Noriko's Dinner Table
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| Noriko's Dinner Table Noriko no Shokutaku |
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 The Noriko's Dinner Table flyer |
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| Directed by | Sion Sono |
| Produced by | Takeshi Suzuki |
| Written by | Sion Sono |
| Starring | Kazue Fukiishi Ken Mitsuishi |
| Music by | Tomoki Hasegawa |
| Cinematography | Souhei Tanigawa |
| Editing by | Junichi Ito |
| Distributed by | Eleven Arts Tidepoint Pictures |
| Release date(s) |  September 23, 2006 April 2, 2006 |
| Running time | 159 minutes |
| Country | Japan |
| Language | Japanese |
| Preceded by | Suicide Club |
| Official website | |
| Allmovie profile | |
| IMDb profile | |
Noriko's Dinner Table (紀子の食卓 Noriko no Shokutaku?), is the follow-up to the cult movie Suicide Club (Jisatsu Sākuru), a Japanese film concerning a mass suicide of 54 schoolgirls and how it leads the law to a shady cult. It won the Don Quijote award at the 40th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in the Czech Republic and a special mention. The movie was written and directed by Sion Sono. This film deals with various themes such as the generation gap on modern families, the nature of happiness, suicide, the lack of real communication, the alienation it causes and how the internet is used in an attempt to mend it, and the concept of family. It takes place before, during, and after the first film, in hopes of explaining some of the lingering mysteries that film left behind. The film was released intheatrically in Japan on September 23, 2006.
- Tagline: The family that eats together stays together.
Contents |
[edit] Plot
A 17-year-old teenage girl named Noriko Shimabara lives with her quiet family, formed by her sister Yuka, her mother Taeko, and her father Tetsuzo, in Toyokawa. Feeling alienated and misunderstood by her parents, Noriko resorts to the internet where she finds a website, www.haikyo.com, where other teenage girls from Japan gather. There, after making new and unknown friends, she feels truly at "home" and eventually runs away from her unhappy life to Tokyo, where she plans on meeting Haikyo's leader, a mysterious girl who goes by the nickname of "Ueno Station 54".
Once in Tokyo, Noriko logs onto haikyo and contacts Ueno54. They meet up at Locker #54 in Ueno Train Station, where it is revealed that she is a pretty young woman named Kumiko. She introduces Noriko to her "family" and sweeps her off into her bizarre organization. The purpose of the organization is to be contacted by people that want them to act out a role for them (families, lovers, spouses, etc.).
6 months later, 54 girls decide to act out their roles by jumping in front of a train at Shinjuku station and committing suicide. They happily die in their roles, splattering all of the onlookers (including Noriko and Kumiko) in blood. After the events of Suicide Club transpire, Yuka (back in Toyokawa) hears about it. Suspecting that her sister is involved, she also runs off to Tokyo. After Taeko commits suicide, Tetsu starts looking for clues as to what they may be up to in Tokyo. It all eventually brings him to Kumiko. In order to get his daughters back, Tetsuzo gets a friend to rent Kumiko as his wife and the two girls as his daughters (Mitsuko and Yoko).
Once Tetsu reveals himself to the girls, the cult's "thugs" come in and start to beat him up. He brutally kills them all with a knife. Then Tetsu, Kumiko, Noriko, and Yuka sit at the dinner table and start to eat. They all go to bed a happy family. Yuka, however, decides to shed behind her roles and become a new person. She leaves the house in the middle of the night.
By the end, 2 years have passed in this film and 18 months since Suicide Club.
[edit] Cast
- Noriko Shimabara - Kazue Fukiishi
- Tetsuzo Shimabara - Ken Mitsuishi
- Yuka Shimbara - Yuriko Yoshitaka
- Kumiko (Ueno54) - Tsugumi
[edit] Staff
- Director - Sion Sono
- Executive Producer - Yutaka Morohashi
- Producer - Takeshi Suzuki
- Screenplay - Sion Sono
- Photography - Souhei Tanigawa
- Production Designer - Toru Fujita
- Original Music - Tomoki Hasegawa
- Editor - Junichi Ito
[edit] Novel
- Suicide Circle: The Complete Edition (自殺サークル 完全版 Jisatsu Sākuru: Kanzenban) was written by Sion Sono in April 2002. This book was as a draft of sorts for Noriko's Dinner Table, according to Sono. In fact, the movie is divided in four "chapters", as the book, and is constantly narrated by its characters, like the book. The story of The Complete Edition deals with both the events of this movie and those of its prequel, Suicide Club. So far no plans for an English edition have appeared.
