Tokyo Sonata

I find something inherently fascinating about Japanese movies. It's hard for me to grasp just how dysfunctional Japanese culture is, with all of the repression and honor and machoism driving everyone batty. This movie was actually much more normal than the other Japanese movies I've seen, although the director felt the need to put in about twenty minutes of that peculiar brand of Japanese fantastical weirdness near the end.

Tokyo Sonata is the Japanese version of American Beauty, or the dysfunctional Japanese family. The core of the problem is the husband (that's something that doesn't change from country to country), who's terribly emasculated at work and feels the need to rule his house with an insensitive lead fist. Things only get worse for Sasaki-san when he loses his job in about five minutes and spends the rest of the movie standing in food lines and unemployment lines, doing menial labor, and screaming at/beating his children. His wife slowly goes to pieces, his eldest son who's never at home elects to leave home for good, and his youngest son has a burning passion to humiliate his teacher in school and to learn how to play the piano.

The movie has a somber, depressing quality about it (I don't think I've ever seen an upbeat Japanese movie) and each scene crawls along at an excruciating pace for the first half of the movie. The family suffers one setback after another, each more momentous as the solitary burden of unemployment crushes Sasaki. When the entire family is near the breaking point, strange things happen to Sasaki, his wife, and his youngest son in illogical and completely unforeseeable ways. This part of the movie was completely unsatisfying and felt cheap. Clearly, the tension needs to culminate in some sort of explosion, but this just seemed like a convenient rest stop for the director to spout some weirdness and profundity, point out the errors of the family's ways, and to happily rush off towards the resolution.

Although Tokyo Sonata has its moments, the entire package just felt a bit dull. The acting was above average but nothing exceptional and the editing was a bit too abrupt. I didn't feel that the pace flowed very well, and the pulse of the story was ruined for me in the last half hour.