Tokyo Sonata

[dreamdead]

Trailer is here, though not in English. This will be a drive-up-to-Chicago-worthy film. Kurosawa's framing looks typically excellent, and Debussy works here as well as ever for establishing the melancholy mood.

[Bosco B Thug]

Tokyo Sonata is what you'd expect from Kiyoshi Kurosawa absorbing and filtering Ozu. But don't think the Ozu wins over - I'm not alone in this evaluation, it's pretty much the turn-of-phrase in conversation about the film: this is still a "Pretty f*king weird/strange/bizarre/odd" Kiyoshi Kurosawa film.

(That said, I might get spoiler-y now, so I would recommend people watch the film before reading various interpretations.)

It's a point of contention, too. Some are lovin' KK's fusing of his hyper-allegorical rendering with his stab at social realism, and some think it undermines the film. I'm somewhere in between.

Apparently the development of the film wasn't entirely a harmonic one. Apparently Mannix had written the film to be a very Ozu-like, "neo-realist" look at a contemporary Japanese family, and yes, Kurosawa seems to have significantly re-worked it to his own vision.

Now while I said I lay in between, I'm glad KK ran away with it. The "straight and understated family drama" chunk of the film (and it's a rather large chunk in the middle) lulled me into an early "underwhelmed" state (although "underwhelmed" relative to my esteem for KK - even in this "straight, understated family drama" segment, his style isn't lost). During this chunk, if KK's directing and mise en scene wasn't also so soulful, I'd have to call it just kind of static and unengaging. And I'd have to call the material just sort of obvious and prosaic.

So how am I in between then? Because when his usual absurdist allegoricalness pops up within the drama, it doesn't entirely work here, either. A major reason being:

This is a total message film. As in, it's sure got some on-the-nose things to say about the contemporary world, the family unit, the financial bedrock of the common living, and, in common K. Kurosawa fashion, generation gaps and the plight of the underestimated female. Yes, the K-man has never been coy with his hypervivid worldviews, but never has he been this blunt, this in-your-face, this tied to a realistic social setting, this willfully working towards heightening social perception.

This is kind of like KK's Milk. No more stewing in dark, mysterious contemplations of an inaccessibly repressed society - no, let's engage in the very-public world and be so proactive against common thought and mores, their bright and shining films will inspire even the cinema layman.

This is KK trying to be constructive by working with very public space, emotional and physical. This no longer is a KK chamber drama. No more desolate voids, and he works here with probably the largest number of extras American viewers have seen him with.

Thus, when his very surreal, expressionistic plot developments and character interactions rear their head in the latter half of the picture, they felt a bit obvious and cliche. "K. Kurosawa cliche" is a very special type of cliche, of course, but even if it weren't for the contrast between hyper-realism and hyper-allegory, his absurdist gestures here do come off as sort of hackneyed. "Sort of," though, in that I still love 'em.

Although don't get me wrong, the film is never completely hyper-real - as I said, his off-kilter mise en scene is always evident, even in the mid-portion - nor is it ever completely hyper-surreal, which is why, despite me misgivings, the film is still great.

Two points I didn't like: a subplot with a fellow down-and-out businessman is a distraction, and there is another subplot involving American involvement in Japan that seems more suited for the broad social satire of The Host than this film. It's kind of thuddingly presented, but this particular plot point ultimately leads to a very clear-mindedly progressivist and moving conclusion - an evaluation that probably applies to the film as a whole. Despite the rough ride the film gives us, the resolutions it finally offers us have a stunning clarity. And the ending is really, truly resplendent in its simplicity.

[Rowland]

I've been irked by critics discussing this film as if it's his first non-horror picture, obviously unaware of his unfairly underseen License to Live, which this sounds to me a great deal like, at least in superficial terms. I see you've seen some of his undistributed pictures recently Bosco, including the great Serpent's Path and the curiously genre-hopping Eyes of the Spider. You should check out Barren Illusions if you haven't yet, which is his most undiluted vision of surreal expressionism, so much so that much of it comes across as parody, but some of his most inspired bits are found in it as well.

[Raiders]

which is his most undiluted vision of surreal expressionism, so much so that much of it comes across as parody

Like Loft?

:twisted:

[Sycophant]

Oh, man. I forgot that I have a copy of Barren Illusions lying around that I haven't watched. I'll need to get to that some time soon.

Hoping this makes a stop in my town, though the "coming soon" page on the Salt Lake Film Society's webpage hasn't been updated in over a month.

