FILM NORIKO’S DINNER TABLE DIRECTOR SONO SION
Sono Sion’s Noriko’s Dinner Table (2005)
‘The family that eats together stays together’
‘The family that eats together stays together’
Sono Sion is probably best known in the west for the independent Japanese shocker Suicide Club (2001), a tale of consumerist fads and intergenerational conflict that takes as its fictional starting point the mass suicide of 54 schoolgirls at Tokyo’s busy Shinjuku station. Suicide Club was to be part of a trilogy of films based loosely on this central conceit but in the intervening years Sono has found it “in reality [. . .] very difficult” bringing this to fruition (he is currently releasing follow-up novels to some of his most personal film projects, a practice he initiated in 2002 with the book Suicide Circle: The Complete Edition). In September 2006, Eleven Arts released Noriko’s Dinner Table, Sono’s promised follow-up to Suicide Club and the second of three feature productions made by the director in 2005 alone (the others were Into a Dream and Strange Circus). On the international festival circuit the film had a modest run, winning the Don Quixote award at the 40th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, but it also proved highly divisive. Both The New York Times and The New York Sun dismissed the film as scrambled and overblown (writes Zoller Seitz, [Sono] “oversells the first half’s whimsical touches [. . .] and the second half’s spiral-of-doom emoting”), while Leslie Felperin, writing for the trade paper Variety, said that “the puzzle doesn’t quite form a complete picture by the end, which may leave genre fans frustrated but the arthouse crowd intrigued”. Meanwhile in the world of online fandom, where allegiances hold strong for the original as well as for such subcultural gems as Yamaguchi Yudai and Yamamoto Junichi’s Meatball Machine (also released in 2005), the film appears to lack the bite or pop-cultural tackiness of the original and is regarded nowhere near as highly.
Suicide Club revisited: the mass suicide as seen again in Noriko’s Dinner Table (2005)
The story revolves around a suburban family, the Shimabaras. Teenage sisters Yuka and Noriko are holed up in the Aichi city of Toyokawa where emotional and intellectual discord gradually drives both girls to ditch school and run away from home. First Noriko (Fukiishi Kazue), then later Yuka (Yoshitaka Yuriko), seek out the adult world of Tokyo where they pick up with a bizarre cult group, known only as the Family Circle. Under the leadership of Kumiko (Tsugumi), who shares a sort of Philip K. Dick-inflected philosophy of life in which its members sell fake realities to potential clients, the girls learn to forger their past identities and in doing become key players in a lucrative family-rental service, catering to an entire cityscape fractured by social disintegration. Back at home, Taeko (Miyata Sanae) tragically accepts responsibility for failing in her duty as a mother and takes her own life, leaving her mortified husband, Tetsuzo, to obsess over the fate of his girls until very literally the point of absolute exhaustion. He then hatches a plan to track down the Family Circle, with the intention of ‘hiring’ back his daughters in order to re-make the family.
References to the events and themes of Suicide Club (whose victims gathered in the cyber-support forum Haikyo.com, a fictional website that is actually accessible online) are made in service of a much broader discussion about family structure, family relationships, social organisation, and social change. The film invites a re-evaluation of the characteristics of stable family systems and consideration of the ways in which family structure, family relationships, social organisation, living arrangements inside and outside the familial home, and the autonomy of children are changed over time. Despite its hopeful final image, which manages to consign the Shimabara family to history whilst simultaneously honouring it for producing a free-thinking, sensible adult in Yuka, Noriko’s Dinner Table ultimately ends on a down-note in its critique of family units. There is no getting away from the painful truth that in all families something inevitably has to give, that — although parents work exceptionally hard to develop family cohesion, providing levels of commitment, support and interest that often go unparalleled until a child develops a unique support system of their own — inevitably complacency sets in. Here, it is the father, Tetsuzo (Mitsuishi Ken, whose performance is compelling), that seems to fail, not because he is rigidly disciplinarian, or too emotionally nurturant, but because he seems to have lost himself in the humanitarian values he engenders. Yet his reasons for tracking down Yuka and Noriko are absurdly egotistical: he needs to show them precisely what he is capable of.
I find myself in agreement when Sono hints that neither popular freedom-of-choice values, nor classical Confucian values, will save the traditional family. He goes on to make the potentially upsetting point that personal connections and familial relationships are transitory, that although we may not literally be rootless we are, ultimately, making this journey on our own. The point at which we realise this, in early adolescence, is the point at which, Sono seems to be saying, the family hits its inevitable crossroads. Like some of the finer Hollywood movies of the 1980s / 1990s — think Allan Moyle’s generation gap movie Pump up the Volume (1990) — Sono’s film finds solace in its proposal that families have expiration dates, beyond which the typical power relations of children and their parents naturally dissolve. It may end on a pessimistic note, but Sono makes it a liberating one, a hopeful sign for Yuka, the real star of the film, of a connected future.
References to the events and themes of Suicide Club (whose victims gathered in the cyber-support forum Haikyo.com, a fictional website that is actually accessible online) are made in service of a much broader discussion about family structure, family relationships, social organisation, and social change. The film invites a re-evaluation of the characteristics of stable family systems and consideration of the ways in which family structure, family relationships, social organisation, living arrangements inside and outside the familial home, and the autonomy of children are changed over time. Despite its hopeful final image, which manages to consign the Shimabara family to history whilst simultaneously honouring it for producing a free-thinking, sensible adult in Yuka, Noriko’s Dinner Table ultimately ends on a down-note in its critique of family units. There is no getting away from the painful truth that in all families something inevitably has to give, that — although parents work exceptionally hard to develop family cohesion, providing levels of commitment, support and interest that often go unparalleled until a child develops a unique support system of their own — inevitably complacency sets in. Here, it is the father, Tetsuzo (Mitsuishi Ken, whose performance is compelling), that seems to fail, not because he is rigidly disciplinarian, or too emotionally nurturant, but because he seems to have lost himself in the humanitarian values he engenders. Yet his reasons for tracking down Yuka and Noriko are absurdly egotistical: he needs to show them precisely what he is capable of.
I find myself in agreement when Sono hints that neither popular freedom-of-choice values, nor classical Confucian values, will save the traditional family. He goes on to make the potentially upsetting point that personal connections and familial relationships are transitory, that although we may not literally be rootless we are, ultimately, making this journey on our own. The point at which we realise this, in early adolescence, is the point at which, Sono seems to be saying, the family hits its inevitable crossroads. Like some of the finer Hollywood movies of the 1980s / 1990s — think Allan Moyle’s generation gap movie Pump up the Volume (1990) — Sono’s film finds solace in its proposal that families have expiration dates, beyond which the typical power relations of children and their parents naturally dissolve. It may end on a pessimistic note, but Sono makes it a liberating one, a hopeful sign for Yuka, the real star of the film, of a connected future.
30 August, 2008
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