QUICK AND DIRTY: LIVE FROM TALLINN
Morning. 40-year-old Sato wakes up, surrounded by bagged-up piles of manga, used food packaging and drink cans. The used food packaging squelches as he stretches into it. He is a slob. Meanwhile, his better-dressed, retired and widowed art teacher father is out teaching watercolour painting to a lady of a similar age to himself. They sit on the bank overlooking a picturesque river scene and seem to be enjoying both the act of painting and each other’s company.
Sato finds the note his father left him, and orders takeaway food to feed himself accordingly. Then, to satisfy more carnal appetites, he also orders a call-girl from Bang Club Tokyo, who arrives as promised in a matter of minutes, sitting for a relaxing smoke (which we see) before servicing her client (which we don’t). The father isn’t just enjoying his lady student’s company. He appears to be teaching her and her alone for a number of consecutive days, and would like to formalise the relationship into something more. To this end, he would like her to meet his two sons.
If Sato is a slob, his younger brother Akira is scarcely a model of filial propriety, having failed to get into Tokyo University and, more recently, having been dismissed from his job on account of sexual harassment of a colleague. He has a small son, and his wife has just presented him with divorce papers. Attempting to suggest to her rather too late that she might like time to make up her mind about this, he phones back a contact regarding a job application he’s already turned down a couple of days ago, saying he’d now like the job, but it’s now too late. And anyway, the contact can’t hire someone who’s been fired for sexual misconduct. Sorry.
The father returns home, sees the woman leaving, and insists the son can join him to eat at the dinner table so they can talk. He is pleased about his son’s girlfriend, then less so when he learns she’s a call-girl. His offer of paying rent for his son and girlfriend morphs into throwing him out, so the old man can move his potential bride-to-be into the premises. This develops into a full-blown fight, with son chasing father round the kitchen table, and then the unthinkable; father collapses, dead, choking on his homemade food.
Now the panicking Sato phones Akira, persuading to come round because of a difficult situation with dad, without mentioning the fact of the death. When Akira arrives and learns the truth, he and Sato must find a way of disposing of the body. They are also minded that Uncle Daisuke owed their father a great deal of money, so they would be advised to get that back before their uncle discovers he’s dead and uses that as an excuse not to pay the money back to them. Their subsequent meeting with Daisuke doesn’t go according to plan, and suddenly they have two bodies to dispose of.
The film is gentle and lightweight in tone, if ultimately possessing less gravitas than, for example, such Japanese family dramas as likeable if comparatively conservative entries Good Morning (Yashijiro Ozu, 1959) or Still Walking (Hirokazu Koreeda, 2008). While such popular fare clearly has an influence here, director Tsujino uses it as a backdrop against which to both explore the seamier and darker sides of Japanese culture, placing the film closer to either more recent blackly comedy fare like noisy neighbour tale Mrs. Noisy (Chihiro Amano, 2019) and decluttering drama Hoarder on the Boarder (Takayuki Kayano, 2022) or that classic indie assault on conservative values The Crazy Family (Sogo Ishii, 1984).
Tsujino has an undeniable gift for comedy, and the film has plenty of laugh-out-loud moments. In terms of comic timing, the performances are beautifully judged. Much of the humour derives from what one might call Comedy of Social Failure, in which various characters by dint of bad decision-making and ill-judged spur of the moment actions dig themselves deeper and deeper into a hole in which they find themselves unable to stop digging.
For those seeking more familiar, Western cinematic reference points, Hitchcock is the obvious one. The festival’s description mentions The Trouble With Harry (1955), and the film is undeniably similar in tone to that tale of an unexpected corpse turning up in the middle of a small Vermont community, disrupting the lives of those living there. While much of the violence in The Brothers Kitaura (not that the film actually contains much violence) derives from family arguments and often feels more throwaway than violent – a sudden blow causing a death is over almost before you even realise it has happened. The film shares a sense of humour with Psycho (1960). Just think of some of Norman’s interactions with Mother which, if you can imagine that film shorn of most of its violence, are very funny indeed.
If The Brothers Kitaura is not quite in the same league as any of those above-mentioned films, it nevertheless in places proves highly effective as a black comedy. It sits comfortably in that well-ploughed Japanese cultural furrow in which outrageous behavioural extremes confront the conformism of widely accepted, everyday values. A minor comic gem.
The Brothers Kitaura premiered in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 28th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.