is a 1983

Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north ...

ese movie directed by

Yoshimitsu Morita was a Japanese film director who was born in Tokyo. Career Self-taught, first making shorts on 8 mm film during the 1970s, he made his feature film debut with ''No Yōna Mono'' (''Something Like It'', 1981).Mark Schillin"Director Yoshimitsu Mo ...

. ''The Family Game'' received several awards including the best movie of the year as selected by Japanese critics. Although the movie missed the Japan Academy Prize for the Best Picture (losing out to

Palme d'Or The Palme d'Or (; en, Golden Palm) is the highest prize awarded at the Cannes Film Festival. It was introduced in 1955 by the festival's organizing committee. Previously, from 1939 to 1954, the festival's highest prize was the Grand Prix du Fe ...

Winner '' The Ballad of Narayama''), Ichirōta Miyagawa was awarded Newcomer of the Year.

Plot summary

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). Shigeyuki is a junior high school student. He will soon be taking a high school entrance examination. Unlike his high school student brother, Shinichi, who lives up to the father's expectations, Shigeyuki’s grades are poor, and he is only interested in roller coasters. His father finds a private tutor, Yoshimoto (Yūsaku Matsuda), for Shigeyuki and imposes all responsibilities for his exam on the tutor. Yoshimoto's behaviour is extremely strange, including kissing Shigeyuki and hitting him painfully hard. Even though Yoshimoto is a seventh year student of a third-rate university, Shigeyuki’s marks become better and better. Eventually he passes the exam for the high school. At a family celebration, Yoshimoto begins to riot, hitting people, pouring wine on their heads, and throwing spaghetti around wildly.

Cast

Yūsaku Matsuda was a Japanese actor. In Japan, he was best known for roles in action films and a variety of television series in the 1970s as well as a switch to a wider range of roles in the 1980s. His final film appearance was as the villain Sato in Ridley ...

as Katsu Yoshimoto *

Juzo Itami , born , was a Japanese actor, screenwriter and film director. He directed eleven films (one short and ten features), all of which he wrote himself. Early life Itami was born Yoshihiro Ikeuchi in Kyoto. The name Itami was passed on from his fath ...

as Kōsuke Numata * Saori Yuki as Chikako Numata * Ichirōta Miyagawa as Shigeyuki Numata * Junichi Tsujita as Shinichi Numata, the older brother *

Yoko Aki Yoko may refer to: People * Yoko (name), a Japanese feminine given name; variants include Yōko and Yohko * Yoko Gushiken (具志堅用高, born 1955), Japanese professional boxer * Yoko Taro (横尾太郎, born 1970), Japanese video game di ...

as Yoshimoto's girlfriend *

Jun Togawa is a Japanese singer, musician and actress. Her close friends over the years include Susumu Hirasawa. Career After gaining attention a guest singer for the New Wave band Halmens and her acting roles in Japanese dramas and commercials for th ...

as Neighbors wife

TV Series

The Family Game was adapted into a TV series in 2013 by Fuji TV, starring

Sho Sakurai (born January 25, 1982) is a Japanese singer, songwriter, rapper, actor, news anchor, host and former radio host. He is a member of the boy band Arashi. Sakurai began his career in the entertainment industry when he joined the Japanese talent ...

as the tutor Kōya Yoshimoto.

Themes

The film focuses on a dysfunctional middle-class nuclear family—each family member is connected not internally, but through the social roles they are expected to take on, and the pressure of these social expectations further accelerates the breakdown in their communication. Japanese critics saw the film as showing the change to a new epoch and a post-modern sensibility. One said that if Japanese before and during the high growth economy defined their reality first though "ideals" and then through "dreams," and tried to change reality according to those visions, then in the post-high growth era, from the mid-1970s on, they no longer tried to change reality but to remain content with reality as "fiction." The Numatas' table is not unrealistic, but fixes the "un-naturalness" of reality itself in an age when families watch television while eating. This epochal shift was marked, another critic said, by Morita's films and the works of novelist

Haruki Murakami is a Japanese writer. His novels, essays, and short stories have been bestsellers in Japan and internationally, with his work translated into 50 languages and having sold millions of copies outside Japan. He has received numerous awards for his ...

and musician

Sakamoto Ryuichi is a Japanese composer, pianist, singer, record producer and actor who has pursued a diverse range of styles as a solo artist and as a member of Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO). With his bandmates Haruomi Hosono and Yukihiro Takahashi, Sakamoto inf ...

, leading to a culture which celebrates meaninglessness.quoted in Aaron Gerow, "Playing with Postmodernism: Morita Yoshimitsu’s Family Game," in Alastair Phillips and Julian Stringer, ed.''Japanese Cinema: Texts and Contexts'' (London; New York: Routledge, 2007). p. 242.

Notes

Bibliography

* *

External links

* * ''Arun Kumar''
The Family Game (1983) Review – An Incredible Dark Comedy on the Middle-Class Nuclear Family Life
High On Films. May 8, 2021. {{DEFAULTSORT:Family Game, The 1983 films Films directed by Yoshimitsu Morita Japanese comedy-drama films 1980s Japanese-language films Best Film Kinema Junpo Award winners