The recent spate of Japanese family dramas by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Hirokazu Koreeda, Shinya Tsukamoto, Yuya Ishii and other indie directors has produced much outstanding work, but the on-screen alienation can be depressing, to be honest. The housewives (almost never career women) in these films live especially joyless lives, expected as they are to sacrifice themselves for family units (hard to call them "members") who barely acknowledge their existence.
So it was with the expectation of another downer that I watched Koki Yoshida's "Kazoku X (Household X)," a first feature selected for the Forum section of this year's Berlin Film Festival. Influenced by the observational, documentary methods of Nobuhiro Suwa (Yoshida was both Suwa's student and assistant director), the film focuses on what must be the ultimate dysfunctional Japanese family. The full-time housewife mother (Kaho Minami), salaryman father (Tomorowo Taguchi) and adult temp-worker son (Tomohiro Kaku) behave more like stressed strangers in an overcrowded disaster shelter than family members, never exchanging so much as an "Ohayo¯" ("Good morning").
But the film held my attention to the end, despite its by-now overfamiliar indie techniques, from the barely-there dialogue and extreme closeups with a jittery handheld camera to the absence of background music, back story or any of the other usual devices for building empathy and sustaining interest.