[Rowland]

Like Loft?

:twisted:

Well, Barren Illusions even at its worst has an arrestingly foreboding vibe that keeps it engaging, and its best moments shame anything in the comparatively airless Loft. That said, I've basically conceded that I need to see Loft again in a better format, since I watched it in what amounted to cropped VHS quality.

[Bosco B Thug]

I've been irked by critics discussing this film as if it's his first non-horror picture, obviously unaware of his unfairly underseen License to Live, which this sounds to me a great deal like, at least in superficial terms. I see you've seen some of his undistributed pictures recently Bosco, including the great Serpent's Path and the curiously genre-hopping Eyes of the Spider. You should check out Barren Illusions if you haven't yet, which is his most undiluted vision of surreal expressionism, so much so that much of it comes across as parody, but some of his most inspired bits are found in it as well.

License to Live irritated me a bit, I have to say - I don't think I like Kiyoshi Kurosawa trying to be cute. Neither do I fully embrace his humor (unless it's mordant)... Tokyo Sonata suffers a bit from this, too - applying humor that isn't laced with anything but a desire for amiability. Hate to box him in, but yeah.

Nevertheless, LtL is really impressive. I'm always astounded by the thick allegorical layerings Kurosawa concocts in his films, and 'License' has to be one of the most thick and intricate; it's grouped for me with 'Doppelganger' and 'Charisma' - films that seem to be working on the level of pure symbol and hypothetic, and that exemplify his extraordinary instinct to push his allegories even further than you'd expect. These three films all reach a very similar level of dizzying story development as they near their conclusions that's really mind-boggling. Does any other working filmmaker work so purely in allegory as much as Kurosawa? Von Trier, maybe, with his US maybe-trilogy, or Roy Andersson, though I don't think I like Songs from the Second Floor very much.

Serpent's Path is so memorable if only because of how f*ked up it becomes in the blink of an eye. I did not expect it to become so ghastly towards the end, but the subject matter and the way it comes as a sort of audience revelation is pretty much the definition of "ghastly."

In the beginning, I wasn't really digging low-budget, "on-the-fly" Kurosawa (he said he filmed either one of these or both of these in a span of 2 weeks, I forget...) when I could be having super-polished Kurosawa, but 'Serpent's' is indeed a doozy. The subject matter's a bit extreme and (thankfully) a bit too exclusive a set in society, but I felt there were some nice intimation of internal politics and hypocrisy within the secret business, which gives the film more richness. And, again, the final 30 minutes are messed up, seriously. The zoom into the video tape... ugh. Also, [anyone] care to explain the math subplot in the movie and the last scene?

Eyes of the Spider I was kind of falling asleep during just because I was tired, but what I saw seemed like more allegorical nuttiness from Kurosawa. Genre-bending, definitely, with all the black humor. Wish I was more alert, the only thing I can say is I liked how it was about a guy with a bunch of jobs.

EDIT: I forget to mention: I totally got to shake his hand. It was awesome. And even better, straight from the horse's mouth (the horse being Kurosawa): he's a self-proclaimed Tobe Hooper aficionado and enthusiast. Apparently he's "interviewed" Hooper a couple of times? Though I don't know how that exactly went down since Kurosawa speaks very little English.

[Rowland]

I used to have a really strong handle on Serpent's Path and Eyes of the Spider, but I'd need to watch them again to really get into parsing them, since I haven't watched either of them in a few years. I wish I'd saved my analysis of them from the old site...

[Derek]

Review

[Boner M]

This was my favorite film of 2008, although I saw it in the midst of a 3-4 films a day festival so I had to re-read my capsule review from back then to remember my exact thoughts:

Why this film works as resoundingly well as it does has been nagging me since seeing it two days ago, but I'm suspecting it can be chalked up almost solely to Kurosawa's strengths as a director. It's been finely written by Australian ex-pat Max Mannix (who, oddly enough, wasn't able to attend the screening while Kurosawa and the film's producer were) but as it plays out, some blatant contrivances in the narrative, especially near the end, feel completely organic. This is mostly because of Kurosawa's meticulous framing and compositional sense, which creates a certain distance between the audience and the film's dramaturgy that lends a troubling sense of discomfort and ineffable strangeness to even the most conventional dramatic tropes - the style is Ozu via Tati, but Fassbinder is a better reference point as far as the emotional timbre goes. Indeed, the ending would be ridiculously schmaltzy in most contexts, but the very final shot shifts it's meaning so that it's both unnerving and deeply moving at once. Like Imamura, Kurosawa also proves to be a master of tonal shifts that ensure a discordance that's always true to the messiness of human experience, even when the screenplay sometimes favors neatness. It's a film is so close to being a standard family-in-crisis melodrama, but under Kurosawa's fascinatingly contradictory approach, the result is sublime; a perfect alchemy, if there ever was one.

