{"id":156,"date":"2009-04-03T21:51:38","date_gmt":"2009-04-04T02:51:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/?p=156"},"modified":"2021-08-26T09:55:11","modified_gmt":"2021-08-26T14:55:11","slug":"tokyo-sonata","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/2009\/04\/03\/tokyo-sonata\/","title":{"rendered":"Tokyo Sonata"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Wisconsin Film Festival always has had a stellar lineup of outstanding films from around the world. This year is no exception. Two of the films from the 2008 festival \u2013 Jos\u00e9<\/span> Luis Guer\u00ed<\/span>n\u2019s In the City of Sylvia<\/a><\/em> and Jia Zhang-ke\u2019s Still Life<\/em> \u2013 were among my favorites of last year. Carlos Reygadas\u2019s austere and Dreyer-inspired Silent Light<\/em> (Stellet Licht<\/em>), which is playing at this year\u2019s festival, was another, so I very much look forward to an opportunity to see it again. A Mexican film about a Mennonite community in which people speak Plautdietsch and wear cowboy hats, Silent Light<\/em> struck me as one of the weirdest films I\u2019ve seen in quite some time. Yet Kiyoshi Kurosawa\u2019s Tokyo Sonata<\/em>, which just played at the 2009 film festival, might challenge it for that distinction.<\/p>\n

Tokyo Sonata<\/em> begins like a typical art film \u2013 a family melodrama \u2013 but it slowly turns the genre on its head. During a storm, Ryuhei (Teruyuki Kagawa) loses his middle-management position at the Tanita Corporation through downsizing. Jobs are being shipped to China for economic reasons \u2013 sound familiar? \u2013 where three workers can be hired for the same salary as one Japanese employee. As might be expected given the culture, Ryuhei doesn\u2019t want to lose face at home. Dressed in a business suit and carrying a briefcase that seems an appendage to his body, he pretends to go to work each day, but actually looks for jobs and hangs out at the library and in the park with the other unemployed men.<\/p>\n

Ryuhei even meets a former high school chum named Kurosu (Kanji Tsuda), who at first fakes being a high-powered executive. He\u2019s programmed his cell phone to ring five times an hour \u2013 he claims it calms his nerves \u2013 to simulate still being in the business world. The two men realize the truth about each other when Kurosu\u2019s hunger forces him to head toward the free food line that\u2019s been set up for the homeless. Suspecting that his wife is growing mistrustful, he later invites Ryuhei to his house for dinner to play the role of a business colleague. Kurosu\u2019s worried wife asks Ryuhei to look after her husband once the ring of the cell phone interrupts dinner. Kurosu pretends it\u2019s a call from the company president. Returning to the table, he chastises Ryuhei for his lack of diligence on a work project.<\/p>\n

Ryuhei also comes home each day as if he\u2019s been at work, but his family life has become completely dysfunctional. There is little ostensible warmth between Ryuhei and his wife, Megumi (Kyoko Koizumi). At the overcrowded employment office, Ryuhei is offered menial positions instead of the administrative post he desires. When he does land a job interview at a corporation, he\u2019s asked what skills he can contribute to the new company. Ryuhei is so unprepared for the interview that he seems stumped by the question. He mentions being able to sing karaoke. Needless to say, the young interviewer berates him in almost as humiliating a fashion as Chad does to the intern, Keith, in Neil LaBute\u2019s In the Company of Men<\/a> <\/em>(1997). Kurosawa at least spares us by cutting the scene abruptly. Ryuhei explodes in the park afterwards, as Kurosu compares the two of them to a sinking ship. “The lifeboats are gone,” he tells Ryuehi \u2013 a remark that foreshadows the fate of Korosu and his wife later on. To survive, Ryuhei is forced to take a job in the cleaning crew at the local shopping mall.<\/p>\n

As might be expected, Ryuhei\u2019s younger son, Kenji (Kai Inowaki), already has started to act out. When he gets in trouble for passing manga during class at school, the teacher makes him stand in the back of the room. Kenji becomes angry that he\u2019s unfairly being singled out and retaliates by announcing that he\u2019s seen the male teacher reading porn manga on the train. One of Kenji\u2019s peers later congratulates him for fomenting a “revolution” that has caused the teacher to lose his authority over them. When Kenji apologizes, the teacher suggests an accommodation \u2013 he wants nothing to do with his student. Kenji also announces to his family during dinner that he wants to play piano. Most families would be thrilled, but the tyrannical Ryuhei rejects it as a whim. In a parallel to his father\u2019s duplicitous behavior, Kenji uses his lunch money to takes piano lessons with an attractive and recently divorced female teacher, Kaneko (Haruka Igawa), whom he has eyed previously on the way home from school.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile the older son, Takashi (Yu Koyanagi), whom the parents view as a “mess,” seeks to join the American army in order to create happiness through world peace. His family wants him to stay home. Against his father\u2019s wishes, Takashi goes off to war, but comes back suffering from post-traumatic stress. In Tom Quinn\u2019s The New Year Parade<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>(also playing at the festival), the family disintegrates under the strain of divorce, but here the family crumbles under the duress of staying together.<\/p>\n

