The Mutual Human Concern

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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