Tokyo Sonata

A distinctive movie from a distinctive director.

By Matt Prigge
Add Comment Add Comment | Comments: 0 | Posted Apr. 28, 2009

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Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa
B

It’s often said there are no more new stories to tell. Perhaps that’s true—after all, even the world’s finest directors are starting to steal each other’s premises. In 2001, Laurent Cantet (late of The Class) made Time Out, in which a Belgian family man loses his job and, instead of informing the wife and kids, simply pretends he’s still employed.

Now comes Tokyo Sonata, the latest from the terrific Kiyoshi Kurosawa (no relation, as he’s by now tired of pointing out), in which an administrator (Teruyuki Kagawa) is downsized and winds up wandering the city streets all day, pretending he’s at work. Happily, that’s where the two films end in terms of similarities. Time Out is very much the work of Cantet, the social-realist, while Tokyo Sonata is thoroughly K. Kurosawa-esque—that is, deadpan and almost inscrutably melancholy.

Sonata also distinguishes itself by branching out. Kagawa isn’t the only one feeling the deep funk of modern life.

His elder son (Yo Koyanagi) has decided to rebel against an upbringing designed to make him selfishly happy by joining the American army, just in time for the Iraq War to escalate. Younger son Inowaki Kai begins harassing both a manga porn-reading teacher and secretly taking piano lessons. His wife (Kyoko Koizumi, exceedingly good) is stuck in a pit of worry, but is greeted toward the end with an appearance by a bumbling would-be thief played by Kurosawa regular Koji Yakusho.

Kurosawa is chiefly known as a horror director, having basically invented the J-Horror wave with intelligent and hair-on-the-back-of-the-neck-creepy greats like Cure, Charisma and Pulse, which concern modern-day isolation rather than boos and shocks. Genre shift and all, his gift for horror isn’t entirely absent this time around. Tokyo is depicted as a dense nightmare that swallows its characters up; people they’re often depicted as mere ants in static long shots, moving through the city’s dense latticework. It’s a metropolis in which no one is doing well. Kagawa is shocked to find a business friend who’s also pretending to still be employed, while even the criminal element has been reduced to pathetic incompetents.

This doesn’t end as miserably as it perhaps should; Sonata reeks of the work of a maturing dilettante, especially when compared to Kurosawa’s last drama, the 2003 head-scratcher Bright Future. But then, it could never be confused for any other filmmaker’s handiwork.

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