Tokyo Sonata

The first time I went to the Sydney Film Festival was in 1998. I saw an awesome Japanese horror film called Cure, about an amnesiac hypnotist who (almost accidentally, it seems) turns random strangers he meets into programmed killers. I voted for this as the best film on some voting slip. The audience disagreed, instead opting for the French lovey-dovery of Marius Et Jeanette.

Anyway, Cure was directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, whose Tokyo Sonata is playing in the festival's competition strand this year, and which I saw at the State this evening. What was even cooler was that the director was there, and to be in the room with the creator of Cure made me happy.

Tokyo Sonata could broadly be described as a portrait of a dysfunctional family in the title city. The businessman father loses his job, hides the fact, and fails to connect with either his would-be itinerant older son, or the younger one who's actually a musical prodigy, yet whom dad has forbidden to play the piano. Amidst all this, the mother's looking pretty good, but she's kind of stuck in the loop made up by the rest of them.

Kurosawa's style is apparent anew from shot one. His held perspectives, long takes and deliberately dreamy rhythms, and the natural performances he elicits from all his actors, work together to impart a distinct feel. My friend commented that the film was perhaps too dreamy to have much impact at the times when you'd expect it to, for instance when the dad wallops his son, and I suppose I broadly agree with him. What can assuredly be said about Tokyo Sonata is that you can't predict what's going to happen in it at any point, no matter how slow things seem to be moving. The final shot (one long take) is also quite moving. A good film, and definitely not one suffering from any kind of overstatement.