Tokyo Sonata

THE LATEST sober film from sometime horror director Kiyoshi Kurosawa (no relation to Akira) begins with a decent attempt to breathe life into a fairly ancient cliche. We meet Ryuhei Sasaki (Teruyuki Kagawa), a hard- working salary man at a Tokyo firm, on the day he learns that, following outsourcing to China, he is to be made redundant.

What do proud family men do in such situations? What did the protagonist of Laurent Cantet's great Time Outdo? Sasaki, of course, hides the sad news from his wife (Kyoko Koizumi) and continues to leave the house every morning with an empty briefcase.

These things do, I suppose, happen, and the two leads make something of the very familiar situation. Koizumi embodies quiet frustration as her character goes through the rituals of domestic life and Kagawa plays out moments of comedy with some subtlety.

As Tokyo Sonataprogresses, however, a terrible realisation gradually dawns on the viewer. We discover that the couple's eldest son is disaffected with modern life and wishes to join the US army. Order has broken down in the youngest boy's school and – in obscene defiance of the traditional Japanese hierarchies – the students now bully the teachers. Then, as the film lurches into its last third, a burglar breaks into the family home and, after indulging in some unnecessary slapstick, begins droning on about his own existential despair.

Oh, no. Tokyo Sonatais, it seems, A State of the Nation Movie. Worse than that, it is a film whose entire plot has been, as we used to say, ripped from the headlines. Such beasts can have some use, but the various social issues are bundled together with such disregard for narrative order that the film ends up playing like a dull magazine article on the decline of Tokyo. No thank you.