Tokyo Sonata

Ryuhei, in middle age, is made redundant and does not tell his family. Every morning he puts on his suit and leaves the house, spends the day queuing with the unemployed, and comes home in the evening to go on playing the head of the household. In the same house are his wife, an older son who wants to enlist, and a younger boy secretly taking piano lessons. The film is not interested in unemployment. It is interested in the family as a performance kept running: all four are hiding something, and when they sit down at the table each plays a part. The form moves through the first half in fixed, quiet, precise frames; in the second half it comes apart unexpectedly and nearly changes genre. That break is the most argued-over thing about it. This is Kiyoshi Kurosawa's work. He came from horror, and applies that craft to the dinner table here: half-open doors, empty corridors, figures standing at the back of the frame. The film won the Jury Prize in Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 2008. Teruyuki Kagawa plays the father and Kyoko Koizumi the mother. Who it is for: viewers who like Japanese family drama and stories of the middle class after a crash. Who it is not for: anyone who needs a consistent tone. The sudden events of the last stretch pull the film away from realism, and that is not for everybody.