Product: Tokyo Sonata (2008)
Rating: 4.0
Waiting for Debussy . . .
I wanted to like this film more than I did. For anyone who has been downsized, let go, fired, quit a job - while at the same time supporting a family - this film has considerable emotional and dramatic potential. In a culture where the "authority" of the breadwinner is maybe more critical than elsewhere, this theme provides the thread for most of the film. It accounts for why the husband keeps his family from knowing that he's lost his job, why his wife does not confront him when she finds out, and why he physically abuses his younger son who challenges his judgment. But the film takes a long time to set this all up, while never really exploring it very deeply. The tension in the story is about his keeping his job loss from his family.Besides a humiliatingly comic job interview and the decision of the man's older son to enlist in the American military, what happens in the first hour of the film is not uninteresting, but fairly predictable. He meets an old out-of-work schoolmate whose ruse is even more exaggerated and inventively complex, though we do not sense until it happens that he's riding the ragged edge of disaster. Instead of exploring the implications of this family crisis, Kurosawa punctuates the second hour of the film with unexpected turns: a home invasion and abduction, abrupt shifts in time, an asthmatic runaway boy being pursued by several adults, plus other discoveries and revelations. After a night of adventures, the family is reunited around the breakfast table - as if it had all been a bad dream from which they've awakened and learned, like Dorothy in "The Wizard of Oz," that there's no place like home.What Kurosawa seems to be saying at the end is that the rituals of family life (stultifying and unfeeling though they may be, especially as compared to Ozu's families) are what keep these people intact as individuals. The film ends with the soothingly slow playing of Debussy's "Claire de lune," which brings together three of the four members of the family in yet another ritual - public this time - a piano competition before a respectfully silent audience and panel of judges. What to make of this denouement? Depends on what you've made of the preceding two hours, and that seems to be the point.