Just finished watching "Tokyo Sonata" by Kiyoshi Kurosawa. For me, the overall experience and message of the film was heart-wrenching, yet the story was so lightly and cleanly told that it never felt emotionally burdensome or psychologically stressful (as I've been experiencing lately in watching commercial films).
Without a doubt, the most joyful experience in the film is that of a little boy discovering music. From his first glimpse of another child studying piano at home on his way to school, to his entreaty of his father to study piano, denied; from his saving lunch money to buy a keyboard and pay for his own lessons, to the beating his father gives him for lying about it; and ultimately, to the discovery of his being a true prodigy (shimmeringly expressed through his performance of "Claire du Lune" in the end).
The end of the film seems to tell us that this was what the whole film was about, all along - that somehow, if the boy's father - (who argues that the piano teacher is only calling him a 'prodigy' because 'that's how they make money' and there's no way he and his wife could have had a child who is a 'prodigy') - had taken his son's instincts seriously, that none of the problems in the film would have had occurred in the first place.
Yet the music, in fact, is not what the film is about - or at least, that's not how it rolls out on screen. It appears to be about a man who has lost his job, who goes to great lengths to keep his family from finding out. Initially, he bonds with another man who has become an expert at pretending he has a job, who later ends up committing suicide and homicide when he and his wife die of gas poisoning in his house. Our protagonist then goes from one humiliating interview to another until his older son, who insists on enlisting in the American army as one of the hundred-some Japanese fighting in the Middle East, confronts him with the truth of his actions. And at that point he gets a job cleaning toilets.
Tokyo Sonata is chock-full of tongue-in-cheek drama, and halfway or so through the film, this begins to appear in a way that feels improvisational. The father bumps into his wife while wearing his sanitation outfit, runs from her, and somehow ends up getting hit by a truck, his body plastered against the curb throughout the night. In the meantime, we see via a "Run Lola Run" flashback-intersection that the wife had been fending off a robber who broke into their house and tied her up before taking her on the road. The little boy, out alone, stumbles upon another little boy hiding from his father, and they embark on a run together, with the second boy's father chasing, and colleagues in tow like government agents.
But all of this is painted in a humorous way. The robber turns out to be a harmless, incompetent failure of a man who's robbing for the first time, and he and the mother of the story end up bonding in a seashore shack. We start to understand that the story is about failure. The robber has failed at everything he's ever tried: "I don't get along with people," he says. The mother conjectures, "What if I could have a completely new life starting tomorrow? That would be wonderful," later sobbing at the sight of a star over the night ocean horizon.
And here, in the end, the "Claire du Lune" performance shows us that if the father had only trusted that he had a son who was a prodigy from the beginning, that none of the terrible things would have happened. He would have understood that as a family, they were not a failure, but a success.
There's one part of the film that I find mysterious and am still trying to connect to all else. It can't be a coincidence that Kurosawa decided to shoot the scene of the father falling asleep in front of a TV - with his wife calling his name gently - in a mystical way. There's a very gradual, floaty push-in shot towards him sitting in front of the TV, as if to say, 'something very important is being revealed,' while the newscaster notes that a few years earlier, China was #1 in the world in terms of producing coal, and #6 in terms of consuming oil. And that in recent years, China's oil consumption has gotten higher and higher. It's as if Kurosawa wanted us to pay close attention to this just before the man's wife reaches him and wakes him up, at which point he stares at her with fear, still worried about being discovered in his joblessness.
The next time a newscaster is saying something important, it's about the return of the 100-some Japanese soldiers fighting on behalf of America in the Middle East. Sometime later, the older son writes his mother a letter explaining that he wants to continue fighting. Earlier in the film, he criticizes his father for not being able to "give them security" (thus resulting in his father's taking the job as a toilet cleaner).
Surely there is talk in here of Japan having no military of their own, depending on the US, and squashed, in some sense, between the US and China. Maybe Tokyo Sonata, with its all-surmounting child musical prodigy, is a metaphor for creativity as a final outlet for Japanese strength?
