How appropriate that “The Taste of Tea” opens to the sound of breathing — and not just breathing, but the panting of a boy literally chasing after a dream as it disappears in the distance.

It’s a theme that will come to ensnarl every member of this woefully dysfunctional — which is to say refreshingly believable — family. All around the boy, we see the solemn eyes of dreamers caught in a waking man’s world — an uncle who has returned home to cope with a broken heart, a younger sister who is frustrated by how long it’s taking her to grow up, a mother and father who seem lost in their jobs, and a grandfather who drifts further and further into dementia.

But unlike lesser American films built on such a formula — particularly the Oscar-nominated, terrifically overrated “Little Miss Sunshine” — there’s more to “The Taste of Tea,” which opens tonight at Imaginasian, than caricatures bumping along the road of hard knocks. Director Katsuhito Ishii, best known for directing the animated segment of “Kill Bill, Vol. 1,” bathes the film in silence and views this family’s life not through a series of vignettes and jump cuts, but with long takes that will evoke in some audiences the memory of the great Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu.

With patience, confidence, and reverence, Mr. Ishii persuades us to love his characters as deeply as he does. His interest lies less with the nucleus of the family — father Nobuo (Tomokazu Miura) and mother Yoshiko (Satomi Tezuka) — than with its fringes: the children and the grandfather who spend their days lost amid unanswered questions and unfulfilled dreams.

The film’s base line is a state of silent wistfulness. With mom working in the background, we watch the days slide by. Bored Uncle Ayano (Tadanobu Asano), heartbroken Hajime (Takahiro Sato) and frustrated 9-year-old Sachiko (Maya Banno) sip tea and sit on the ledge, staring out from their home into the rolling countryside. Occasionally, grandpa peers out at them from his window, working away furiously in his room on a project he hides from the family. There’s poetry to the choreography of this daily routine, the younger family members too busy looking out at the big world, the adults too focused on looking down at their work, and only grandpa content in the moment.

Day after day, they go through the same routine. Hajime, having just experienced his first heartbreak, rides his bike aimlessly before finding a new girl on whom to fix his fancy. Every night he silently rides the train home with his father, who nudges his son not to stare at the random characters making spectacles of themselves.

Sachiko, meanwhile, walks away from home on a daily basis, down the dirt round to a high bar mysteriously set up in the middle of the forest, dreaming one day of being a gymnast. But try as she might — and try she does for hours at a time — she can’t make it over that bar. Perpetually dejected, Sachiko is so haunted by her lack of height and agility that she imagines she is being watched constantly by an imaginary giant — a towering version of herself.

Even uncle Ayano seems caught in a rut, sleeping away half the day before wandering down to a nearby bridge to think about his wounded heart and stare at the water.

Existing mostly in a silent universe — other characters in the film have a great deal to say, while this family keeps to itslef —Mr. Ishii’s brand of magic realism works thanks to an ensemble of subtle actors capable of using the slightest gestures — the flick of a finger, the arch of an eyebrow — to convey an ocean of heartache. Ms. Banno and Mr. Sato, the two youngest members of the cast, somehow stay afloat in these silent waters without allowing these children to become two-dimensional cliches.

And all the actors have a great friend in Mr. Ishii, who embraces the Ozu mode of filmmaking. He adopts unexpected and unusual camera angles, begins scenes before they should seemingly start, and allows them to endure long after they would conventionally end. He repeatedly wanders away from the main characters with unexpected subplots (most notably a side story involving gangsters) and contrasts this family’s quibbles with the patterns of nature all around them.

There’s a palpable pulse to “The Taste of Tea” — a life force that suggests the ways a family, a community, a nation, and a universe are connected without their knowledge. A final scene of sadness is punctuated by the simple joy of a fluttering butterfly; a glowing scene of triumph is less an exclamation point than an ellipses, showing how our desires are merely temporary distractions; and as the house becomes emptier, we realize that the small joys of life, what some might call the minutiae, are the ones that matter most.