The Family Game

Yoshimitsu Morita's 1983 Japanese film is about a middle-class family under examination pressure. When the younger son fails at school a private tutor is hired; the man who arrives uses unorthodox methods and disturbs the family's entire balance. The best-known formal choice is the dinner table. The family sits in a row along one side of it and the camera shoots them flat from the front; the arrangement says in a single image how formal their being together is. Yusaku Matsuda plays the tutor and his character is never fully explained. Morita keeps the humour cold; the film was read as a satire of the educational race and the consumer order of eighties Japan. Who it's for: those who like Japanese satire and formally bold eighties cinema. Who it's not for: viewers who want the characters' motives explained; the film deliberately refuses explanation.