost entirely unsympathetic. He does very little to win over the audience – and in some violent outbursts against his own family, he’s very dislikeable. Played against his semi-comical attempts at hiding his redundancy, this almost creates two characters. This isn’t a problem in itself – hundreds of movies have toyed with such ideas over the years – but here it jars thanks to the wildly different styles employed in depicting the separate facets of his life.

Ryuhei’s family life is depicted in very stark terms: quiet, contemplative and with occasional flashes of violence, there is little humour or warmth to these scenes at all. In direct contrast, scenes of Ryuhei queuing for food at the local soup kitchen, befriending fellow self-deceiving job-seekers and scrubbing toilets are injected with a kind of knockabout, light-hearted humour which doesn’t gel well with the grim domesticity on show.

The more humorous scenes are certainly the film’s strongest. Kenji’s porn-based revelation about his unreasonable teacher is laugh-out-loud funny and a wonderfully cringe worthy scene which takes place over dinner at a colleague’s house almost needs to be watched between your fingers. Better still is a job interview in which Ryuhei names his most employable skill as karaoke – it’s a scene which recalls Ricky Gervais’ The Office.

A pretty convoluted subplot soon evolves which distracts entirely from the real domestic drama, as Megumi is kidnapped by a would-be burglar. It’s a charismatic performance from Koji Yakusho – but whether these scenes even belong in this film is highly questionable. And therein lies the problem with Tokyo Sonata – it’s a film which has no clear sense of identity. It’s not taut or tight enough to be a domestic drama, not funny enough to be slapstick, and not dark enough to be black comedy. Perhaps the latter would have been best suited to a man of Kurosawa’s talents, but instead, he’s fallen between several stools.

Tokyo Sonata has received largely positive notices, but that is perhaps largely due to the topicality of its central themes. Set against the background of the current economic climate, it’s easy to see how the story has spoken to reviewers and resonated with audiences. But taking a step back and looking objectively, it’s just not a very good film. A director more experienced in this field might have taken the bare bones and produced something magnificent, but Kurosawa’s first attempt in this area betrays his lack of experience in this genre.