This family drama from 53-year-old Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa - no relation to Akira - is quite different from the horror genre in which he made his name. It is far from perfect, ending melodramatically and arguably even sentimentally, but it is still a powerfully direct piece of cinema, a movie with a rich vein of compassion, humour and narrative drive. It won a prize at last year's Cannes film festival, but 2009 is the year to see it, delivering, as it does, a premonition of hard times and a fierce satire on what happens to the salaryman's family life when the worst happens, how easily he can go into denial, and how denial has been bred into us by our former lives of prosperity and success.
The movie is set around five years ago and centres on Ryuhei (Teruyuki Kagawa), a loyal and energetic company man who has lost his job as part of a management shakeup that he did much to initiate. Desperate to avoid the humiliation of admitting this to his wife, Ryuhei leaves the house every day in his suit, and spends his time queueing for free food from a charity cart and applying for unattainable jobs. His wife Megumi (Kyoko Koizumi) soon suspects what has happened and must now shoulder a grim new domestic burden: pretending not to know. Their eldest son Takashi (Yu Koyanagi) also cannot find work and infuriates his father by applying to join the US military as an international volunteer - an implied rebuke to his father's inadequacies as the traditional Japanese patriarch-provider. The couple's younger son Kenji (Inowaki Kai) has been brutally forbidden on financial grounds from learning the piano, but sneaks out to buy lessons with his lunch money: a life of diurnal subterfuge much like his father's.
Tokyo Sonata reminded me a little of two French movies about salaryman-delusion: Laurent Cantet's Time Out (2001) and Nicole Garcia's The Adversary (2002), both based on the same real-life story of an unemployed doctor who lived a lie and engineered his own tragedy. Like those movies, Tokyo Sonata shows how prosperous men put their careers at the centre of their identities and suffer agonies when those careers disappear - and also it shows that, in a bizarre way, pretending to have a job is actually not that different from having a job: the rituals of leaving for work, coming home from work and generally imposing your family authority can easily be maintained, and for longer than you think. Denial and pretence were there from the beginning. Kurosawa wittily shows how Ryuhei and fellow jobless sufferer Kurosu (Kanji Tsuda) find that, for a while, their bogus salaryman lives are rather pleasant: they are still the wage-earning lords of their cowed domestic fiefdom, but do not have the bother of actually having to go into work. Ryûhei's lies poison his family life, but redemption is to come from Kenji's piano lessons in a quietly moving final scene. This film is an intelligent, unobtrusive pleasure.