User Reviews

"Tony Takitani" is the first full length adaptation of a Haruki Murakami tale (the IMDb message board provides a link to an English translation of the story) and it beautifully translates his ethereal prose themes to visuals.

There's his characteristic isolated man, mysterious women who come and go and recur, American jazz and obsessions that all link to Japan's post-war experiences and the prisons we make for ourselves.

The film begins like a narrated slide show as we see biographical images of "Tony" as a child and his father. Gradually, the stills move for longer periods to learn more about each man and focus on "Tony" as a young man who has gravitated to free-lance mechanistic illustration as a perfect professional emotionless counterpart to his internal condition. The characters occasionally take up the narration in almost the only dialog we hear.

The second half of the film explores the nature of loneliness and love. The younger woman he falls in love with literally comes with baggage, as each have a fear of emptiness that they assuage through their own means.

While how she wore her clothes attracted him in the first place, the world is divided between those who are pack rat collectors and those who are not - a division "Tony" thinks he can cross and suppress, only to have those feelings reappear with resonances, with a bit of a spooky reference to Hitchcock's "Vertigo" trying to morph into "Here Comes Mr. Jordan" with almost an O. Henry twist. While most viewers will think the woman's clothes shopping is a fetish (and the montage of her luxuriating in shoe after shoe is humorous), I thought this film was the best since "Ghost World" to make an effort to capture the sensual, addictive feelings of a collector of objects and not as outsiders for an Errol Morris documentary.

As it visually relates her fear of emptiness to the father's and the son's claustrophobic lives, the film lyrically shows how not only is love not enough and how asking one you love to give up something they love destroys love, but the objects themselves will now carry different and unexpected emotions for whomever comes into contact with them.

While Ryuichi Sakamoto's gentle score reinforces this meditation on loneliness, I thought we should have heard more of the father's jazz.

This is a slow, deliberate film on the subject of loss (and loneliness) The first few minutes don't exactly imbue you with confidence, and strike very much as a "pseuds" corner speciality.

The filmmaker and the droll narrator however save you and produce a gentle portrait of a man who lives through loneliness.

There are woman involved too, but the cast is sparse.

I have read other users mention melancholy in their reviews. I disagree with this. This is a film simply shot and with a gentle simple piano score attached to it. There are no vibrant colours but it is just as visually enchanting as the "The thin red line" even for it greyness.

It is the strength of the characters that however keep you engaged.

Watch this.

Director Jun Ichikawa demonstrates a uniquely idiosyncratic film-making style somewhat reminiscent of Yasujiro Ozu's work in his constant use of lengthy medium shots shot at waist level, as well as a certain narrative sensibility that focuses on elliptical episodes to unfold a story in a subtly uneventful manner. Unlike Ozu, however, Ichiwara verges somewhat toward contrivance in unspooling his tale, one that feels more like a paean to Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo". However, the Freudian subtext and Baroque melodrama of that classic have been submerged in favor of glacial pacing and implied emotionalism.

The title character with the staccato name is the only son of a renowned jazz trombonist. He grows up to become a lonely technical illustrator who obsesses over his work and remains content in his solitude. He finally meets Eiko, a beautiful, demure woman with an even greater obsession - an uncontrollable desire for designer clothes. Upon his insistence, they marry and live happily for a time, so much so that he realizes he can never live without her. True to Murphy's law, tragedy strikes, and the plot turns on what Tony does next to fill the void in his existence. Based on a short story by popular writer Haruki Murakami (who wrote the intriguingly surreal "Kafka on the Shore" released last year in the US), the 2005 movie effectively captures the author's highly stylized world, in particular, Tony's solitude in a series of lingering silences and mundane activities punctuated by acts of quirky behavior.

The beautifully muted cinematography is by Taishi Hirokawa, and it reminds me of Gordon Willis's work on Woody Allen's "Interiors". Similar to the Bergmaneque feeling of that film, Hirokawa achieves a consistent aesthetic that matches an art design that sees characters occupying clean white and gray spaces rendered with a soft graininess. Moreover, the camera moves gradually though pointedly from left to right as transitional devices to move the story's action forward as if following a horizontal timeline or looking though a series of slides. The technique is intriguing at first but eventually feels contrived, just like the literary conceit of having the characters finish the narrator's sentences (Hidetoshi Nishijima provides the penetrating voice narration throughout the story). There is also a meditative, Windham Hill-esquire music score by the estimable Ryuichi Sakamoto, which aptly captures the evocative nature of the story structure.

The acting is unobtrusive to fit the mostly quiet atmosphere. In true Hitchcockian fashion, Ichikawa has his two leads play double roles - Issei Ogata plays Tony and his jazz musician father, and Rie Miyazawa plays Eiko and Hisako, the woman who responds to Tony's ad. Truthfully, neither makes that vivid an impression in either role, and that is part of the problem I have with the film, the lack of indelible characters to inhabit the hermetically sealed world that Ichikawa and Murakami have created. The paper-thin plot yields very little opportunity for emotional payoffs, and there is little that remains resonant after all is said and done. Even at a brief 75-minute running time, it feels like slow going and lingers with a vague sense of hopelessness. By the way, the DVD has no significant extras.

