X Kazoku (家族 X X Household). Director and screenplay : Koki Yoshida; photo: Takayuki Shida; interpreters : Kaho Minami, Tomorow Taguchi, Tomahirō Kaku, Mariko Tsutsui, Jun Murakami; duration: 90 '; 61th Berlin International Film Festival Links: Berlinale Catalogue-
score ★ ★ ★ 1 / 2 The small gestures of everyday rituals of everyday life, reveal the growing desperation within the microcosm of a family. The director insists on symptoms rather than on the diagnosis and track the inexorable progression of the process of alienation, along with systematic rigor every gesture that the three (almost) strangers do.
The mother who arranges the napkins on the table fanatic precision, the father who puts in order his wife's slippers after being intentionally bump and immediately left the house locking the door behind her, the child who falls every morning at home and it is clear that parents know nothing of how and where spends his nights.
Koki Yoshida is on his second feature film (the first was in 2008 Shorei X, another story of monotonous routine of a man and his schizophrenic mother) and seems to successfully reach its goal: starting from the specific case, alludes to the broader context of a society in which the interactions between individuals are marked by a deep malaise.
His film is a perfect machine. Dialogues rare, almost non-existent, mostly focusing on trivial issues, such as a water dispenser, a tension that is growing and highlights the desperation of the three: the mother embodies the perfect desperate housewives that gradually changes from preparing lunches and dinners that no one appreciates a hysterical episodes of bulimia, the father loses his concentration at work and, in fact, end up being isolated from colleagues (and perhaps to see that compromised his work), the son in the only moment in which a verbal contact with the mother a bit 'more intense than usual, the half-hidden by a curtain and does not meet her gaze. The growing alienation within the four walls. What are those of a prison-house, a house-torture the poor woman, a location carefully chosen by the director, as he himself said, to ensure that the three characters you could act without actually interacting with each other .
the balcony plants watered and cared for with devotion, at some point die, forgotten. Even the regulator produces molds metaphorical.
The director did not reveal if there was a trauma, or rather a gradual, daily, but finally removed to cancel the communication between the three. It is precisely this mechanism, the emotional crescendo of every gesture / sign of weakness that gradually affects the sensitivity of the viewer, makes the identification is always (dramatically) powerful. Kazoku X represents any family could be the family of each of us.
One thing however in my opinion is that of the typical Japanese social control that emerges from the film: the family lives in a typical middle class suburb of of Tokyo, in order houses and similar to each other. At regular intervals, the mother takes household waste, which should be carefully differentiated, in the place of collection. And here sometimes feels embarrassed in front of the station (perfect housewife or maybe even a little below her in desperate ...) for its inadequate separation of waste. Meanwhile, the nearby monitor, note that the woman's son returned home in the morning and asks questions to which the mother, awkwardly shameful, can not answer.
A beautiful sequence shot - organized in a manner almost theatrical, with people who appear and disappear from the picture, leaving home, entering the car, at intervals of space / time so regular that it seems almost a dance - accompanied by the some points along the narrow streets of the neighborhood coming back with shopping bags and the sounds around her grow to a peak and then silenced altogether. The woman is now insensitive to-communicative. After destroying objects at home with hysterical fury, goes out and wanders the streets. The husband will recover, a few hours later, crashed on the table in a café. The last image that gives us the director brings together the three characters together in one space (visual): parents returning to their car and their son, he went out to look for his mother on a bicycle. One could perhaps suggest that the dramatic event of the escape of the woman might have led to - or can determine in the future - positive changes in relations between the three (giving hope for recovery, in general / social, of a communication failure), but their profiles to silent, in the frame-enclosed cage, does not seem to give much space to do so. [CB - 61th Berlin International Film Festival - February 2011]
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