Noriko's Dinner Table

Noriko is seventeen, suffocating in a provincial family where she is nothing but "the daughter," a function at a dinner table. She runs to Tokyo and finds Kumiko, who runs a website and a business called Family Circle, a service that supplies rented relatives, actors who will be your daughter, your grandmother, your dead sister for a fee. Noriko becomes an employee. She performs other people's family members with total conviction, and finds she is better at being a rented daughter than she ever was at being a real one. Her sister follows her into the same work. Their father, a small-town journalist, tracks them through the same internet threads that dissolved his family, and finally hires his own daughters back, without telling them he knows, to play themselves at a staged dinner. The surface film is a bleak drama about internet alienation. The actual film is a metaphysical interrogation of identity itself. If a self can be performed for money and performed better than it was ever lived, then what exactly was the original self, and did it ever exist, and can such a person be connected to anyone at all.

Buddhism teaches anatta, non-self: there is no fixed unchanging essence inside a person, only a stream of conditioned roles and processes mistaken for a soul. This is meant to be liberating. Sono takes the same insight and shows what it becomes without wisdom, weaponized into despair. Noriko discovers experientially that she has no essential self, that "Noriko the daughter" was a role all along, and instead of freedom she finds a vacuum she fills with rented roles. The teaching that could have freed her instead hollows her out, because she learned that no self is fixed without learning that awareness itself remains. The rented-family business is anatta run as a marketplace: everyone is interchangeable, every relationship is a performance, no role touches a real ground because there is no ground being touched. The horror is not that these people are fake. It is that Sono makes you feel there may be nothing behind anyone's face that is more real than the performance, and that this, without the further teaching, is not enlightenment but annihilation.

Noriko's Dinner Table draws from Buddhism, Initiation traditions. Sono's companion to Suicide Club abandons the mystery of the mass suicides and asks the harder question underneath it: what is a person who was only ever a role, and what happens when she goes looking for a self she can rent.

Noriko's Dinner Table (2005) directed by Sion Sono is essential viewing for those interested in Buddhism, Initiation. Noriko's Dinner Table Asks Whether You Can Be Connected to Anything If You Never Chose Your Own Self. It rewards multiple viewings and contemplation.