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Kyoko Koizumi plays kidnapped wife Megumi Sasaki as the film takes an odd twist |
Tokyo Sonata - Tale of jobless fallout employs odd methods
TOKYO SONATA
Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa
THE Chinese can offer three office staff for the price of one dedicated Japanese worker, we are told in the opening moments of this rather weird family drama.
And because of the competitiveness of the Chinese economy, men whose lives are gauged by the steadiness of their jobs and the kudos that comes with regular pay cheques suddenly discover they have nothing to live for.
Ryuhei Sasaki (Teruyuki Kagawa) is sacked when his company decide to outsource their administration department, but can’t bring himself to tell his downtrodden wife. He leaves the house each morning with his briefcase and hangs around in litter-strewn parking lots, waiting with other scrap-heaped suits for the charity lunch van to arrive.
At home, things are no better – he can’t talk about his problems, his adolescent son hates Tokyo, hates his father, and decides to join the US army as a means of escaping a city which offers no work. Their school-age boy just wants to play the piano, but lessons are expensive.
While this could make for a striking movie, some parts of Tokyo Sonata are simply super weird, and I can’t see that this is a case of something being lost in translation.
Surely the many asides that make this film come in over two hours are oddball skits to the average Japanese viewer too?
A 25-minute sub-plot involves the wife, Meguni, being kidnapped. She seemingly undergoes some kind of Stockholm effect in about three minutes as she befriends the kidnapper (despite his attempts to rape her).
It gets stranger still. She sees a light in the sky above the sea and falls asleep in the ebb of the tide. She awakes safe and dry in a seashore hut, with her attacker nowhere to be seen. So she, er, goes home.
And sadly this twist – which is matched by other similarly weird interjections – detracts from what could have been an interesting observation on the effect unemployment has on breadwinners – a kind of Japanese Boys From The Black Stuff. Instead, it is just too odd and long to heartily recommend. |
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