Tokyo Sonata
Part of the BAMcinématek series Recent Favorites
Mon, Jun 15 at 4:30, 6:50, 9:15pm
Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa
With Teruyuki Kagawa, Kyoko Koizumi, Haruka Igawa, Yu Koyanagi Inowaki Kai
(2008) 119min
"Tokyo Sonata speaks to us, with feeling and passion, as one of the most eloquent statements on the world today that we are likely to see in this moviegoing year." —New York Observer
Recently laid off, husband and father Ryûhei keeps up the pretenses of being employed while actually idling his afternoons away in a park and fretting about his future. His family members, meanwhile, are alternately secretly pursuing a love of piano, enlisting in the US military, and being victimized in a hostage situation. Alternately bitter, comedic, and philosophical, Tokyo Sonata recalls the work of Ozu in its delicate, clear-eyed examination of a family in the midst of a breakdown.
LA Times on Tokyo Sonata
"Tokyo Sonata is bold, acutely observant and universal in its wide-ranging concerns and implications. Although it was surely conceived before the worldwide economic recession hit, its insights apply all the more forcefully now." More
New York Times on Tokyo Sonata
"Though [Kurosawa's] 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 salaryman whose downsizing sets off a series of cataclysmic events." More
Salon.com on Tokyo Sonata
"A work of tremendous passion, daring and delicacy." More