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The Family Game
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The Family Game
The Family Game (Japanese: 家族ゲーム, Hepburn: Kazoku Gēmu) is a 1983 Japanese comedy and family drama film directed by Yoshimitsu Morita. It follows the story of a nuclear family of four whose father hires a tutor for the younger son, a distracted and low-ranking middle school student who will soon be taking his high school entrance exam. The idiosyncratic tutor soon becomes a father figure for the boy, as the father is distant and unfeeling. Through his interactions with the family, he shakes up the emotional shallowness and artificiality that ties them together. The "game" of the title refers to family interactions based on the roles that each member is expected to play and not on genuine emotional ties. It was the first major film by the director and is an example of postmodern cinema. The film contains elements of black humor and social satire.
The Family Game is considered one of the best Japanese films by film critics. Kinema Junpo, the premiere film magazine of Japan, ranked it as the 10th best Japanese film of all time (in 2009), the best Japanese film of the 1980s (in 2018), and the best Japanese film of the year (in 1983). The film was also selected as the best Japanese film of 1983 by the BFI. The movie missed the Japan Academy Prize for the Best Picture (losing out to Palme d'Or Winner The Ballad of Narayama).
The Numata family consists of the father, Kōsuke (Juzo Itami); mother, Chikako (Saori Yuki); and two sons, Shinichi (Jun'ichi Tsujita) and Shigeyuki (Ichirōta Miyagawa). The family lives together in a small apartment located in a newly built complex of reclaimed land in Tokyo Bay. Mr. Numata is a salaryman who is physically and emotionally absent. Mrs. Numata is a stay-at-home mom who is devoid of other relationships or hobbies and is emotionally drained from caring for her two teenage sons. Shinichi, the elder son, is in a first-rate high school and makes his father proud. Shigeyuki, the younger son, is nearing the end of junior high school and will soon be taking the high school entrance exam. However, Shigeyuki's grades are poor, and he is only interested in roller coasters. He is also bullied at school by a group of fellow students, led by his one-time best friend.
The father has very high expectations for his children - they must go to a top high school which must then be followed by a prestigious national university, etc. He had hired multiple private tutors for Shigeyuki to no avail. He finds a new tutor, Yoshimoto (Yūsaku Matsuda), for Shigeyuki and places all responsibilities for his exam on him. Yoshimoto is eccentric; however, he fills in the role of father that Mr. Numata has vacated. He kisses Shigeyuki on the cheek and sits close to him to hold conversations in a near whisper; he also hits Shigeyuki to assert discipline. He makes it clear to Shigeyuki that his attention, concern and even affection are devoted to him. Even though Yoshimoto is a seventh-year student from a third-rate university, Shigeyuki’s marks improve significantly under his guidance. Yoshimoto also teaches Shigeyuki basic self-defense, which Shigeyuki puts to use against his main school bully, who was once his best friend. Eventually he passes the exam for the high school. At a family dinner celebration, with all five main characters present, a food fight breaks out and Yoshimoto begins to riot, throwing spaghetti around wildly, pouring wine indiscriminately on the table and hitting the Numatas.
The family drama is a popular and influential film genre in Japan. Films in the genre tell stories in which many of the main characters are members of the same family. The stories revolve around how the family members respond to challenges. Both Yasujirō Ozu and Mikio Naruse, amongst the very best of Japan’s “golden age,” worked often in the genre. Almost all of Ozu’s post-war films were family dramas. Yoji Yamada and Hirokazu Kore-eda, amongst the most famous directors of their generation, have also directed many acclaimed family dramas.
Japanese family dramas are often about the deterioration of family ties. Pre-war films frequently attributed blame for this loss to the forces of urbanization and economic modernization which led to a decline in family cohesion (as in Ozu's The Only Son). Post-war films often criticized the younger generation’s disrespect towards their parents, with the parents sometimes portrayed as paragons of devotion (as in Kinoshita's Tragedy of Japan). In the postmodern cinema, blame can shift to the “salaryman," the typical, white-collared salaried employee, who is shown to be a neglectful or ineffectual father in many films, including The Family Game. These fathers are weak and work-oriented and avoid their family obligations; the children are not able to depend on them for emotional support or moral guidance.
Acoustically, the film was recorded very close to the actors – with microphones that could capture the softest ambient sounds and magnify them so that they would interfere with the ability of the characters to communicate – highlighting the alienation of the characters. Another alienating technique utilized by the filmmakers in two scenes was to make all sounds inaudible except for the ambient sounds – thereby making the character’s voices inaccessible to the audience; this happens first in a conversation between Shinichi and a female classmate, and then again when Shinichi and mother are listening to and talking about an American song that the audience cannot hear.
The average shot length (ASL) of The Family Game is 23 seconds, and according to Barry Salt the ASL of the average film directed from 1982 to 1987 was only 6 seconds.
