NYFF. Tokyo Sonata.

"Tokyo Sonata [site; UK] is a film of a profound sadness, not peppered lightly across the picture's surface, but wedged so deep into its marrow that it's impossible to shake off," writes Andrew Schenker. "A thoroughgoing critique of the demands of patriarchy in contemporary Japan, Kiyoshi Kurosawa's film unfolds not as political tract, but as affecting family drama, a balancing act that impresses through its skillful subsuming of abstract thematics into the particularities of individual lives."

"After a retreat to the atmospheric and spectral Loft and Retribution that reinforce Kiyoshi Kurosawa's reputation as a horror filmmaker, Tokyo Sonata continues in the vein of his idiosyncratically personal (and arguably, more interesting), yet equally unsettling films that began with Bright Future," writes Acquarello.

Updated through 10/22.

"That Kurosawa masks his social critique in ghostly, vague affectation often gives him the tag of Abstract Auteur, though compared with willfully obscure directors like Lucrecia Martel and Claire Denis, he's far more digestible," writes Michael Koresky in Reverse Shot. Tokyo Sonata "moves away from his recent forays into toying with horror and sci-fi conventions, but it's no less generic. Playing off the Japanese domestic drama, even seemingly purposely referencing Ozu in its title, Tokyo Sonata applies the trademark Kiyoshi Kurosawa tactics (hazy character motivations, eerily alienating mise-en-scène) to distract from an essentially straightforward narrative. Surely this is a film of immense misdirection, but Kurosawa's always been something of a trickster, and Tokyo Sonata tricks us in an occasionally edifying way: it makes us look so closely at recognizable people—in this case one urban family living in quiet malcontent—that they become unfamiliar, only to then remind us that they were not all that different from us in the first place."

Michael J Anderson and Lisa K Broad argue that the film "caps what has been a very strong year for new Japanese cinema in New York.... In Tôkyô sonata, Kurosawa challenges the Japanese male, the stability of the familial unit, the economic health according to which many of its institutions have been re-orientated and Japan's (seemingly) diminishing place on the world stage. While Adrift in Tokyo (the Japanese family), Dainipponjin (its cultural mythology and the status of the male) and Fine, Totally Fine (again the family and also the more universal subject of maturation) all address topics of Japan's institutional health and self-image, no film this year can claim the comprehensiveness and ambition of Tôkyô sonata's diagnosis."

"Kurosawa's narrative is, superficially, nothing particularly unique, a deadpan depiction of modern disconnection filtered through the lens of a nuclear family's slow disintegration," writes Nick Schager in Slant. "But as with much of his work, it's the means to the end that are profound, his indirect aesthetics creating palpable unease, as if reality had imperceptibly, and yet fundamentally, shifted slightly to the right or left, leaving everything cockeyed and unstable."

"Kurosawa's sonata, lacking the vocals of a proper cantata, dares to show us our own voiceless world," writes Ed Champion. "Without our identities, we're reduced to pretending that things will work out, bandying about in service sector jobs, and ignoring the heartfelt passions that can be readily observed in others. This film is a damning indictment of humanity's position in the present age."

For Alison Willmore at IFC, "the indirect social critiques of Pulse and Bright Future are far more resonant than anything in this subdued and stale offering."

Kevin Kelly talks with Kurosawa for the SpoutBlog.

Online viewing tip. FilmCatcher interviews Kurosawa.

Earlier: Reviews from Cannes.

Update, 10/17: Daniel Kasman talks with Kurosawa in the Auteurs' Notebook.

Update, 10/20: Online viewing tip. Kevin Lee has video of the Q&A with Kurosawa.

Update, 10/22: "Tokyo Sonata is as crisp and latently menacing a film as [Kurosawa's] ever made," writes Vadim Rizov at the House Next Door. "It's pure sensual pleasure, and what it's 'about' is irrelevant to me."

Posted by dwhudson at October 16, 2008 8:26 AM