What a sweet little movie SURVIVAL FAMILY (Sabaibaru famirî) is. It played as part of the Japanese Film Festival in Sydney and has one more showing for the Melbourne season of the JFF.
Classified as a comedy/drama, it is much more than that. This is a heart-warming, zero to hero, feel good film that not only tells the survival story of the Suzuki family as they tough it out post-apocalypse style but gives a real sense of the beauty of modern rural Japan. Because it is quite the road movie as well.
The power suddenly goes out in Tokyo and shows no sign of coming back on. Our brief meeting with the Suzuki quartet has not inspired confidence in their survival. They will mount up bicycles and head out on freeways and through looted, dangerous towns to reach grandparents in a small village on the coast.
When we meet them before the outage, they seem to be bordering on conflict while at the same time being distant from each other in their tiny apartment. Yoshiyuki (Fumiyo Kohinata) is a salaryman doing something vague in an office and distracted and weak at home where his wife (Eri Fukatsu) appears to be well out of her domestic depth. And a horrible cook by all indicators. Surly and silent, their son (Yuki Izumisawa) barely registers the family’s existence preferring to eat Western burgers in his room. A little more engaged but still suffering from ‘my family is just weird’ syndrome is their daughter. (Wakana Aoi).
When the power, including batteries and car engines, fails overnight the Suzukis try and stick it out and there is a lovely scene where all four are drawn to their high rise balcony to stare across the darkness. Seeing the stars and Milky Way for the first real time. The shot of the four together is the first time they have all been in the same frame. Director, Shinobu Yaguchi and cinematographer Takahito Kasai use this frame as a reprise for the film. Their ability to be together grows as the image repeats through the film. Before an incredibly charming final shot.
They will get into a lot of scrapes but will the four of them actually survive? Really, we know what is going to happen, we just don’t know how. The drama of their journey will form the basic driver of the film. The situations can be heart wrenching with a disturbing reality to them as their own survival must create circumstances where they deny others. The weather, the urban settings and the terrain are against their succeeding.
The comedy is provided by really enjoyable performances and a terrific rapport between them. These four are so funny together in places. There’s a tunnel scene that is hysterical.
Kohinata gives the dad a real sadsack feel. His voice is whiny and he’s beset. A struggler who will have stick his courage to the situation despite his natural inclination to keep the peace. He becomes distinctly perky when he takes charge. And when his competitive streak surfaces, watch out. Such an enjoyable characterisation.
The film doesn’t overdo the father son, coming of age, need to be the man now, aspects but the relationship between he and Izumisawa is warm and manly. And realistic.
Fukatsu’s Mum might the ideas person … she constantly surprises without ever overwhelming the story elements but Mum can’t stay stolid for ever. When things go bad for her and her brood, the pathos is placed with such care. Same with the changes in her daughter. From being a girl in pink, (clothes, bedroom, bunny eared phone) Aoi brings the daughter to a place of understanding without ever losing the teenage sulkiness about various indignities.
Apart from the skilled framing, there is a terrific tautness about the film. Faces in closeup, and wide shots showing tracts of green landscape. Places where our heroes are hemmed in and others where they are dwarfed by the broken trappings of modernity. Lovely filmic moments such as a pig chase shot from the pig’s eye level. Look out for a tilt up toward a building’s name. It made the whole cinema at my viewing gasp in recognition of what was going on.
While I loved the cinematography in this film, I absolutely adored the sound design … that’s why you should take the chance to see SURVIVAL FAMILY in a proper cinema. The use of silence is superb. There are distant effects, silences broken by one relevant sound and a wonderful use of echo in the scene in Osaka.
All in all it’s a film to enjoy on many levels, a family to root for and a couple of hours to wonder … what would my family do? The Suzukis are surely survivors, it’s in the title!
SURVIVAL FAMILY will play as part of the Japanese Film Festival in Melbourne 2nd of December. For more information visit: