The film is the first one that I see from this director, Jun Ichikawa. It is a film that needs to be seen over and over. The layout is Substantially challenging the habits that are rooted in the coded Hollywood cinema. There is a minute layering of many subtle levels; There is an amazing doubling that moves inwardly in the bottom skin of the film.
The main character, Toni, who carries this oddity of a name in Japanese, is the same as the father who is a total outsider in his own culture, a Jazz musician who constantly journeys the memory of a war never ended! The name of a the character, Tony, it is a culture that is stamped on him (American)with the subtle poetic background of war; the same Americanism imposed on his country Japan since World War II.
It is a film of many and the one, the film of an amazing engagement of a profoundly thoughtful cinema! the cinema in the cinema, the film that uses every single element in the total composition of the film to keep the narrative away from the codes of narrative cinema. The addictive audience of mainstream Hollywood cinema getting board to follow a story that suddenly using the still images of an old newspaper about the time of the past, and the life of Tony's father(both father and the son are the same actor!).
That is why judging at the level of the story with its totally unconventional approach, it throws off the taste that one expected when one watches the film. The style of everlasting panoramic camera movement , crossing of a camera that actually paints every scene with the tip of a brush. The idea of scene changing like a painting canvas is also adds to the richness of its deep engagement with cinema as an art.
Therefore you are watching a film that is not an entertainments in the style of Hollywood story telling. There is a lot to say about the film, and again not this cliché of saying the film is about loneliness, and not about "solitude" which is deeply different of this pitiful romantic reading of a cinema that questions profoundly even the ready-notions that we have in our sleeves to make sense of anything that does fit with the system of representation in our simplified mind bubbling!
The main character, Toni, who carries this oddity of a name in Japanese, is the same as the father who is a total outsider in his own culture, a Jazz musician who constantly journeys the memory of a war never ended! The name of a the character, Tony, it is a culture that is stamped on him (American)with the subtle poetic background of war; the same Americanism imposed on his country Japan since World War II.
It is a film of many and the one, the film of an amazing engagement of a profoundly thoughtful cinema! the cinema in the cinema, the film that uses every single element in the total composition of the film to keep the narrative away from the codes of narrative cinema. The addictive audience of mainstream Hollywood cinema getting board to follow a story that suddenly using the still images of an old newspaper about the time of the past, and the life of Tony's father(both father and the son are the same actor!).
That is why judging at the level of the story with its totally unconventional approach, it throws off the taste that one expected when one watches the film. The style of everlasting panoramic camera movement , crossing of a camera that actually paints every scene with the tip of a brush. The idea of scene changing like a painting canvas is also adds to the richness of its deep engagement with cinema as an art.
Therefore you are watching a film that is not an entertainments in the style of Hollywood story telling. There is a lot to say about the film, and again not this cliché of saying the film is about loneliness, and not about "solitude" which is deeply different of this pitiful romantic reading of a cinema that questions profoundly even the ready-notions that we have in our sleeves to make sense of anything that does fit with the system of representation in our simplified mind bubbling!