Monday, January 03, 2011

Late Capitalism, Revisited


The wreckage of late capitalism is on display in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's creepy family drama, Tokyo Sonata (2008). One gets the feeling from this movie that the shock of Asia's financial crisis never went away. It haunts this film. The Japanese, it seems, are dealing with the same consequences of globalization as America: Jobs outsourced to China and India, youth with no prospects, a workforce beset with an existential crisis of faith. Kurosawa's movie is drenched in a striking anomie that all begins with economics. The world, it seems, is moving on.

The story here finds salariman Ryuhei downsized from his company. His boss asks him what his skill set is and what he can contribute if they keep him on, but Ryuhei can't even answer him. He's been a minor functionary for so long that he no longer knows what makes him valuable, if he even is. Shamed, he continues to dress in a suit and tie for work every morning as he lines up for unemployment, then hangs around a soup line where he meets another unemployed salariman who, like Ryuhei, puts on a great show of being a busy businessman. Ryuhei's family is none the wiser, though he seems a bit more high strung and testy. Megumi, his wife, dutifully keeps house in spite of her own dawning discontent with the role of housewife, while his sons have crises of their own. Their oldest son, Takashi wants to join the American military as a means of finding opportunity (this film posits a fictional, but plausible scenario where a recruiting strapped military takes volunteers from pacifist Japan), while their youngest son, Kenji, is not getting along with his teacher and wants to take piano lessons. Kenji pockets his lunch money and pays for the lessons on the sly, even though his father expressly forbids the lessons. The film gives more or less equal weight to the stories of all of these characters, especially once the whole facade of a traditional Japanese family comes crumbling down. That happens once Megumi spots her husband in the soup line one day. She keeps it to herself for a while until Ryuhei discover's Kenji's forbidden piano lessons, when she throws it in his face to rebuke his patriarchal authority.



This all sounds like a "this is how we are" slice of life, but this film is a lot weirder than that. There are several turns of the story that take the film in unforeseen directions. It's best that the viewer discover these on her own, because this is a movie that constantly surprises. Kurosawa follows his own imp of the perverse, so this is NOT an Ozu-esqe family drama. It shades a little bit into the Gothic in a way that would be overcooked in another movie, but which is suitably subdued by the rigor of Kurosawa's deadpan direction. Kurosawa honed his craft on upscale horror movies, and the techniques he developed for creeping dread work just as well when applied to melodrama.



I should mention that the environment in which all of this takes place is vitally important to the mood of the film. The Tokyo envisioned by this movie is recognizably the same haunted Tokyo of the director's Pulse, populated by walking dead men, metaphorically. It has the same oppressive mood of anomie. There's a wonderful scene where Ryuhei's friend, Kurosu, the other unemployed salariman, gives up on Japan and on its economic dreams and falls into a procession of other workers, a procession that has a whiff of the next world. It's a procession of the damned. In the next scenes, Ryuhei discovers that Kuroso has killed himself and his wife rather than keep up his facade and live with his shame. Most of the film is composed of shots defined by architecture and geometric framing. This shot is typical, in which the characters are arranged symbolically (Ryuhei is alone on one side of the table, while his family is opposite) in a frame defined by the shelf in the foreground:



The way Kurosawa shoots the movie suggests that you can't divorce the characters from Tokyo; it defines them. For their part, Kurosawa's actors are down with the program (except, perhaps, for Kurosawa regular Kôji Yakusho (though more about his role, I will not say). Kyôko Koizumi is particularly wonderful as Megumi, who starts as a devoted wifey, arrives at a point where she says to her husband, "Screw your authority," embarks on a mad adventure, and somehow finds her way back. Koizumi plays all of this with a subtle grace that allows the audience to believe all of it, even the more outre turns of her story.

All of this has the potential to end with horror and, for a while, it seems that that's where it's headed. But this is pointedly not a horror movie. In the end, it finds some measure of grace. Ryuhei comes to terms with his family, and they with him, and even though they may not be happy, the masks are off.




7 comments:

- said...

Thanks for the review...I'm interested. Perhaps when I'm done with a month of Italian film, I'll start on Japanese again.

Do you ever think the Japanese are best situated to adapt J.G. Ballard stories? I'd love to see them tackle "High Rise"

xoxo

Vulnavia Morbius said...

Oooh. Italian film. Trash or highbrow? Or both?

I can totally see the Japanese adapting Ballard. For that matter, I can totally see Kiyoshi Kurosawa adapting Ballard. Some of his horror movies reek of it.

- said...

Somewhere in the middle I think...Sadly, we're watching The Bicycle Thief (which I believe is an Italian film class right of passage...), but there are some films on the list I'm interested in. I'm sad there's no attention to Sergio Leone and I may write my paper for the class on spaghetti westerns to protest the lack on inclusion of these wonderful films. I thought we might get Suspiria, but again, there is an attempt at high brow for the sake of it. It's the last class for my program aside from my thesis bit which is all but done...it's been approved, I just have to bind it and send it off. So I'm going to watch the films, chat about them and not stress too much on it. I may even learn something :D

As for Ballard, if we use Empire of the Sun as his autobiography of sorts, then he is definitely influenced by Japanese culture, so it only makes sense for Japanese culture to embrace and adapt his work.

Vulnavia Morbius said...

That's unfortunate, because Italy is one of those places where the line between highbrow and lowbrow is almost impossible to draw. Examples: Once Upon a Time in the West, Salo, Ossessione, some Fellini movies. Still, it sounds fun. What was on the syllabus? Lots of neo-realists, I expect.

- said...

Here's the list:

Ossessione
Open City
The Bicycle Thief
La Strada
The Wide Blue Road
Swept Away
Gommorah

Any you like in particular (aside from Ossessione)?

xoxo

Vulnavia Morbius said...

I like Open City a lot. Bicycle Thieves is heartbreaking, of course, but De Sica is so shamelessly manipulative sometimes (have you seen Umberto D?). La Strada is good. I like early Fellini better than later Fellini. I don't get along well with Lina Wertmüller movies, but that's just me. I haven't seen The Wide Blue Road or Gomorrah.

Annie said...

I'm not a huge film buff, but I read most of your reviews with interest. I'll definitely check this one out :)