REGENT RELEASING
Kyoko Koizumi as Megumi Sasaki in Tokyo Sonata
Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Tokyo Sonata lurches from one scene to the next with the gait of Frankenstein's monster--a style of locomotion that is not unexpected, considering that the writer-director made his name with horror films. To date, he has filled the screen with cybernetic zombies, rampaging jellyfish, amnesiac murderers under hypnotic control; and the off-balance rhythm in which he has told their stories has carried into this new film, even though it's a comedy of desperation about a family of near-perfect middle-class drabness.
The paterfamilias (Teruyuki Kagawa) is a short, thick-chested salaryman with bulging eyes and a wide, glum mouth--a frog, you'd think, waddling about in a business suit--who loses his job in the film's first scene. The wife and mother (Kyoko Koizumi) is a slender, pretty flower, stuck in a pot and left to wilt in a sunless house. The college-age son (Yu Koyanagi) wears his hair samurai-style and makes a point of returning home only when it suits him--affectations that can't disguise his status as a day laborer who hands out leaflets on street corners. This leaves the younger son (Kai Inowaki) to be the rule-breaker in the family. A gawky grade-schooler, he rebels by taking piano lessons on the sly.
This isn't the stuff of nightmares; but Kurosawa makes the scenes stagger even so, with edits that can go from a soft, shadowed, lingering close-up of the wife's dreamy face to a garishly lit tracking shot of the husband crashing into a pile of garbage, and another, and another. "It lives!" Kurosawa might cry, looking upon the monster he's galvanized: this unhappy but orderly family, which gradually becomes chaotic and even more unhappy.
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