Tokyo Sonata

I went into this film with no foreknowledge, based solely on its ranking in critics' polls for last year (#23 and #44).  After the fact I learned that director Kiyoshi Kurosawa is best known for horror films, so this mostly realistic social commentary represents a departure.  Like Laurent Cantet’s Time Out, it tells the story of a white-collar worker who gets laid off, but too embarrassed to tell his family, he sets off each morning as if he still had a job.  This missive from Japan’s “lost decade” certainly has relevance for an American audience today, as economic disaster frays the fabric of family and society.  This was a good film to know nothing about in advance, because one definitely does not know where it’s going as it unfolds.  Some events border on the surreal, but for the most part the film is only too real, showing for example how economic stress leads to domestic violence.  The acting is generally good, for the downwardly mobile father and the two sons, one a disillusioned recruit to American forces in Iraq and the other a surreptitious young piano prodigy.  Outstanding is Kyoko Koizumi as the mother who tries to hold the family together, until abducted into her own fantasy of escape.  I didn’t know what to think about all this as I was watching, and I still don’t know what it adds up to, but many of the elements are good and the intent seems serious, if occasionally oddball.  (2009, dvd)  *6+*  (MC-80)