Family Game 家族ゲーム(1983)
Family Game is a film by Yoshimitsu Morita. This is an interesting newer Japanese film that I had wanted to see. Although it came out in 1983 I say it is newer because I pretty much stop in the 60s when it comes to Japanese films with a few exceptions, notably a film or two by Oshima Nagisa and Immamura Shohei and newer directors like Kore-eda Hirokzu and Itami Juzo (who actually played the father in this film). After a year I had managed to download it and was prompted to watch it by my friend who said he had seen it. I understand why it is one of the most influential films of the decade falling in line with what would become Itami Juzo’s decade releasing The Funeral, Tampopo, and Supermarket Woman.
Family Game in short is satire on the Japanese nuclear family. It portrays a family being connected not by their relationships but more so by the roles they are expected to play as a family. In no way is it realistic, instead it is an exaggeration that is metaphoric for Japanese life. The story is about a family consisting of a father, mother, older and younger brother. They all live in a remote industrial area in an apartment building that seems to only house single tenants who seem to only work at seedy clubs. The father is a hard working salaryman who cares to much about titles, the mother is a neglected housewife who lives for the happiness of the males in her life, the older son is accomplished and has been accepted into a prestigious high school, while the younger struggles in Jr. High school. The father decides to hire yet another tutor to help the youngest son to pass his exams so he too can be accepted into his brothers high school. The tutor is quite eccentric and is ridiculed because he is a student at a minor university. However, the tutor changes the boy’s attitude while the family holds together to an ending that is more metaphoric than real.
Interesting to me was the film`s style. The idea that the family is game, is expressed cinematically. In transition shots to scenes of the family we get shots of the brothers playing different games through the cuts, while all transitions to school scenes show an overhead view of the students doing P.E. games. More interesting is the fact that this is a family drama, and in terms of Japanese drama the best at the genre is Ozu Yasujiro who was known for his stylized dramas. Yet, Yoshimitsu’s film is an anti-thesis to Ozu. Rigid realism reigns for Ozu while over exaggerated metaphorism is the case for Yoshimitsu. Yet it is the shot compositions that this becomes most obvious. For Ozu his composition of his family members always had members facing each other. What Yoshimitsu does is set up his characters on an even plane in a horizontal line. This is punctuated when a neighbor comes for tea and is put off by the uncomfortableness of not being able to directly face the wife but instead is absurdly forced to be lined up with her. This is all then capitalized in a final dinner scene that erupts in the most aburd food fight. What he does is deconstruct the Japanese family in a way that Ozu did…just more absurdly. This again is repeated in a scene that sees a teacher announcing test scores and throwing the worst ones out of the window for students to fetch. The students in return respond enthusiastically running out of the class to fetch their failures.
I like Yoshimitsu idea of reducing a family to role-playing to a point where individual worth can only be found in one’s social standing. Yet the point of the tutor who comes into the family is to break up the formal structure as he no more than a new element introduced into the game. The characters are reduced to plastic figurines, and are really Ozu archetypes in terms of post modernism.
Yoshimitsu himself I think comes off interesting in his own character. He was a teen in the 60s, a time of radical movement in culture and I think Yoshimitsu coming into his own in the 80s as artist was disillusioned with Japanese ideals. The same can be said for Harauki Murakmai and Ryuichi Sakamoto who all of the same age represented in their respective arts the same sort of disillusionment.
