I recently heard a report about the astonishing increase in crime in Japan, and the fact that a significant amount of crime is being committed by the disaffected elderly. Appar-ently Japan has been experiencing a long and steady economic decline that perhaps some of us have only become aware of given the global depression now upon us.

The effects of this decline is the topic taken up in TOKYO SONATA, Kiyoshi Kurosa-wa’s distressingly superb CANNES Jury Prize winner. Like the equally brilliant, TIME-OUT, by French director Laurent Cantet (THE CLASS), this film concerns itself with the dilemma faced by the middle management man, who finds himself suddenly and inexplicably downsized. In this case, we have a patriarch, Ryuhei Sasaki (Teruyuki Kagawa) who has worked his way up to a vague supervisory position at a big corporation that's decided to outsource to China. Like many a cinematic and real life worker bee hero, he is overwhelmed with shame at the fact of his sudden unemployment, deceiving his family by dressing up and going to work every day. This increasingly dysfunctional family consists of his wife Megumi (Kyoko Koizumi), teenage son Takashi (Yu Koyanagi) and surprise piano prodigy Kenji (Kai Inowaki).

We follow along as Ryuhei suffers humiliation after humiliation in search of work: at one point being told that it is 100% impossible that he will ever find a position at the same level. He meets another gainfully unemployed character who programs his cell phone to ring every 15 minutes so that he'll appear to be busy. When he gets home from the days meanderings he’s even more of a bully than usual: refusing to let Kenji have piano lessons and fighting with his older son, who decides his best option is to join the U.S. military and fight in Iraq. Ultimately he is forced to take a job cleaning at a mall and when he bumps into his wife, the climatic family implosion is accelerated.

As a portrait of the collapse of Japanese economic and social structures, the film is both accurate and meditative, that is to say it’s not polemical or even instructive. It asks questions that have all been posed previously about work and identity, family dynamics, and the overall breakdown of society. But there is also an injection of absurdist wit that drives the film off the rails just when you think you should be absorbed by the tragedy of it all. Imagine, for example, a boy using his lunch money to sneak piano lessons with a gorgeous piano teacher. Set pieces like the one referred to above with the phony meetings and others with former office managers now janitors changing out of their suits in bathroom stalls. You can sort of imagine where the film is going, overall, but you never have any idea exactly what’s coming next, how they’ll get there. It’s what makes this film much more than satisfying but a lyrical exploration of survival amidst a crumbling country and how maybe Claude Debussy will save us.

Directed by John Maybury; written by Sharman Macdonald; produced by Sarah Rad-clyffe and Rebekah Gilbertson; Director of Photography, Jonathan Freeman; edited by Emma E. Hickox. Released by Capitol Films.

With:Teruyuki Kagawa (Ryuhei Sasaki), Kyoko Koizumi (Megumi), Yu Koyanagi (Takashi), Kai Inowaki (Kenji), Haruka Igawa (Kaneko), Kanji Tsuda (Kurosu) and Koji Yakusho (Thief).