We meet the characters in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's really well made 2009 Japanese film Tokyo Sonata as they hover very delicately over a precipice in life; the resulting drama born out of several frustrations and rather life changing events, as children grow up into young adults and middle aged men supposedly grow up into obsolete old age, captured wonderfully thanks largely to a sophisticated and level headed script complimented by some fabulous direction. The film will begin with a very harmonious glide over the rooms of a Toyko based home, the rain falling outside as everything lies still in this tranquil but largely colourless series of places of dwelling. When we finally get sight of flesh and blood, it's of a woman sitting on the floor beside a kitchen back-door, her actions of shutting the door to stop the water drifting in and making a mess then counteracted by her own opening of it back up again to prevent the prevention. Such an action is, at the be-all and end-all, somewhat destructive; a sabotaging of one's better being so as to allow for chaos, however minute in the form of rainwater blowing in and saturating the general area, to unfold and consume the area quite clearly on show. As Kurosawa's film rolls on, we begin to realise anger; frustration and destructive natures play an awfully large part in the lives of the family whom lives in the house, but with stakes and well being greatly raised above that of a wet floor.
The film is ultimately about the family members' forging of new identities, forced or otherwise, and advancing on in life whilst systematically having to deal with the fact precisely this is simultaneously happening to each of those within the unit around them. Kurosawa balances each of the respective plights efficiently and methodically, one character's decent into unemployment after so many years granted as much screen time as another's lust to learn the piano as another character announces his desire to branch off into the army following menial work here and there. His film borrows largely from the works of another Japanese director named Ozu but is neatly distilled, at least for the early part, through a filter of often black comedy that combines well with undercurrents of social realism reminiscent of a certain Mike Leigh. Tokyo Sonata zeroes in on the husband and father of the Sasaki family named Ryûhei (Kagawa); his two sons named Kenji (Inowaki) and Takashi (Koyanagi) as well as wife and the mother of these sons Megumi (Koizumi), each of them here captured as going through a respective transitional phase as several stages of the bounding forward in one's life occurs at once to many of them.
The catalyst appears to be the firing of Ryûhei from his steady office job and inability to confirm to his home unit this news, his employers stating that never again will Ryûhei be able to work under the same circumstances as he did before nor in a similar job; that the modernising and expansion into territory which sees an influx of Chinese orientated territory has effectively rendered his contribution null and void. At home, the essence of both modernity, globalisation and the products of the modern age further-still seep into his life when his two sons cause such ripples. Kenji is a young boy on the cusp of leaving school before most probably moving into the working world; on the way home from school, and after the film has established he is unafraid to answer back to figures of authority – something which is key for later on, the film captures his gazing at a piano sitting in a teacher's living room as she instructs. On top of this, eldest son Takashi is sick of working as a leaflet distributor and tells his parents he is volunteering for a special, more specific role in the Armed Forces to do with aiding the Americans if needs be in The Middle East in an "aren't-we-all-happy-now-that-the-first-world-is-as-one" programme the product of globalisation.
Around Ryûhei, many men of his age are equally unemployed with one such individual an old school acquaintance whom he runs into; here suggesting an entire generation of men being phased out by modernity and globalisation with similar things happening at each of their companies as happened to Ryûhei. His disdain at both of his sons becoming preoccupied with items infused within a sufficiently contemporary ideal, namely the desire to pay for piano lessons and become more enthused in an item of culture rather than head directly into employment directly out of school; or to nominate oneself to aid another nation entirely in fighting a foreign war, is purely the sign of the changing times and how things are now different when compared to Ryûhei's childhood, symptomatically running with Ryûhei's own loss of a clear cut grasp on the modern world following his redundancy. Embedded at the core of all this is Megumi, a character whose own respective journey culminates, through one means or another, in her occupying a beached locale in which the raging sea and jagged rocks form a messy pattern on one half of the frame with flatter, more normalised terrain placed directly opposite, thus neatly capturing the extreme shifts in madness and confusion with the normality that plagues her life. Tokyo Sonata is rather deeply involving, the strands connecting together and staying rather impressively true to overall tone quite well, and I look forward to seeing more of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's work in the future.
The film is ultimately about the family members' forging of new identities, forced or otherwise, and advancing on in life whilst systematically having to deal with the fact precisely this is simultaneously happening to each of those within the unit around them. Kurosawa balances each of the respective plights efficiently and methodically, one character's decent into unemployment after so many years granted as much screen time as another's lust to learn the piano as another character announces his desire to branch off into the army following menial work here and there. His film borrows largely from the works of another Japanese director named Ozu but is neatly distilled, at least for the early part, through a filter of often black comedy that combines well with undercurrents of social realism reminiscent of a certain Mike Leigh. Tokyo Sonata zeroes in on the husband and father of the Sasaki family named Ryûhei (Kagawa); his two sons named Kenji (Inowaki) and Takashi (Koyanagi) as well as wife and the mother of these sons Megumi (Koizumi), each of them here captured as going through a respective transitional phase as several stages of the bounding forward in one's life occurs at once to many of them.
The catalyst appears to be the firing of Ryûhei from his steady office job and inability to confirm to his home unit this news, his employers stating that never again will Ryûhei be able to work under the same circumstances as he did before nor in a similar job; that the modernising and expansion into territory which sees an influx of Chinese orientated territory has effectively rendered his contribution null and void. At home, the essence of both modernity, globalisation and the products of the modern age further-still seep into his life when his two sons cause such ripples. Kenji is a young boy on the cusp of leaving school before most probably moving into the working world; on the way home from school, and after the film has established he is unafraid to answer back to figures of authority – something which is key for later on, the film captures his gazing at a piano sitting in a teacher's living room as she instructs. On top of this, eldest son Takashi is sick of working as a leaflet distributor and tells his parents he is volunteering for a special, more specific role in the Armed Forces to do with aiding the Americans if needs be in The Middle East in an "aren't-we-all-happy-now-that-the-first-world-is-as-one" programme the product of globalisation.
Around Ryûhei, many men of his age are equally unemployed with one such individual an old school acquaintance whom he runs into; here suggesting an entire generation of men being phased out by modernity and globalisation with similar things happening at each of their companies as happened to Ryûhei. His disdain at both of his sons becoming preoccupied with items infused within a sufficiently contemporary ideal, namely the desire to pay for piano lessons and become more enthused in an item of culture rather than head directly into employment directly out of school; or to nominate oneself to aid another nation entirely in fighting a foreign war, is purely the sign of the changing times and how things are now different when compared to Ryûhei's childhood, symptomatically running with Ryûhei's own loss of a clear cut grasp on the modern world following his redundancy. Embedded at the core of all this is Megumi, a character whose own respective journey culminates, through one means or another, in her occupying a beached locale in which the raging sea and jagged rocks form a messy pattern on one half of the frame with flatter, more normalised terrain placed directly opposite, thus neatly capturing the extreme shifts in madness and confusion with the normality that plagues her life. Tokyo Sonata is rather deeply involving, the strands connecting together and staying rather impressively true to overall tone quite well, and I look forward to seeing more of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's work in the future.