Tokyo Sonata

City Paper Grade: A-

by Shaun Brady

ATTENTION: Takashi (Yu Koyanagi) enlists in the American military in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Tokyo Sonata. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION

[City Paper Grade:  A- ]

Domestic drama is not a turn that one would expect from Kiyoshi Kurosawa, whose career up to now has largely been spent on disquieting horror films. But despite the melodramatic storyline, Kurosawa leaves his sense of pervading unease intact, creating an off-center melodrama that at times approximates David Lynch remaking Ozu. Teruyuki Kagawa plays anonymous salaryman Ryuhei, who gets downsized in the film's opening minutes when his position is outsourced to China. Like the protagonist of Laurent Cantet's Time Out, he conceals this fact from his family, instead wandering through a surprisingly well-populated nether-Tokyo all day. Where Cantet dealt in bleak interior lives, Kurosawa is more concerned with a tense inter-family power struggle, which reflects a society in which authority rests precariously on appearances. As he is increasingly debased in the outside world, Ryuhei exercises his authority at home in increasingly arbitrary and violent fashion, but he is unquestioned by long-suffering wife Megumi (Kyoko Koizumi) until the truth is spoken aloud. With that revelation comes a shift not only in his familial importance but in his narrative focus, which suddenly tilts toward Megumi and her unexpected window of freedom. Meanwhile, the couple's younger son becomes a schoolyard folk hero when he stands up to his teacher and incites a classroom rebellion, while their mostly absent teenage son, Takashi, decides to enlist in the American military (the film is set in an any-day-now future where a Middle Eastern war requires recruits from U.S. allies). Kurosawa follows his tale's unexpected twists smoothly, easing the impact of sudden shocks without lessening their resonance. In less nuanced hands the ending, which hinges on the second child's surreptitious piano lessons, might come across as trite redemption; but Kurosawa has played such a queasy undercurrent throughout his piece that it continues to ring ambiguously in the ears even as his themes resolve beautifully.