The Family Game (1983)

Original title

家族ゲーム

Directed by

Yoshimitsu Morita

Genre

drama film

Country

Japan

Runtime

1h 47m

Rating

6.8 of 10 from 25 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

A distant father hires a strange tutor for his younger son who is not doing well in school. The tutor becomes a father figure and disrupts the family's shallow way of relating to each other.

satiricalbleakly funnyunsettlingslow pacingcerebraldetacheddarkly comicemotionally cold

What happens

The Family Game (Japanese: 家族ゲーム, Hepburn: Kazoku Gēmu) 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. The movie missed the Japan Academy Prize for the Best Picture (losing out to Palme d'Or Winner The Ballad of Narayama). (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

Trailer

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