JETAA NY Movie Review at Japan Society<\/p>\n
TONY TAKITANI<\/strong><\/p>\n Directed by Jun Ichikawa, based on a short story by Haruki Murakami<\/strong><\/p>\n Reviewed by Harper Alexander (Hokkaido-ken, 2002-04) (Summer 2005)<\/span><\/p>\n Nowhere\u2019s not crowded in Tokyo.<\/p>\n In the spring there, all the junior high school students and high school students are on their school trips and throng the streets and subway cars and giggle over coffees and hang their bags just so in the crook of their elbows or off their shoulders.\u00a0 Everyone takes photographs and you all coo, sigh, shriek, and shock at the same things.<\/p>\n In the summer there, backstreets in Shibuya and Akasaka are overloaded and given over entirely to pedestrians, the crowds metastasize, easily fill this new space as well.\u00a0 You buy shoes and italian ices and t-shirts.\u00a0 Tanned construction workers tie thin white towels around their heads and necks to soak up the sweat.<\/p>\n In the winter there, the shoulder-to-shoulder crush of hordes and hats and fur-lined jackets moves down the sidewalks together and you can see your breath and the breath of everyone around you.\u00a0 All of that breath is wispy and white and wafting upwards, and it feels like you\u2019re all one massive swaying body, one giant animal respiring \u2013 aspiring \u2013 together.<\/p>\n But director Jun Ichikawa\u2019s<\/strong> film Tony Takitani<\/em> seems to take place in a perpetual Tokyo autumn.\u00a0 The city is serene, still, calm, cool, empty, beautiful.\u00a0 So are the two main characters; so is the film itself.\u00a0 Based on a couple of short stories by Haruki Murakami<\/strong>, the film feels like a piece of writing.\u00a0 It has the tenuous pacing and unresolved ending that short fiction can get away with and film usually does not attempt.\u00a0 In nearly every scene, the camera comes out from behind something on the left \u2013 table, column, plant \u2013 moves to the right and goes behind something else \u2013 wall, chair, body \u2013 like eyes moving across a page.<\/p>\n There is a voiceover from the outset that gives the audience some background on the man before them.\u00a0 Tony Takitani, played by Issey Ogata<\/strong>, is not particularly photogenic or energetic, but the sense is that he is at least a good man.<\/p>\n He grew up alone, son of a dead mother and an absent father (away playing with a jazz band, Tony\u2019s father Shozaburo is also played by Ogata), and settled into a career as an illustrator, straddling the line between high art and pure functionality.\u00a0 Competent but never entirely comfortable, good but never entirely happy, Tony is unlocked one day when he meets a beautiful young client, Eiko, who is interested in high-end fashion.\u00a0 It is clear that Tony is in love with her from the start.\u00a0 After a short time they are married.\u00a0 Despite the many brushes, charcoals, paints and other implements of art-making that surround him, Eiko, played by Rie Miyazawa<\/strong>, is the first object of real beauty in Tony\u2019s life \u2013 the illustrator gets animated.<\/p>\n But there are down-sides to being so alive.\u00a0 The detachment Tony has lived with for so long evaporates as he attaches himself to this beautiful young woman.\u00a0 He knows love but now can anticipate loss.\u00a0 His monochromatic self-sufficiency is swarmed and overwhelmed by Eiko\u2019s vibrancy.\u00a0 She quite literally brings color and texture into his home \u2013 instead of the creamy off-whites and dull sand-shades of his abode, we are treated to a long moving close-up shot of rack after rack of exotic fabrics and patterns and colors.<\/p>\n This wouldn\u2019t necessarily be bad, but her shopping seems out of control.\u00a0 Her love for the clothes and shoes and hats she brings home is obsessive, almost anthropomorphic.\u00a0 After getting accustomed to Tony\u2019s minor-key bachelor habits for the first 45 minutes of the film, Eiko\u2019s intensity is as unsettling and bizarre to the audience as it is to her husband.\u00a0 Tony clears out an entire room for her wardrobe, entire closets for her shoes, but he senses something is not quite right.\u00a0 Finally he speaks up and asks her if she can tone Thankfully, this is not \u201cMarried With Children\u201d or some other screeching middlebrow sitcom, in which the harried husband pleads with the shopaholic wife to come home from the mall, to a resounding guffaw from the laugh track.\u00a0 The consequences are much more severe in this film.\u00a0 After Tony asks Eiko to cut back, she never appears again.<\/p>\n Or does she?\u00a0 In the most beautiful shot in the entire film, Tony mourns Eiko\u2019s loss from his knees in her walk-in closet room under a fluorescent light.\u00a0 The garments she bought so fanatically are all he has left of her, and they hang like a hundred skeletons around him.\u00a0 If she poured herself so obsessively into the clothes, and the clothes are still in place, is part of her still there?\u00a0 To further complicate matters, Tony\u2019s loneliness and desperation pushes him to place an ad in the newspaper, seeking a perfect size 7 to wear Miyazawa plays Hisako, the surrogate, as well.\u00a0 She comes, she interviews with Tony, for a brief time she wears the clothes.\u00a0 She is perfect for the \u201cpart\u201d but unnerving and Tony recognizes his folly quickly.<\/p>\n With only two principal actors, \u201cTony Takitani\u201d is a study in compression and restraint.\u00a0 I watched it on an early summer night in Manhattan, which is a study in neither of those traits, but the film was stronger than the city on that night and made New York seem quiet, which was refreshing.\u00a0 Re-imagining Tokyo and hushing New York \u2013 no small feats for such a small movie.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" JETAA NY Movie Review at Japan Society TONY TAKITANI Directed by Jun Ichikawa, based on a short story by Haruki Murakami Reviewed by Harper Alexander (Hokkaido-ken, 2002-04) (Summer 2005) Nowhere\u2019s not crowded in Tokyo. In the spring there, all the junior high school students and high school students are on their school trips and throng […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":59,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-411","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/PkZ7m-6D","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/411","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=411"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/411\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":678,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/411\/revisions\/678"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/59"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=411"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n<\/em><\/p>\n
\ndown her shopping.\u00a0 Money is not the issue \u2013 he simply cannot understand her need to buy so much so often.<\/p>\n
\nEiko\u2019s clothes.<\/p>\n