The critics weigh in from Cannes

I’ve spent the better part of a morning reading various reviews and reports from this year’s Cannes International Film Festival... of course with an eye to Japanese films, so I thought I would pass my findings on to you.

The first of the two big films this year is Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s shift to straight drama “Tokyo Sontata”, the story of how keeping up the façade of a happy and normal home life proves difficult for a modern day Japanese family. Dad (Teruyuki Kagawa) has just been downsized and spends his days trying to maintain the illusion of employment. Mom (Kyoko Koizumi) is harbouring a sadness and dissatisfaction that she keeps at bay by rigouressly keeping house. Their two sons Takashi (Yu Koyanagi) and Kenji (Kai Inowaki) float on the periphery of their parets lives, making their way for themselves. Young Kenji spends his time attending secret piano lessons, fostering a dream that he keeps from his parents.

I have said it before, but I’ve always been a fan of the less horrific aspects of Kurosawa’s filmography, so I was very pleased to read the good press on “Tokyo Sonata”. Tom Mes from Midnight Eye feels the horror is still present, but not in the Kurosawa’s early ghostly touches, but in the disassociation exhibited within the family and finishes his review by saying that “Tokyo Sonata would be unbearable if it weren't the director's masterpiece.” Derek Elley from Variety is a little more cautious saying that “nothing here that hasn’t been dealt with in other Japanese movies, pic benefits considerably from its pitch-perfect performances.” Finally James Rocchi at Cinematical feels that Kurosawa’s film has “been one of the most unexpected surprises of the Un Certain Regard selection at Cannes this year, and one of the most delightful.”

The second film that people are anxious to hear about is the omnibus film “Tokyo!” by directors Michel Gondry, Leos Carax, and Bong Joon-Ho. Justin Chang from Variety says “Tokyo!” is “playfully ragged attempt to capture (and skewer) the multiple shifting identities of its eponymous city,” while Maggie Lee at The Hollywood Reporter feels the three films “range from teasingly surreal to unsubtly grotesque. The film would uniformly improve with at least 10 minutes trimmed from each segment to sharpen the narrative focus.” Most of the ink (or I guess in this case pixels) seems to be dedicated to Gondry’s entry “ Interior Design” about a neglected girlfriend who literally turns into a piece of furniture, but I’m more excited about Carax’s much more human take on the kaiju genre “Merde”.

But leave it up to Todd Brown at Twitchfilm.net to bring us news from the trenches of the festival’s marketplace. In his daily updates from Cannes he gives us the low down on “Guilala Strikes Back: Toyako Summit Crisis” (very raw, very goofy and very fun), Koki Mitani’s “The Magic Hour” (seems to run a touch long but is absolutely golden for the bulk of its running time), Shinya Tsukamoto’s “Nightmare Detective 2” (a good bit more experimental than the initial installment and is much more an exploration of the character than the sort of good guy / bad guy pursuit that the first film was) and Fumihiko Sori’s reboot of the Zatoichi franchise “Ichi” (a serious chanbara film – and a very well made one, at that).

Here’s hoping that some or all of these films make their way to this year’s Toronto International Film Festival so that The Pow-Wow can have our own look.