miguelreina

7/10

[MUBI] The particularity of the film is in its reference to the cinema of Yasujirō Ozu, to the point that it could be considered as a kind of erotic version of "Tokyo Story" (1953). In fact, many critics find in some films by the Japanese director an implicit sexuality that is not directly represented, but is shown through symbolic objects, such as a vase. And we could say that what Masayuki Suo does is make explicit the sexuality of the Japanese master's films. He uses some very characteristic Ozu resources, such as his famous "tatami shots", a camera position at ground level, flush with the tatami, which shows us a very careful but static composition of the scene, in which the relevance is in the internal rhythm of the dialogues. Tatami shots predominate in "Abnormal family", which Masayuki Suo uses as a contrast to sexual scenes. At the beginning of the film, one of these frontal shots alternates, showing the father and his two sons as they listen to their brother and sister-in-law having sex upstairs in the bedroom, where the camera is also positioned flush with the bed. In fact, almost all erotic scenes are seen from the ground or in a medium shot, but in most cases as a contrast to that of the family representation. In some way, it can be said that Masayuki Suo carries out a deconstruction of the cinema of Yasujirō Ozu, with some of its characteristic elements: a vase, a teapot, a poster or with the representation of the outer life in front of that inner universe that develops inside. family, and that also functioned in Ozu as a kind of kaleidoscope of society. This position of the family in which everything remains is taken to the incestuous extreme in the film, in which the sister-in-law ends up sexually initiating the youngest son. The sex here is more explicit, but less violent than in other pink movies. Or at least it proposes a "calm" violence, because the wife, Yuriko, takes such a static position in sexual relations with her husband Koichi (and later with his brother, Kazuo), that it seems almost a rape. This statism contrasts with a kind of later sexual liberation, in a masturbation scene. At the same time, her sister, Akiko, made the decision to work in a soapland, a kind of Turkish bath that was drifting towards what are now massage parlors, a euphemism for prostitution. But this apparent social transgression is shown as a way to become an independent woman.