"Why wasn't it in Competition?" The perennial Cannes complaint about some film or other in the market or sidebar was most frequently heard this year in regard to Kurosawa's fine, very flawed "Tokyo Sonata," which ended up in the Un Certain Regard. Certainly preferable to many films in Official Competition, "Tokyo Sonata" reveals Kurosawa admirably grasping for a new maturity but failing to achieve it because of traits he can't shake. The first half suggests an update of the shomin-geki: a muted, masterfully controlled portrait of what the director calls "a very ordinary family in modern Japan," whose hidden fissures and banked resentments lead to their disintegration. The opening sequences, in which the hitherto successful father, Sasaki Ryuhei, is replaced by a Chinese man who will work for a third of his salary, are impressively compressed. Shifting from office to home, and from nervous, hand-held camerawork to a more fixed and pristine style for the Sasakis' apartment, "Tokyo Sonata" is no less efficient. Family relations are precisely established when eldest son Takashi returns home and snaps at his mother, Megumi, "I'm going to bed. Don't vacuum."
Taking a welcome break from J-horror and fantasy and courting new respect, Kurosawa is clearly uninterested in the subgenre of the Japanese satire of family life — think "Ajia no gyakusha (The Crazy Family)," "Kazoku Ge^mu (The Family Game)," or "Shitoyakana Kedamono (Elegant Beast)" — and more in the tradition of the disintegrating family as emblem of a wider societal breakdown. Developing a theme of deception, of subterranean emotion and adult life as play-acting, Kurosawa shows Ryuhei becoming one of Japan's secretly unemployed, maintaining a fiction with his family by spending his days (in business suit and with briefcase) in parks, libraries and useless job-hunting queues. Already rigid and tightly battened, he marshals what little self- respect he has by intimidating his smiling wife (wonderfully played by Kyoko Koizumi) and his two sons. The boys rebel, the eldest by enlisting in the Self-Defense Forces and going to Iraq, the younger, Kenji, by secretly signing up for piano lessons, violently denied him by his authoritarian father.