A Tear in the Social Fabric (Kiyoshi Kurosawa)

Here is a profile of Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa I wrote for the Sydney Film Festival website ahead of tonight's Australian Premiere of Tokyo Sonata.

Idiosyncratic Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa occupies a unique space in global cinephilia. To some, who will have seen his films on DVD, he is an icon of J-horror, the genre which took the West by storm in the late 90s with the release (and subsequent remakes) of horror films such as Hideo Nakata's The Ring and Takashi Shimizu's The Grudge.

To those lucky enough to attend international film festivals, he may also be known as a prolific auteur whose films often grace the programs of the world's most prestigious events, witness Kurosawa's 1999 hat-trick, when License to Live played Berlin, Charisma played Cannes and Barren Illusion played Venice.

While Kiyoshi Kurosawa is far from being a household name in Australia, film lovers will soon get a chance to discover the work of this immensely gifted artist. Hot off winning the Jury Prize in Cannes' Un Certain Regard sidebar, the dysfunctional family drama Tokyo Sonata is screening in competition at the Sydney Film Festival, presented by the filmmaker himself.

The versatile director achieved international recognition with 1997's Cure, a post-modern dissertation on identity disguised as a genuinely terrifying serial killer movie. Apart from a few horror films such as Pulse and Séance, few of his films have seen the inside of a cinema outside of Japan.

One exception is France, where theatrical distributors have championed Kurosawa's work since the early days. First in the small cinemas of my hometown of Lyon, then in the arthouse cinemas of Tokyo, I sat through these weird and wonderful films, sometimes forgetting to breathe through entire precisely choreographed sequences.

While he is best known for this horror films, Kurosawa is in fact one of Japan's most versatile filmmakers. The director of over 30 feature films in 30 years, he has tried his hand at many things, from soft-core porn (The Excitement of the Do-Re-Mi-Fa Girl) to gangster flicks (Suit Yourself or Shoot Yourself).

His films often revolve around the intrusion of a foreign life form in the otherwise harmonious lives of the protagonists, from a mysterious tree in the metaphysical eco-thriller Charisma to a jellyfish in the mystically-inclined 2003 Cannes entry Bright Future, from the ghosts in the machine haunting techno-thriller Pulse to the protagonist's exact double in Doppelganger.

The characters in Kurosawa's stories fall under the spell of these otherworldly beings, leading them to question the everyday myths they take for granted, their very place in society. Like the monolith in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, these foreign elements cast a long shadow over our actions and thoughts, revealing hidden truths about our world, the existence - perhaps - of something bigger than ourselves.

Japanese society obeys strict laws and a rigid structure, but in Kurosawa's dystopia, it takes very little to break the social contract. The erruption of the supernatural - or even the semblance of the supernatural - frees men and women from their responsibilities and renders meaningless the rules that ordinarily keep them in line.

While it is devoid of supernatural elements and includes occasional forays into screwball comedy, Tokyo Sonata is not a total departure from Kurosawa's genre offerings of the past 10 years. In fact, it could be his most frightening film to date. Thematically, it contains many of the motifs present in the director's horror films: alienation in contemporary Japanese families, the fragility of the social fabric, the incapacity to articulate our fears.

Adapted from an original screenplay by Australian writer-director Max Mannix, Tokyo Sonata tells the story of a family quietly imploding under the weight of its efforts to keep up appearances. When a loyal salaryman loses his job, he is initially unable to share the truth with his wife or his sons. For a while, he pretends to go to work every day. He slowly comes to realise that his role as a husband and father - his very identity - is now bereft of its foundations.

Kurosawa's work shares common themes with the cinema of Michael Haneke (Hidden, Funny Games), most notably its hypothesis that what society elevates as a model of accomplishment - the harmonious middle-class family - is really a fragile illusion, and that unseen chaos lurks just beneath the surface of civilisation.

In his recent horror films, that chaotic element was personified, manifesting itself through the presence of ghosts. Unlike the ghosts of Western horror films however, these aren't vicious creatures to be fought and exterminated. Instead, Kurosawa's ghosts are an unsettling presence, something with which we need to cohabit, a mirror not of the evils of our world but of the demons within ourselves.

Like Haneke, Kurosawa is able to charge even the most banal scene of domestic life with a sense of dread. Elaborate sound design and counter-intuitive framing conspire to create an atmosphere rich with possibility. From the smallest of disruptions, a tiny tear in the social fabric, everything can unravel.

Paring the narrative down to its bare essentials, he is able to cast a cold hard gaze on Japanese society. His films borrow from the codes of formulaic, commercial movies but refuse to stick to the confines of a genre, preferring instead to augment his simple stories with layers of sociological and philosophical observations.

There is something unnerving in Kurosawa's cinema, something which gets under the viewer's skin. His characters seem to interact with an unseen force field, a gateway to a parallel universe not unlike our own. Like the screen onto which his films are projected, this invisible barrier often reveals more about ourselves, when we peer though it, than is entirely comfortable.

A Tear in the Social Fabric (Kiyoshi Kurosawa)