Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa may have left behind the J-horror tropes in his deeply satisfying oeuvre, but with Tokyo Sonata, he remains incapable of breaking free from the metaphysical terrors that influence his work. Amongst other things, Tokyo Sonata is an Ozuan domestic melodrama and for almost its entire length, it holds together wonderfully as a bleak but rich vision of a contemporary family on the verge of collapse. That is, until Koji Yakusho shows up.
Card-carrying members of Kurosawa’s shamefully underdeveloped American cult will recognize Yakusho from almost all of the director’s more recent work. His appearance in Tokyo Sonata brings with it an unwelcome continuity to Kurosawa’s previous films, where technology and other hypnotizing cues bring back the ghosts of repressed traumas and traditional thinking.
Thematically, Tokyo Sonata doesn’t start that much differently than his other films, but it eventually sets itself apart considering how the Sasaki family’s problems all splinter off from papa Ryuhei’s (Teruyuki Kagawa) big predicament. After he loses his high-level white-collar job, he quietly but persistently lies to his wife Megumi (the stellar Kyoko Kozumi) and kids while wanly scrambling to find some sort of employment to maintain them.Though Ryuhei is the film’s catalyst, his problems don’t sustain the film, but the family’s respective forceful voices assert themselves convincingly. Prodigal son Takashi’s (Yu Koyanagi) sub-plot comes on especially strong, recalling Kurosawa’s coyly stolid Bright Future (2003), a blistering volley of urban youth and alienation.
Tokyo Sonata’s delicate plot threatens to implode when Yakusho shows up. He provides a heavy-handed and utterly bewildering complication to Megumi’s story that is so dispiritingly out-of-place that it almost ruins the deft interplay between the Sasakis’ intersecting lives. He’s an inexplicable reminder that nobody’s past ever stays buried—especially not Kurosawa’s, since Yakusho’s appearance serves as a leftover signifier from Retribution that was never explained and now reappears to nearly unravel the film’s entire skein.Thankfully Kurosawa pulls the film’s various strings back together for an awesomely assured finale.
> Tokyo Sonata
Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa At Lincoln Plaza Cinemas and IFC
