The films are creepy, vibrant, uncanny, familiar, and alien. For me, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s films are much less about certain themes (though you’ve perhaps nailed some of them) than they are about tones, feelings. Some of his earlier films are Cure (1997), which has themes of emotional disconnection of human interaction, Pulse (2001), a haunting film about human alienation and disconnection and our human interaction with the impersonal nature of technology in modern urban culture, and Bright Future (2003), a film that also possesses characters that are emotionally isolated and portrays a family with relationships that are disjointed and ironically puts it’s characters’ focus on a jellyfish that symbolizes the dangerous and hazy life course of the film’s youthful, but imperfect characters.īob Davis: Wow! That’s a mouthful.
The film is a dreary tale of a family that is falling apart, but ends with a sense of hope as they make an attempt to solve their dilemmas. ĭig In Magazine: Tokyo Sonata (2008) is Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s newest film, which screened at the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival and won the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize at Cannes. He teaches New Asian Cinema at California State University at Fullerton. Bob Davis is a former film critic for SPIN magazine and a former contributor to American Cinematographer.