Upended by Downsizing

By Manohla Dargis
Friday, March 13, 2009
NYT-Weekend Arts, C1

Dargis reviews the movie “Tokyo Sonata,” and criticizes it based on the Japanese director, Kiyoshi Kurosawa. The lede talks about Kurosawa’s fame in making horror films, “A genius of dread, known for his unnerving horror films and eerie thrillers, the wildly prolific Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa tends to ply his trade with spooky silences, a lived-in feel for everyday, droning life and a sense of social unease.”

Dargis then walks right into her “but” statement, “Though his latest to hit the American big screen, ‘Tokyo Sonata,’ looks like a family melodrama--if a distinctly eccentric variant on the typical domestic affair--there is more than a touch of horror to its story of a salary man whose downsizing sets off a series of cataclysmic events.”

One thing most movie critics don’t comment on much is the editing, and Dargis does a great job in making a point of how even though Kurosawa separated the family in the beginning of the movie, he brought them back together with his editing. “…which pivots on an ethereal rendition of Debussy‘s ‘Clair de Lune,’ he keeps the discordant layers of his composition in harmonious play.”

Dargis kicker talk about the father’s role in the movie and how it somehow unites the family at the end, “an economic crisis shakes the family up--it brings the father to his knees, lifts the mother, almost destroys one son and liberates the other--but it‘s art, useless art, that unites them.”

I like this review, because I am interested in Japanese made movies. I think they have so much emotion in them, and there are so many American movies, that everything seems so fake. But Japanese movies are very intense and actually have a real story to it. One can clearly see the directors’ message.