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The Family Game
The Family Game (Japanese: 家族ゲーム, Hepburn: Kazoku Gēmu) is a 1983 Japanese comedy and family drama film directed by Yoshimitsu Morita. It follows the story of a nuclear family of four whose father hires a tutor for the younger son, a distracted and low-ranking middle school student who will soon be taking his high school entrance exam. The idiosyncratic tutor soon becomes a father figure for the boy, as the father is distant and unfeeling. Through his interactions with the family, he shakes up the emotional shallowness and artificiality that ties them together. The "game" of the title refers to family interactions based on the roles that each member is expected to play and not on genuine emotional ties. It was the first major film by the director and is an example of postmodern cinema. The film contains elements of black humor and social satire.
The Family Game is considered one of the best Japanese films by film critics. Kinema Junpo, the premiere film magazine of Japan, ranked it as the 10th best Japanese film of all time (in 2009), the best Japanese film of the 1980s (in 2018), and the best Japanese film of the year (in 1983). The film was also selected as the best Japanese film of 1983 by the BFI. The movie missed the Japan Academy Prize for the Best Picture (losing out to Palme d'Or Winner The Ballad of Narayama).
The Numata family consists of the father, Kōsuke (Juzo Itami); mother, Chikako (Saori Yuki); and two sons, Shinichi (Jun'ichi Tsujita) and Shigeyuki (Ichirōta Miyagawa). The family lives together in a small apartment located in a newly built complex of reclaimed land in Tokyo Bay. Mr. Numata is a salaryman who is physically and emotionally absent. Mrs. Numata is a stay-at-home mom who is devoid of other relationships or hobbies and is emotionally drained from caring for her two teenage sons. Shinichi, the elder son, is in a first-rate high school and makes his father proud. Shigeyuki, the younger son, is nearing the end of junior high school and will soon be taking the high school entrance exam. However, Shigeyuki's grades are poor, and he is only interested in roller coasters. He is also bullied at school by a group of fellow students, led by his one-time best friend.
The father has very high expectations for his children - they must go to a top high school which must then be followed by a prestigious national university, etc. He had hired multiple private tutors for Shigeyuki to no avail. He finds a new tutor, Yoshimoto (Yūsaku Matsuda), for Shigeyuki and places all responsibilities for his exam on him. Yoshimoto is eccentric; however, he fills in the role of father that Mr. Numata has vacated. He kisses Shigeyuki on the cheek and sits close to him to hold conversations in a near whisper; he also hits Shigeyuki to assert discipline. He makes it clear to Shigeyuki that his attention, concern and even affection are devoted to him. Even though Yoshimoto is a seventh-year student from a third-rate university, Shigeyuki’s marks improve significantly under his guidance. Yoshimoto also teaches Shigeyuki basic self-defense, which Shigeyuki puts to use against his main school bully, who was once his best friend. Eventually he passes the exam for the high school. At a family dinner celebration, with all five main characters present, a food fight breaks out and Yoshimoto begins to riot, throwing spaghetti around wildly, pouring wine indiscriminately on the table and hitting the Numatas.
The family drama is a popular and influential film genre in Japan. Films in the genre tell stories in which many of the main characters are members of the same family. The stories revolve around how the family members respond to challenges. Both Yasujirō Ozu and Mikio Naruse, amongst the very best of Japan’s “golden age,” worked often in the genre. Almost all of Ozu’s post-war films were family dramas. Yoji Yamada and Hirokazu Kore-eda, amongst the most famous directors of their generation, have also directed many acclaimed family dramas.
Japanese family dramas are often about the deterioration of family ties. Pre-war films frequently attributed blame for this loss to the forces of urbanization and economic modernization which led to a decline in family cohesion (as in Ozu's The Only Son). Post-war films often criticized the younger generation’s disrespect towards their parents, with the parents sometimes portrayed as paragons of devotion (as in Kinoshita's Tragedy of Japan). In the postmodern cinema, blame can shift to the “salaryman," the typical, white-collared salaried employee, who is shown to be a neglectful or ineffectual father in many films, including The Family Game. These fathers are weak and work-oriented and avoid their family obligations; the children are not able to depend on them for emotional support or moral guidance.
Acoustically, the film was recorded very close to the actors – with microphones that could capture the softest ambient sounds and magnify them so that they would interfere with the ability of the characters to communicate – highlighting the alienation of the characters. Another alienating technique utilized by the filmmakers in two scenes was to make all sounds inaudible except for the ambient sounds – thereby making the character’s voices inaccessible to the audience; this happens first in a conversation between Shinichi and a female classmate, and then again when Shinichi and mother are listening to and talking about an American song that the audience cannot hear.
The average shot length (ASL) of The Family Game is 23 seconds, and according to Barry Salt the ASL of the average film directed from 1982 to 1987 was only 6 seconds.