Genre: Drama
Starring: Teruyuki Kagawa, Kyoko Koizumi, Yu Koyanagi, Kai Inowaki, Haruka Igawa, Kanji Tsuda
Release year: 2008
Language: Japanese
Subtitle: English
SYNOPSIS:
TOKYO SONATA is a portrait of a seemingly ordinary Japanese family. The father who abruptly loses his job conceals the truth from his family; the eldest son in college hardly returns home; the youngest son furtively takes piano lessons without telling his parents; and the mother, who knows deep down that her role is to keep the family together, cannot find the will to do so. From the exterior, all is normal and the same. But somehow, a single, unforeseeable chasm has appeared within the family, only to spread ever so quietly and quickly to disintegrate them.
RATING: ?/10
REVIEW:
Kurosawa’s films have always had a sort of existential edge to them, a sort of concern with the ennui that grips society in general and the Japanese in particular. In Bright Future he explicitly tackled this issue in the younger generation, exploring the aimlessness and lack of purpose that grips so many in their twenties who have simply lost faith or interest in the lifestyle that their parents pursued and idealized before them. In Tokyo Sonata he does the exact same thing but instead of characters in their twenties he instead looks at the issue from the perspective of fully grown adults who have spent their lives serving a sort of social ideal only to find themselves failed, abandoned and forgotten by it. How do you respond when you have lived your entire life believing that making certain choices, living a certain way, will lead to certain desired ends only to arrive in your forties or fifties and discover that you were wrong?
A quiet and subtle film Tokyo Sonata is unlikely to find much of an audience outside of the festival circuit simply because nobody out there will know how to sell a movie about an unemployed fifty (or so) year old man, which is a shame because this is an elegant, insightful piece of work that stands among the best films he has made throughout his career. For my own selfish ends I hope that Kurosawa hasn’t left his genre roots permanently but this is a much needed change of pace for a man whose skills clearly run wider than the confines of the film that built his name.
Source: twitchfilm
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