Tokyo Sonata

Globalization claims another victim in the opening scenes of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Tokyo Sonata. Middle-aged administrator Ryûhei Sasaki (Teruyuki Kagawa) is fired when his company moves operations to China. Deeply humiliated, the stoic father and husband can't get himself to tell his wife and two sons about the layoff.

Instead, he continues to leave for work each morning, wearing suit and tie, briefcase in hand, to spend the day on employment lines or in the park, warming himself by burning oil drums, eating free meals from the soup kitchen. He befriends an old high school buddy who enacts the same charade. Through example, Ryuhei learns the tricks of the phony employed: setting up fake calls and inviting each other over for bogus business dinners.

In the meantime, Ryuhei's equally stoic wife Megumi (Kyôko Koizumi) struggles to hold her family together. She cooks elaborate meals and allows her husband's ruse to continue. Precocious Kenji (Inowaki Kai), the film's truth-telling conscience, embezzles lunch money to take forbidden piano lessons. Eighteen-year-old Takashi (Yû Koyanagi) voluntarily joins the American military to do something, anything, to avoid what he perceives as his father's futile existence.

Kurosawa coats this dire domestic melodrama with a thin veneer of desperate humor, wonderfully modulated by an outstanding cast. The beauty of Tokyo Sonata lies in the elegance in which the film dances between humor and a profound examination of tightly circumscribed lives.

In one scene, Megumi has fallen asleep on the couch, waiting for her husband's late return. When he finally arrives, she lifts her arms: "Pull me up." But Ryuhei, tired himself, has already disappeared into the bedroom. For a moment, it's a joke, played for laughs-- but Kurosawa holds the camera on Megumi, then closes in on her face: "Somebody, please pull me up!" she pleads, and now her desolation is anything but funny. If you've steered yourself into such a desperate dead end that you wish your entirely life was a dream, how do you start over?

Tokyo Sonata (2009)

Starring: Teruyuki Kagawa, Yu Koyanagi, Inowaki Kai, Haruka Igawa, Koji Yakusho
Directed by: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Produced by: Yasushi Kotani, Michael J. Werner, Yukie Kito
Running Time: 1 hr. 59 min.
Distributors: Regent Releasing
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic elements and brief strong language.