There is no such thing as perfect writing. Just as there's no such thing as perfect despair.
Haruki Murakami*
… and no such thing as 'perfect filmmaking' either, though this may come as news to Ichikawa. Because with Tony Takitani – based on a short story by Murakami – he delivers a relentlessly soporific exercise in immaculate cinema. Easily the best-known current Japanese author among western readers, and for decades hugely popular at home, Murakami (like J D Salinger) is famously reluctant to allow his works to be filmed. And this mid-length effort – much too long for a short, rather too short for a feature – provides plenty of evidence to support such a strict position. An intriguing curio and a noble failure, Tony Takitani seems unlikely to herald further Murakami 'translations' from page to screen – it's hard to imagine even the most vainglorious film-maker contemplating an assault on his masterpiece, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which would perhaps be most suitable to a 6- or 12-part TV serial.
Tony Takitani is, by contrast, a delicate miniature – a patient, intensely focussed, shamelessly slow character-study of a solitary baby-boomer who grows up into a solitary graphic-illustrator. Though seemingly too introverted for romance, he starts a relationship with Eiko, a demure young woman who has a fatal weakness for expensive designer clothing. The reticent Tony eventually plucks up enough courage to suggest that Eiko might rein back on her costly 'hobby' – with disastrous consequences…
The film features an audacious casting coup/gimmick: Issey Ogata (later cast as Emperor Hirohito in Aleksandr Sokurov's The Sun) plays both Tony and his jazz-musician father Shozaburo; Rie Miyazaki (from Yoji Yamada's The Twilight Samurai) also plays a dual role as Eiko and Hisako – the latter a different, even more demure young woman with whom Tony forms a more professional connection in the film's latter half. Ichikawa's intention with this "closed circuit" mirror-casting is clear – he's constructing a hermetic, self-referential little world where every image and every gesture is precisely modulated, weighed, slotted neatly into place.
It's all a matter of exquisite poise and oh-so-Japanese restraint: Ryuichi Sakamoto's piano score; Taishi Hirokawa's cinematography (all greys, greens and greeny greys); Yoshikazu Ichida's just-so art-direction. Performances are hemmed-in, tamped-down, blanked out – the actors often complete the lines of voice-over dialogue intoned by an unseen, authorial Hidetoshi Nishijima. The cumulative result is oddly dispassionate and alienating: we can't get any traction on these smooth surfaces, and our attention repeatedly ebbs away. Ichikawa's technique seems designed to emulate the experience of reading a Murakami novel – but he ends up with the polar opposite: at its best, this author's work is unputdownable; Tony Takitani, on the other hand, flatly refuses to be picked up.
Neil Young
5th October, 2005
TONY TAKITANI : [5/10] : Japan 2004 : ICHIKAWA Jun : 75 mins
seen at Pictureville cinema, National Museum of Photography Film and Television, Bradford (UK), 29th September 2005 – public show, Bite The Mango Film Festival
*the first line of his first novel, Hear the Wind Sing [1979]
