Dispatch #2 from CIFF - Tokyo Sonata (2008, Japanese)

Tokyo Sonata may be the one of the best Kiyoshi Kurosawa film I’ve seen, but it’s not necessarily my favorite. There’s something so . . . normal about this narrative, which is miles away from Doppelganger, or Charisma, or even Bright Future. All of those films had a streak of crazy in them so wide that it was impossible to mistake any of them for a mainstream film. Tokyo Sonata struck me more as a lightweight Shohei Imamura film, with dollops of crazy, but nothing that really managed to take off on its own. (Perhaps not surprisingly, parts of Sonata reminded me of Warm Water Under a Red Bridge.)

That being said, Sonata is generally quite a lovely film. The story of a Japanese salaryman who gets laid off and must, out of pride, protect his family from this knowledge, takes strange (occasionally harkening back to themes from Doppelganger and Bright Future) and dark turns before finally righting itself at the end. It’s an almost eerily lovely film to watch – many frames are so carefully shot, warmly lit, and loaded with meaning that they in fact reminded me of nothing so much as the photography of Jeff Wall. Still, I felt myself hoping for the loopiness of an old-school Kiyoshi Kurosawa, which never quite made itself fully felt, even with a late-stage intrusion from the awesome Koji Yakusho. (Who may just be one of my most favorite actors, ever. I think there’s good reason that he’s spent time with both Imamura and Kurosawa. The man is mad.) Overall, I felt Sonata to be a bit scattershot, perhaps somewhat under-inspired, and occasionally obvious – but I liked it quite a bit. Go figure. Sometimes there’s just room enough for a quirky little family melodrama, even if it may not always be quirky enough for my taste.