The Family Game

The Family Game , Kazoku Gmu? is a 1983 Japanese movie directed by Yoshimitsu Morita. The Family Game received several awards including the best movie of the year as selected by Japanese critics. Although the movie missed the Japan Academy Prize for the Best Picture losing out to The Ballad of Narayama, Ichirta Miyagawa was awarded Newcomer of the Year.

The film focuses on a dysfunctional middleclass nuclear familyeach family member is connected not internally, but through the social roles they are expected to take on, and the pressure of these social expectations further accelerates the breakdown in their communication.Japanese critics saw the film as showing the change to a new epoch and a postmodern sensibility. One said that if Japanese before and during the high growth economy defined their reality first though ideals and then through dreams, and tried to change reality according to those visions, then in the posthigh growth era, from the mid1970s on, they no longer tried to change reality but to remain content with reality as fiction. The Numatas table is not unrealistic, but fixes the unnaturalness of reality itself in an age when families watch television while eating. This epochal shift was marked, another critic said, by Moritas films and the works of novelist Haruki Murakami and musician Sakamoto Ryuichi, leading to a culture which celebrates meaninglessness. ........

Source: Wikipedia