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Tokyo Sonata
REVIEW BY GENEVIEVE YUE
Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Country/Year: Japan, 2008
Opening: March 13
Where: New York and Los Angeles
DESPITE HIS REPUTATION AS A LEADING J-Horror auteur, Kiyoshi Kurosawa has tended to eschew thie grisly dirills and spectral manifestations of his peers for a more diffuse atmosphere of mystery and dread. Even at his most terrifying, his approach has always been one of genre estrangement, and films like Cure and Pulse are unsettling less for dieir shock-laden effects than the loneliness and isolation within which they're embedded. There are no ghosts in the family drama Tokyo Sonata, no senseless violence (though, typical of a Kurosawa film, diere are characters driven to suicide), but the spare, emptied-out cityscapes and sterile interiors clearly belong to the director.
This is a Tokyo story of a different sort, both larger than the metropolis and smaller than the middle-class abode of the Sasakis, the family at the center of Kurosawa's film. When the administrative job of father Ryuhei (Teruyuki Kagawa)...