I'm glad Amy Taubin picked up the Fassbinder comparison in her ArtForum review, I was starting to wonder if it was just a bleary-eyed festival hallucination.

[NickGlass]

This film is so, so elegant and graceful (when its not being incisively satiric), that the slightly overdone climax kills me. It's a beautiful moment--why can't the camera simple linger, so the whole film can resonate as strongly as its parts.

[Bosco B Thug]

This film is so, so elegant and graceful (when its not being incisively satiric), that the slightly overdone climax kills me. It's a beautiful moment--why can't the camera simple linger, so the whole film can resonate as strongly as its parts.

Are you refering to the
[

Show Spoiler

final scene, the piano performance? Something about the shot of the onlookers?
Just for everyone's info, one tidbit Kurosawa shared in the Q&A was that he gave full consideration to doing the alternatives to the ending and it took him a while to decide: the ending as is, an ending where everyone applauds at the end, and an ending where everyone is unfazed except the parents. I think he chose right.

]
Also: the subplot with the fellow businessman he meets and befriends. Yay or nay? Nay for me, it lay at the center of the film's "prosaic" middle-section for me. How about
[

Show Spoiler

the scene when the mother goes all Bonnie Parker and returns to the thief and the car and say something to the effect, "Can't go back now... etc."? Nay for me, we all saw that bit coming.

]

[NickGlass]

Are you refering to the
[

Show Spoiler

final scene, the piano performance? Something about the shot of the onlookers?
Just for everyone's info, one tidbit Kurosawa shared in the Q&A was that he gave full consideration to doing the alternatives to the ending and it took him a while to decide: the ending as is, an ending where everyone applauds at the end, and an ending where everyone is unfazed except the parents. I think he chose right.

]

Yes, but I'm at least glad Kurosawa had the restraint not to include the slow-clap.

[number8]

I was fine with it. I groaned more at the choice of song.

[Spinal]

This was really great. What surprised me most is that even though it is not a horror film, it still retained a lot of the eerie, apocalyptic feeling that I enjoyed so much about Pulse. And more there's more humor than I expected. Perhaps it is because economic crisis is so much a part of the current zeitgeist, but those scenes with the unemployed businessmen drifting around the city are haunting. I love that he shoots them almost like he's telling a ghost story. So many great scenes, but the confrontation about the piano lessons was the highlight for me. Weak spot was the interaction between the wife and the thief. That didn't really go anywhere meaningful for me. Still, I'm starting to be a big fan of this director.

[Sycophant]

My need to see this film is practically physical. And I just found out it's not coming to my region. Ouch.

[ledfloyd]

i think i loved it. some of the second half is a bit hard to gauge for me. i may need a second viewing.

[Cult]

i think i loved it. some of the second half is a bit hard to gauge for me. i may need a second viewing.

Same here, except for the "I think" part. I definitely loved it, but I'm not sure if all of it worked. And I know I'll be wearing out the dvd when I get my hands on it.

[Raiders]

Am I the only one who found it unfortunately distracting that Kurosawa used the same Debussy piece that Soderbergh did in Ocean's 11 for their respective film denouement's moment of zen?

[Kurosawa Fan]

Am I the only one who found it unfortunately distracting that Kurosawa used the same Debussy piece that Soderbergh did in Ocean's 11 for their respective film denouement's moment of zen?

Yes.

[Peng]

As often remarked upon, Kurosawa's brand of existential dread works fittingly when applied to a drama of family unit's alienation and disintegration, and his not-quite-right atmosphere renders some stuff that might come off too didactic or obvious (the father's old friend who's also down-and-out office worker) disquieting and eerie instead. Most of the film balances well between human-based drama and allegorical readings, but I find the parallel climax, of each family member's dark night of the soul, tips over far too much into broad allegory/metaphor territory at the expense of previously believable behaviors and situations. Loved that ending scene though, which manages to be emotionally cathartic and still very Kurosawa-strange at once. 7.5/10