Tokyo Sonata
(Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
Teruyuki Kagawa, Kyoko Koizumi, Yu Koyanagi, Kai Inowaki, Haruka Igawa.
Running time: 119 minutes. (IFI Club)
The dreaded ‘R’ word sends people shrinking into a corner as if they’ve just entered a room full of lepers. Spare a thought for the Japanese: they’ve been trying to shake recession for almost 20 years. Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa channels that economic gloom into this droll comedy drama.
Takashi (Yu Koyanagi), a pudgy-faced office worker, loses his job to outsourcing. (Blame it on the Chinese.) But he’s too proud and ashamed to tell his wife. So he leaves the house each day for work, refuses menial work at the job centre but is not too proud to queue up with the homeless for free lunch. The strain leads to cracks in his family: his wife Megumi (Kyoko Koizumi) develops a thousand-yard stare, their teenage son emigrates to the US army, while their youngest child takes sneaky piano lessons where it is discovered he is a child prodigy.
Tokyo Sonata touches on similar terrain to Time Out, Laurent Cantent’s Milleresque study of delusion and breakdown in a French man who still pretends he has a job. But Kurosawa wants to take traditional Japanese ideas of authority and kick it in the backside.
Takashi is put through the ringer until he discovers humility. With a gentle hand, Kurosawa teases out a dry humour. And then, unexpectedly, Tokyo Sonata jumps gear into borderline farce. It’s as if somebody decided to tack on the final reel of Magnolia, but dialed to 11. We get a bizarre burglary and kidnap, a hit and run and all sorts of coincidental silliness that robs the film of any heft it had.
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