Tokyo Sonata | Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2008
Originally published 4th May 2015 on my Tumblr. I'm moving some old writing from there over here because it's nice to have it all in one place. It's also nice to look back once in a while.
On the wall of the family home at the heart of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Tokyo Sonata is a clock emulating the style of a Piet Mondrian painting: a grid, created by intersecting black lines, with a horizontal blue rectangle in the top right corner, and a smaller vertical red rectangle on the left, surrounds a small clock-face in the centre. It appears on screen maybe twice in the whole film, but it stands out as an image of imbalance among the regimented interior design of this typically Japanese home.
Imbalance within a family unit is very much Kurosawa's primary concern in Tokyo Sonata: Ryuhei, a strict middle-manager of a healthcare equipment firm, is suddenly left unemployed after his company relocates to China to cut costs. Too proud to tell his family, he continues the pretence of his daily routine as he searches with hundreds of other men for a new job. As he struggles to find work, he takes his frustrations out on his family: he won't let his young son, Kenji, take piano lessons, or his older son, Takashi, join the US military, and he doesn't tell his wife, Megumi, anything; because of this, his family gradually spirals out of control.
Kurosawa cuts back and forth between these micro-plots (and others, including the younger son's accidental "bullying" of his teacher after he's punished for something he didn't do, and Ryuhei's odd friendship with a fellow unemployed man lying to his family) as they unfold, and, initially at least, they seem relatively unassuming, ending abruptly before they have chance to develop into anything outwardly dramatic. At one point, Ryuhei arrives home late to find his wife asleep on the sofa. He wakes her up and goes to bed, while she's left there, arms raised in search of a husband to help her to her feet. This moment suggests a breakdown in their relationship, but Kurosawa has no interest in drawing attention to its importance: it's the accumulation of these brief moments that makes his cinema so destructive — and when Tokyo Sonata finally goes, it goes hard. The predominantly static compositions of the first half give way to quick tracking shots, while the reserved characters finally show emotion; the cramped offices and houses become vast shopping malls and empty roads, and the episodic structure becomes a parallel narrative, with flashbacks and a dream sequence, as each character tries to escape their own life.
The idea that they need to escape their lives because they've fallen into chaos so quickly is terrifying, if only because it could happen to anyone, at any time, and because it's entirely out of our control. This is the kind of idea that Kurosawa thrives on: in Cure, a detective tries and fails to control an apathetic young man who manipulates people into killing each other, while Pulse presents a world in which a lack of human connection is the catalyst for total annihilation. Both of these films end with their respective problems unresolved, yet Tokyo Sonata ends on a high. At their lowest points, both Ryuhei and Megumi wish they could start their lives over, but the film ends with a moment of familial unity. Enjoying life together as a family is more important than money or pride. The Mondrian clock is never seen again.