Family Game

A subtly cruel satire on the Japanese obsession with corporate and academic success which blends striking visual compositions, pithy dialogue and absurdist humour. Matsuda plays a young private tutor hired by ambitious parents to cram their youngest son into the 'right' school. The father works all the hours God sends, while the wife busies herself with obsessive cleaning. Both are alienated from their sons, for whose benefit they are supposedly making these sacrifices, and the presence of the tutor opens up the cracks which the formalities of parental love and filial duty are meant to paper over. The juxtaposition of meticulously framed images with terse, ironic dialogue and explosions of slapstick violence exposes the frustrations generated by an unhealthy preoccupation with material aspiration and social status. Sogo Ishii ripped into similar issues with a chainsaw in Crazy Family, but Morita dissects equally tellingly with a scalpel.