The Family Game

The Family Game
Film poster
Directed by	Yoshimitsu Morita
Written by	Yohei Honma (novel) Yoshinori Kobayashi Yoshimitsu Morita
Produced by	Yutaka Okada Shirō Sasaki
Starring	Yūsaku Matsuda Juzo Itami Saori Yuki
Cinematography	Yonezo Maeda
Edited by	Akimasa Kawashima
Production companies	Art Theatre Guild Nikkatsu
Distributed by	Circle Films
Release date	4 June 1983 (1983-06-04)
Running time	107 minutes
Language	Japanese

The Family Game (家族ゲーム, Kazoku Gēmu) is a 1983 Japanese comedy film directed by Yoshimitsu Morita. It follows the story of a nuclear family of four whose stability is shaken by the appearance of an idiosyncratic tutor from a lower social background. It was the first major film by the director and is an example of postmodern cinema.^[1] The film contains elements of black humor and social satire.

The Family Game is considered one of the greatest Japanese films of the 1980s by film critics. Kinema Junpo, the premiere film magazine of Japan, ranked it as the 10^th 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).^[2][3][4] The film was also selected as the best Japanese film of 1983 by the BFI.^[1] The movie missed the Japan Academy Prize for the Best Picture (losing out to Palme d'Or Winner The Ballad of Narayama).

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). Mr. Numata is a salaryman who is physically and emotionally absent. Mrs. Numata is a stay-at-home mom who is devoid of other relationships or hobbies and is emotionally drained from caring for her two teenage sons. Shinichi, the elder son, is in a first-rate high school and makes his father proud. Shigeyuki, the younger son, is nearing the end of junior high school and will soon be taking the high school entrance exam. However, Shigeyuki's grades are poor, and he is only interested in roller coasters. He is also bullied at school by a group of students.

The father, though emotionally absent, has very high expectations for his children - they must go to a top high school which must then be followed by a top university, etc. He finds a private tutor, Yoshimoto (Yūsaku Matsuda), for Shigeyuki and places all responsibilities for his exam on the tutor. Yoshimoto is eccentric; however, he is able to play the role of a genuine father better than Mr Numata. He kisses Shigeyuji on the cheek and sits close to him to hold conversations in a near whisper; he also hits Shigeyuki to assert discipline. Even though Yoshimoto is a seventh-year student from a third-rate university, Shigeyuki’s marks improve significantly under his guidance. Yoshimoto also teaches Shigeyuki basic self-defense, which Shigeyuki puts to use against his primary bully. Eventually he passes the exam for the high school. At a family dinner celebration, with all five main characters present, a food fight breaks out and Yoshimoto begins to riot, throwing spaghetti around wildly, pouring wine indiscriminately on the table and hitting people.

• Yūsaku Matsuda as Katsu Yoshimoto
• Juzo Itami as Kōsuke Numata
• Saori Yuki as Chikako Numata
• Ichirōta Miyagawa as Shigeyuki Numata
• Junichi Tsujita as Shinichi Numata, the older brother
• Yoko Aki as Yoshimoto's girlfriend
• Jun Togawa as Neighbors wife

The Family Game was adapted into a TV series in 2013 by Fuji TV, starring Sho Sakurai as the tutor Kōya Yoshimoto.

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. Individual worth becomes quantified chiefly in terms of success and class ranking. According to Donald Richie, the "game" that the family plays is an "enactment the members agree to go through with, a set-up filled with tricks and dodges, a kind of gamble the results of which are not serious."^[5]:241 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.

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.^{[5]: 240} Murakami Tomohiko argues that these associations are a filmic equivalent to the commodity catalogues in Japanese fashion magazines of the 1980s.^{[6]: 243}

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 and musician Sakamoto Ryuichi, leading to a culture which celebrates meaninglessness.^[6]:242

Last Dinner Scene

The five main characters celebrate Shigeyuki's success in his entrance exam with a sumptuous dinner towards the end of the film. The whole dinner scene is captured in an 8-minute static single take, which shows the characters looking towards the camera and seated in a single line on the table with tutor Yoshimoto in the middle, ala Jesus in the last supper. The dinner devolves into a verbal altercation between father and older son and then into a food fight involving the four males, provoked by Yoshimoto. Many critics have commented on this dinner scene as it is the most famous and iconic 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 closed proximity results in conflict.^[4]

Keiko Mcdonald wrote that the "hero" (Yoshimoto) is formally accepted into the Numata's club through this dinner, but then promptly decides to leave that club. She notes that thanks to Yoshimoto's disorderly behavior, the family members are for the first time able to express emotions that they would always keep repressed.^[5]:146

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."^[7]

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."^[7]

• Gerow, Aaron (2008). "Playing with Postmodernism: Morita Yoshimitsu's Family Game". In Phillips, Alastair; Stringer, Julian (eds.). Japanese Cinema: Texts and Contexts. Routledge. pp. 240–252. ISBN 978-0-415-32848-7.
• McDonald, Keiko (1989). "Family, Education, and Postmodern Society: Yoshimitsu Morita's The Family Game". East-West Film Journal. 4 (1): 53–67.

• Kazoku Gēmu at IMDb
• Arun Kumar. The Family Game (1983) Review – An Incredible Dark Comedy on the Middle-Class Nuclear Family Life. High On Films. May 8, 2021.