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. 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.
Visual Design
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.
In the Numata household, characters often inhabit the frame in claustrophobically close proximity. This is highlighted by the filmmaker’s emphasis on closeups indoors and long shots out of doors. An example of this technique occurs in the scene when Shigeyuki's classmate, Tsuchiya, suddenly appears in the Numata's front door; Morita is able to include all five characters in one cramped shot, each with a different expression on their face. The Numata household is like a model home display - inside of it the characters engage in more role-playing than "real life" living. As the girl student who has a crush on Shigeyuki states in one scene, it is better to get along and curry favor with the group than to be true to oneself.
The tutor, Yoshimoto, is the only main character who consistently deviates from the "game" and becomes a more genuine father figure for Shigeyuki. Yoshimoto, unlike the parents, develops an intimate relationship with the boy. He kisses him on the cheek when they first meet, sits near him, places his hand on the boy's bare thigh after his fight with a classmate, teaches him martial arts, and even gives him a piggyback ride after the entrance exam. The tutor through this physicality and his concern for the boy provides him an alternative relationship based on human warmth. One scholar saw in the film an inversion of the traditional Ozu family, which she wrote was "reserved, considerate, and gourmet." Morita's film overturns this framework through shock value, bizarre framing, deadpan food fights, sexual innuendo and even homosexual undertones.
Commodification
The father rather than devoting his own time to his younger son’s education offers the tutor a financial incentive to help his son get better grades. The attitude of the father is that his son’s education is a commercial venture that he is invested in properly funding so that it will pay off with dividends in the future. The tutor’s attitude is different, he shows a parental concern that will not be remunerated.
Morita associates various characters in the film with an object. Such as the father and his soymilk carton, the mother and her leatherwork, the tutor and his flora encyclopedia, the older brother and his telescope, the younger brother and his spacewarp. Murakami Tomohiko argues that these associations are a filmic equivalent to the commodity catalogues in Japanese fashion magazines of the 1980s.
Last Dinner Scene
The five main characters celebrate Shigeyuki's success with his entrance exam with a sumptuous dinner towards the end of the film. The whole dinner scene is captured in an 8-minute static long take, which shows the characters looking in the direction of the camera seated on the straight table with tutor Yoshimoto in the middle. The dinner devolves into a verbal altercation between father and older son about the boy's future education and then into a food fight involving the four males, provoked by Yoshimoto's antics. Finally, Yoshimoto hits each member of the family once into the ground before making his leave. Many critics have commented on this dinner scene as it is the most famous and iconic scene of the film.
Tadao Sato commented on the influence of Ozu on The Family Game. Ozu liked to seat family members facing the same direction in order to show the unity of their feelings. Morita deliberately makes use of this Ozu-esque device in the dinner scene. But in the new Japanese culture represented by the Numatas, the linear composition no longer means accord, and instead their seating in close proximity results in conflict.
Vincent Canby noted that the tutor acts like an "avenging angel" and shows the Numatas what he really thinks about them through his violence. He goes on to say, "This one-man riot is the humanist's only response to the genteel inhumanism we've been witnessing throughout the film."
Reception
Vincent Canby, writing for the New York Times in 1984, praised the “extraordinary visual design” and also wrote that "The Family Game is so rich that Mr. Morita would seem to be one of the most talented and original of Japan's new generation of film makers."