Review of Tokyo Sonata (2008) by Mike M — 11 Jul 2009

A consistently intriguing, elegantly composed family drama with an underlying strain of horror at the ways and injustices of the modern world... Slowly, the film drifts into an anti-realism reminiscent of Takashi Miike's "Visitor Q", albeit with the outre content toned down and a good deal more sympathy for the family unit under attack.

This drift is likely to confound some viewers; Kurosawa even manages to engineer a happy ending when all seems definitively lost. This director does, however, realise that the stillness central to the Ozu tradition of Japanese cinema need not necessarily equate to a conservatism of content: that a shot with no motion can be aghast or stunned, and not just serene or content with the way things stand.

Kurosawa's past keeps showing through in the manner in which he subverts the frame still further: take the (Lynch-like) stroboscopic flickers that permeate the family's living quarters at the moments of greatest upheaval, only belatedly revealed to be the light from a passing elevated train.

That's the type of trick filmmakers schooled in horror pick up, and which the middlebrows assembling all those American movies about dysfunctional families wouldn't have.