In Tokyo Sonata<\/em>, we sense that there\u2019s something wrong with this picture, as evidenced by the trains that whisk by outside the window of the family\u2019s modest dwelling.\u00a0Megumi plays the faithful housewife, constrained by sexism and tradition as she welcomes the other family members home, cooks and cleans, and quietly endures. At one point, she extends her arms and asks Ryuhei to lift her off the sofa, but her plea goes unheard. As the shot focuses on her arms, she pleads, “Somebody, please pull me up.” Kurosawa cuts and then holds on a closeup of her face. Megumi discovers her husband\u2019s secret one day, but after he beats Kenji she finally confronts Ryuhei and defiantly tells him,\u00a0“Screw your authority.” When she later runs into Ryuhei, dressed in his red jumpsuit, at the mall, he runs off and the film flashes back three hours earlier in time. It\u2019s at this point \u2013 nearly two-thirds of the way through \u2013 that the film goes bonkers.<\/p>\n

Conventional dramatic films depend on believable character motivation, but once a masked thief (Koji Yakusho) tries to rob Megumi at knife-point in her home, these characters suddenly become capable of doing just about anything. As sirens blare outside, the thief takes off his ski mask by mistake, thereby revealing his identity. He then takes Megumi hostage in a stolen car. After the film loops back to the present \u2013\u00a0where she bumps into her husband at the mall \u2013 Megumi transforms into a verison of Patty Hearst. She tells the stunned thief who tries to let her go, “I\u2019ve come this far, I can\u2019t go home now.” The two of them drive to the ocean where Megumi wonders aloud whether she can start over \u2013 the same question Ryuhei also ponders as he lies in the gutter.<\/p>\n

The plot threads get nuttier and nuttier. The deranged thief at one point mistakes Megumi for God. In a spectacular moonlit wide-shot, the tide washes over Megumi as she lies on the shore. Meanwhile, Ryuhei gets hit by a car in a hit-and run-accident, leaving him in a heap on the side of the road. Kenji, whose bug-like eyes and mop of hair have made him look anything but the child prodigy his piano teacher claims him to be, gets finger-printed and thrown in jail as a “fare-cheater” for attempting\u00a0to sneak onto a bus. It\u2019s no wonder that the film\u2019s Australian screenwriter Max Mannix, who thought he was doing an Ozu-like film, is upset by Kurosawa\u2019s treatment of his original script. He told Edward Champion<\/a>: “The original screenplay that I wrote didn\u2019t ask the audience to trust me here and there, then suspend belief when it was convenient for me. The script I wrote was a consistent piece about what appeared to be an average family. An average family that could not communicate, love, or trust one another.”<\/p>\n

Yet what\u2019s truly mind-boggling here is that Kurosawa shifts the tone of this family melodrama with a totally straight face. That\u2019s what gives the film its utterly uncanny quality. Kurosawa shoots Tokyo Sonata<\/em> in wonderfully cluttered compositions. His cinematographer Akiko Ashizawa often lights the interior scenes with a mixture of warm oranges and cool greens and blues. In terms of color, some shots are divided exactly in half, or between foreground and background, or as a rectangles within a rectangle as a way of suggesting the internal contradictions within the family.<\/p>\n

In most films, we usually sense the film\u2019s ending, but this one appears to end multiple times \u2013 as if we\u2019re in a dream from which we can\u2019t seem to awaken. Throughout the film, I kept wondering about the film\u2019s title especially because there wasn\u2019t any evidence of Kenji\u2019s musical talent. His own father scoffs at the notion of Kenji being a prodigy, and thinks the teacher is praising him for purely monetary reasons. The question finally does get answered.<\/p>\n

As this country lurches toward increased unemployment \u2013 now over ten percent in seven states \u2013 a film like Kelly Reichardt\u2019s Wendy and Lucy<\/a><\/em> (2008) seems to be a social commentary on these bleak economic times. And it\u2019s not hard to read Kiyoshi Kurosawa\u2019s brilliant and eccentric head-scratcher as a film that resonates in the same sort of way. Tokyo Sonata<\/em> depicts the disastrous impact that losing a job can have not only on a person\u2019s identity, but also the rippling effect that it can have on one\u2019s entire family.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Wisconsin Film Festival always has had a stellar lineup of outstanding films from around the world. This year is no exception. Two of the films from the 2008 festival \u2013 Jos\u00e9 Luis Guer\u00edn\u2019s In the City of Sylvia andRead More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":160,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8,9,15],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=156"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4304,"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156\/revisions\/4304"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/160"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}