Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa won a Jury Prize at Cannes for this drama about Ryuhei Sasaki, a family man who is made redundant after a Chinese takeover of his firm and decides to keep it secret from his wife and two sons. He goes home in the evenings after eating rice porridge for lunch in his immaculate suit with all the other unemployed.

One of Ryuhei’s friends sets his mobile to ring five times every hour to pretend he’s still working. It’s clearly a shaming thing in Japan to be seen without employment. Even his wife, Megumi, diplomatically keeps quiet when she eventually spies him at the soup kitchen.

Life at home, however, gets increasingly complicated when one son, a rebellious teenager, joins the US Army to fight somewhere in the Middle East and the younger boy, having caught his teacher reading manga porn, deserts school and pays for piano lessons with his pocket money.

This is the realist part of Kurosawa’s fable which proceeds in its second half to become a stinging allegory about the state of credit-crunched Japan. The change of gear is unsettling at first, since things happen much more melodramatically — what with a desperate burglar tying up the wife before making off with her in a stolen car and the elder son writing home to say he’s decided to change sides and fight for the Arabs against the Americans.

The one hopeful thing that happens is that the younger son turns out to be a musical prodigy, astonishing his music academy exam board with his rendition of Debussy.

Tokyo Sonata could hardly be more relevant — even though it was made before the present worldwide recession struck — and it has touching performances from Teruyuki Kagawa and Kyoko Koizumi as Sasaki and his wife. It’s uneven, but memorable in its way.