I found Sion Sono's Suicide Club to be borderline offensive in its use of the suicide epidemic as a springboard for its dull detective story and bizarre red herrings.  One of my chief complaints was its seeming disinterest in the reasons behind the phenomenon and after watching Noriko's Dinner Table, it feels less like a companion piece to the earlier film than a correction to that film's mistakes.  The film begins with Noriko as a typically discontent 17-year old, defined by her nervous ticks and her undying desire to go to Tokyo to meet a mysterious poster on the Internet discussion board she frequents.  In this first of five segments, each focusing on a different character, Sono shows Noriko as a girl who can no longer conform to the role of happy daughter in her parent's stagnant view of their family as she is still dragged along on inane day trips and to her reporter father's assignments as if she were still an 8-year old enamored with everything her father finds fascinating.  Due to this disconnect, she finds solace and a new identity in the virtual world.  Fortunately, Sono is careful not to assign blame to any of the characters and through each point of view, paints a complex, contradicting individual struggling to make sense of the world once Noriko runs away to Tokyo.

Once Noriko makes her way to Tokyo, she assumes the identity of her Internet moniker, Mitsuko, and meets up with fellow poster, Kumiko.  Soon after this, she becomes involved in a cult-like business that sends people out to grieving customers looking to relieve a few hours with dead or missing family members.  We learn that Kumiko was herself abandoned as a child and her methods veer dangerously between good intentions and a desire to violently shake up the general trend of bourgeois complacency.  Like all of the other characters, Kumiko is neither villain nor saint, but her conflicted relationships with her clients and employees make her the most fascinating character to unpackage as she's responsible for providing the film with its moral crux.  Her business is rooted in reality, yet Sono adds stylistic flourishes and narrative unlikelihoods that place much of the film in the realm of the metaphorical and metaphysical as well, managing the excruciantingly difficult task of dealing with the virtual and technological on purely human, emotional terms.  Within the company, Noriko is reunited with her sister, yet they accept each other as Mistuko and Yoko, both as strangers with new identities and as sisters with a silently acknowledged bond.  The sociopathic surrogacy at work in this new relationship and in the company's bizarre method of bridging the psychological and emotional disconnection with a simulacrum of familial normalcy is in turn destructive and reinvigorating.

The film tacks on another metaphorical layer with Tetsuzo's, the girl's father, search for them.  Recognizing his failure as a father, he now uses his skills as an investigative journalist to find and repair his relationships with his daughters.  Later in the film, he uses a friend to set up a "session" with Kumiko, Noriko and Yuka.  The two men find a house with a similar layout as Tetsuzo's and decorate it similarly as well.  Once his friend gets Kumiko to leave the house to run some quick errands, Tetsuzo confronts the girls in this new hyperreal battleground where their multiple identities collide as past memories crash head on with the virtual present.  Like much that has come before it, the distinction between what is real and what is symbolic has lost all significance as the film has become purely about returning to an emotional and psychological equilibrium.  The confrontation fails at first both because of the amount of time that has passed and Tetsuzo's failure to acknowledge his daughters new identities.  Their decision to remain in eternal displacement within the cyclical surrogacy of Kumiko's company is something that must first be acknowledged by Tetsuzo.  He cannot force his daughters to accept their former reality because a new one has replaced it and, more importantly, was a failure in providing the girls with the emotional sustenance they have now found in their new roles.

I will resist spoiling whether or not Tetsuzo is successfully able to rebuild his family and simply say the ending is a fully satisfying resolution that manages to keep the films almost magical ability to seamlessly shift tones and atmosphere while keeping to its own unique sense of rhythm.  Only a week earlier, I was ready to dismiss Sion Sono as a director, but with Noriko's Dinner Table, he proved he is able to navigate the psychological complexities of modern youth and the older generation that struggles to comprehend their behavior.  That he does so with such stylistic flair, full of humor and pathos, makes the film all the more satisfying and puts Sono on the map, at least for me, as a director from whom we can expect great things.