Hanging Garden

2005, 114 min., 35 mm, color, in Japanese with English subtitles. Directed by Toshiaki Toyoda. With Kyoko Koizumi, Anne Suzuki, Itsuji Itao.

Introduction and Q&A with director Toshiaki Toyoda

Best of Unreleased Naughties

"[A] stirring film, both visually and emotionally, simply gorgeous." –Brian McKay, efilmcritic.com

Before Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Tokyo Sonata, Kore’eda’s Still Walking and Sion Sono’s Noriko’s Dinner Table, there was Toshiaki Toyoda’s Hanging Garden, the film that started it all. Family as a nightmare and a fount of terror, discord and disquiet: that was his idea. A visually stunning and surreal tale of desperate times, in which we feel the pressure of things unspoken rippling through an unusual 20th-century Japanese family, Hanging Garden features an unforgettable gallery of neurotic portraits presided over by a camera that travels with unhindered calm, composure and Toyoda’s incomparable mad auteur style.

Meet the parents: the mother, Eriko (Kyoko Koizumi), cheerful and subservient on the surface but full of murderous rage and dying inside; the father, salaryman Takashi (Itsuji Itao), a bland corporate drone driven by the dark forces below his belt.

Meet the kids: the sulky and socially withdrawn son Ko (Masahiro Hirota), not much of an A-student in public but more studious with his private tutor when the door’s closed; teenage daughter Mana, an obsessive visitor and user of love hotels in a bizarre, frantic search for the origin of her own conception. There is also a rather wicked chain-smoking grandmother…

In short, this is the family drama of the decade: weird, stylish, shocking.

Part of Japan Cuts: Festival of Contemporary Japanese Cinema

TICKETS
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