Director Jun Ichikawa’s beautifully understated reading of a short story by Haruki Murakami is a touching study of loneliness…
There’s always one. A great movie you catch at a festival you fall in love with that promptly disappears, never to be properly released or seen again. You enthuse about it to friends, but as the months pass into years, the memory fades, and you find that you even forget about it yourself…
(Which is my way of saying this review is long overdue…)
For me, at the 2004 London Film Festival, that film was Tony Takitani, an understated reading by director Jun Ichikawa of a short story by Haruki Murakami. It was the same year Wong Kar-wai’s troublesome 2046 debuted, that beautiful but flawed, self-indulgent spectacle. The films touched on similar themes, but Ichikawa seemed to get right everything Kar-wai got wrong, and despite its diffidence his film was all the more powerful for it.
Perhaps distributors felt one Asian art movie was enough at the time? Despite author Murakami’s enduring popularity, and even though the film came at the end of a period when his name had hardly been out of the media, no distributor felt game enough to give this movie a chance in the UK.
Until now…
Tony Takitani (Issey Ogata, Yi yi: A One and a Two) is a successful illustrator of vehicles, machines, engines, in fact anything remotely technical. As a boy his mother died young, and his father, a jazz player, left him with a housekeeper while he toured and relating to living beings is something of a problem for him. He’s spent so much of his life alone he doesn’t see how lonely his existence is. That’s until Eiko (Miyazawa Rie, Peony Pavilion) comes into his life as a new client. He falls in love with her instantly and proposes to her.
Eventually she gives in and marries Tony, who feels a wealth of emotion he never even knew existed. But for Eiko, she can’t escape the emptiness she feels inside that fuels her shopping addiction. Instead it gets worse, leading to devastating consequences…
Tony Takitani was the first feature length adaptation Haruki Murakumi approved from his own work, and Ichikawa’s screenplay stays close to his original prose, taking it as his starting point. It becomes the narration that drives the film far more than I’ve ever seen before, at least beyond short movies. The narration is not there to flesh out aspects that can’t be shown or spoken by characters; it is the crux of the whole movie, with those characters often ending the narrator’s sentences.
Ichikawa’s attitude to the composition is to illustrate that narration, with beautifully composed scenes that flow one into another. Working with cinematographer Hirokawa Taishi, Ichikawa’s ability to take the most mundane of premises and show it from a new angle, stylising each scene, is incredible. His characters fit awkwardly in – or often out – of view, just as they do in the story. According to Ichikawa, much of his influence came from the paintings of Edward Hopper, and again fitting that reserved approach.
Even the soundtrack from celebrated composer (and pop artist) Ryuichi Sakamoto (Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, The Last Emperor), follows that low-key approach. His score is emotive without the need for dramatic crescendos, drawing instead on the most simplistic elements for effect, and it works!
Understated it maybe, but conversely there is a pace about the film. At a relatively brief but perfectly formed 75 minutes long, you feel it’s as long as it needs to be; a short story that hasn’t been needless extended into an epic.
It’s a beautiful, thoughtful movie, and strangely uplifting, considering the melancholy of the subject, like most of Murakumi’s written work. Tony Takitani comes highly recommended, and not just for fans of the author.
DVD details
Distributor: Axiom Films (UK)
After promoting an impressive theatrical release in the UK, Axiom Films have done themselves proud giving Tony Takitani just the sort of DVD release it deserves.
It's a beautiful transfer full of detail, and far better than the US DVD release. The extras may be minimal, but that’s more than made up for by a fascinating 'making of' documentary, which, at over an hour long, provides a real insight into the making of the film. (Of particular interest building and shooting of the sets outside, problematic, especially in bad weather, but ultimately very successful.)
