Kazoku Geemu
Japan,
1983, 107 min
Shown in 1984
CREDITS
- dir
-
Yoshimitsu Morita
- prod
-
Shiro Sasaki, Yu Okada
- scr
-
Yoshimitsu Morita
- cam
-
Yonezo Maeda
- editor
-
Akimasa Kawashima
- cast
-
Yusaku Matsuda, Ichirota Miyagawa, Junichi Tsujita, Saori Yuki, Juzo Itami
Yoshimitsu Morita’s fifth feature, winner of the Best Film Award in Japan for 1983, securely establishes this young director as a satirist. The sensibility is totally modern and flies in the face of the conventional wisdom that says the Japanese are too straight-laced to have a feeling for self-parody. Even the title The Family Game implies that the middle-class characters who are Morita’s subjects are “playing” at traditional roles. At first glance their situation appears typical. But the younger son, Shigeyuki, shows no interest in school so, typically, the parents hire a tutor to help him achieve. The tutor, Yoshimoto, however, proves to be a very unusual fellow, and here the traditional images collapse. Not necessarily qualified to coach academic subjects, Yoshimoto employs techniques more like those of the gangster or homosexual underworld to “persuade” his young charge to mend his slovenly habits. Director Morita plays with the shock value of the tutor’s methods and intensifies his satirical message with bizarre framing (the family line up to eat their meals along one side of the table, rather than facing each other across it), deadpan food fights and sexual innuendo. If Yasujiro Ozu’s many films of family relationships and ritualized, mouth-watering meals, such as An Autumn Afternoon and The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice, have created an indelible image of the Japanese family unit as reserved, considerate and gourmet, Morita will overturn it all with havoc-wreaking slapstick likely to bring on indigestion.
—Audie Bock
FACTOID #65
The combined running time for all the films in the Festival is approximately 310,000 minutes. Or to put it another way, 5,167 hours. That’s about 215 days of viewing, 24 hours a day, with no breaks.
