A slow first hour builds to a deeply involving and uncannily affecting second half in Japanese director Koji Fukada‘s chilly and chilling examination of familial guilt, “Harmonium.” Marking a fascinating return to the themes of the director’s celebrated sophomore film “Hospitalité,” yet also a 180-degree change in tone from that film’s droll, occasionally raucous black comedy, “Harmonium” also takes as its subject a working-class Japanese family, and the chaos and disruption that occurs when they invite a stranger into their home. Here too, a general crossing of boundaries (in both films, the interloper becomes both guest and employee, as in both films the home space directly adjoins the workshop area) leads to complications and conflicting currents of desire and suspicion, but here they take on a tragic, maybe even horrific air. Fukada’s deliberate pacing and deceptively indifferent shooting style might seem off-putting at first, but that’s only before we realize that this nuclear family story is actually a nuclear explosion, played out in extreme, minutely observed slow-motion.
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The detonation device here is recently released ex-con Yazaka (the effortlessly charismatic Tadanobu Asano), a taciturn sleek presence in a white shirt buttoned all the way up to the neck. He shows up at Toshio’s (Kanji Furutachi) metal workshop, a small garage space attached to the home Toshio shares with wife Akie (Mariko Tsutsui) and their bright, extrovert little daughter Hotaru, who is learning to play the harmonium with the help of a ticking metronome. Toshio and Yazaka have a history that apparently places Toshio under a burden of gratitude, and so he hires Yazaka on the spot as an apprentice/assistant in the metal shop, much to Akie’s surprise and initial dismay.
But after Yazaka seems to bond immediately with little Hotaru, even promising her harmonium lessons, Akie’s disapproval gives way to curiosity and then fascination with the newcomer, and until the sudden mysterious event that bifurcates the film and plunges the family into a different world entirely, it feels like a dramedy in which Yazaka’s function will be as a catalyst for exposing the complacency of supposedly stable family life and this apparently solid, if unexciting, marriage. But then the film’s defining moment happens (offscreen, meaning the truth of it will always remain elusive) and it falls like a guillotine blade, slicing off the past from the future. We cut next to eight years later, after a new normal has established itself following the trauma, but the apparent calm of the situation is soon revealed to be purgatorial rather than truly peaceful. Yazaka’s absence taints the family’s lives more than his presence ever did, until his son stumbles more or less unwittingly onto the scene, and the film’s last circuit toward its final tragedy begins.
Hovering in the gray space between genres, and never quite settling into one or another, part of Fukada’s cleverness is to use and subvert those conventions to add to a sense of unease. After the considered (sometimes frustratingly so) interpersonal drama of the first half, the film toys with a coping-with-tragedy arc, cycles through hints of revenge thriller and arcane morality play, and finally ends up somewhere closer to existentialist horror. But if there is a guiding throughline, it is guilt: from the Lady Macbeth-style handwashing and hygiene obsession that Akie develops after the tragedy, which seems a literal desire to scrub herself and the tragedy’s innocent victim clean of her myopic infatuation with Yazaka; to Toshio’s inner torment at his shady past association with the man; to the way that Yazaka’s son, though ignorant of his father’s transgressions, is nonetheless held accountable for them — and most remarkably, seems to accept this kind of sins-of-the-father blame as his own cross to bear — the story of “Harmonium” is sodden with guilt at every level.
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It is a guilt that cannot be expiated by external means: When they seek catharsis or closure, they bungle it, and ultimately only visit more misfortune on themselves. This is a bleak world in which clues don’t match up to solutions and a promising lead is just as likely to turn out to merely be someone who resembles the man you’re looking for from behind. Aided by the terrifically surefooted performances from Tsutsui and Furutachi (who also appeared in “Hospitalité,” playing the interloper role, interestingly), Fukada’s unshowy direction becomes more aggressively offbeat as the film pushes into its mundane yet borderline surreal closing stages. Disorienting edits leave us in the middle of one scene only to pick up suddenly in another, where the mood has changed and the questions posed before the cut remain unanswered.
It doesn’t make for uplifting viewing, and the film’s steadily increasing hold takes a while to really bite during the repetitious, metronome-like pacing of the first half, but “Harmonium” builds to something peculiar and unusual by its close, and has a melancholic, discordant, uneasy sustain that lingers long after. As a study of the isolation it’s possible to feel even within an apparently content unit living in close quarters, and as an enigmatic cuckoo-in-the-nest-style psychological thriller, it exerts a considerable pull. But most of all, it operates on an almost subconscious level as a portrait of the family as a living organism — only here the life is being leached out of it in a slow bloodletting, and its members, paralyzed and helpless, are powerless to save it. [B/B+]
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