This film, minimalist in the best possible sense, is a lyrical study of isolation and loss. Tony Takitani (Issei Ogata) grows up the loner kid of a jazz-playing, loner father. Like his father, Tony masters an art, drawing, and eventually becomes very successful. Early in his adulthood Tony has a few failed romances but never considers marriage until, in middle age, he meets a woman fifteen years his junior, the sight of whom for the first time adds an unshakable pain to his profound solitude.

A long sequence of aged Japanese photographs acts as a prelude to the film, telling in a few minutes the story of Tony's father. This section of plot takes up a much greater portion of Haruki Murakami's original short story, and Jun Ichikawa made a wise decision in reducing it, though utmost respect for the source material is in evidence throughout the film.

And then Tony's story itself begins, and if you are going to fall for this film, you do it then. From start to finish, really, the film is an episodic accumulation of small, deeply-touching scenes tied together by very simple yet evocative piano music and the enchanting voice of a narrator (Hidetoshi Nishijima) whose warm, thoughtful delivery makes one think of some poet of a bygone era.

Tony's courtship of Eiko and his subsequent troubles draw us closer and closer to this sad, beautiful soul until his loneliness finally becomes absolute. Ichikawa solidifies these intense layers of feeling with wonderfully basic techniques: stirring skylines and skyscapes used as backdrops; lovely, tangible environments; and discrete, minimalist camera angles--key conversations shot from behind the characters, over the shoulder, for instance. As a side note, the one film to which I can compare "Tony Takitani" is Laurent Cantet's "L'emploi du temps" (France, 2001), which has a similarly touching minimalism married to the intense inner lives of characters.

I was fortunate enough to see "Tony Takitani" at the 2005 Seattle International Film Festival, and of the films I have seen at the festival over the past decade, this ranks among my favorite three--the others being the 1996 Israeli film "Clara Hakedosha" ("Saint Clara") and 1999's "A la medianoche y media" ("At Midnight and a Half") from South America. I cannot imagine a better feature film to first bring the brilliant writing of Haruki Murakami to the big screen.

Note: Murakami's "Tony Takitani" was first published in English in the April 15, 2002 issue of The New Yorker.

First loneliness is displayed poignantly with some great cinematography. Unfortunately the film gets carried away with how well it can display loneliness and never bothers with any other emotion. Without giving too much away there are times of sadness and times of joy. But the central character experiences these in exactly the same way. What has he lost? he was never joyous. The film is constantly drab and quite dull. Although the story is interesting in parts it drags along in a constant monotone performance. You don't care even slightly for the lead character as the film is made from a very detached viewpoint.

This is really a novel that happens to have pictures accompanying it. The decision to use a narrator was lazy and the decision for his narration to be cut into with characters voices is cheap.

overall this is a dull unexciting but reasonably well made film. Read the book (I haven't but chances are it's better than the film.) For a great film with the same minimal dialogue and occasional narrative try 'Be with me' this is a very poor version of that style of filmaking.

*whew* It's been a while since I've been this intoxicated by a film... at least not since February's Nobody Knows.

Tony Takitani is a beautiful poem to loneliness.

The eponymous character is a quintessential loner. As the prologue informs us: His father, a WWII vet who pretty much left most of his soul in POW camp, was not much of a father. His mother died a few days after his death. He has been self-sufficient for most of his life.

We see him mostly by himself, alone near his desk, sketching drawings of motors, engines, amongst other mechanized structures. As the omniscient narrator tell us: Tony doesn't understand the fascination over paintings imbued with passion and ideology. It is certainly fitting for a man bereft of any human connection with another individual to identify with the colder, impersonal realm of mankind.

His lonely streak finally ends when he meets a woman at work. She is pretty, approachable, and most importantly of all, attracted to Tony. After a semi-rocky courting, they finally marry. Tony relishes in this foreign arrangement, but this exchange of intimacy with another person has Tony terrified. He is terrified because, as the narrator informs us, he might be lonely again, regressing back to his former state of isolation.

Maybe I'm too hypersensitive for my own good, but I wept a little when I heard these words. I felt that it could've not been a more articulate way to express the vulnerability of humans, especially the ones living in this modern age. Tony is aware of the cruel, unrelenting nature of time: Just as his mother died within days of childbirth and his father barely escaped the "thin boundaries of life and death" in POW camp, he can easily lose all this one day.

As it is, the inevitable does happen. I shall not reveal the unfortunate fate of Tony's wife and of their relationship, but the biggest rift in their marriage is her shopaholic tendencies. As she, herself, summed it up during their first encounter together: clothes help alleviate the emptiness she feels. After Tony's delicate mention about her habits, she frustratingly tries to restrain herself, only to surrender to the compulsions. In lesser hands, this subplot could've been ripe for (unintentional) camp, but in director Jun Ichikawa's hands, this consuming dysfunction only adds more layers to the film's restrained and somber mood: Tony's wife is not in control of her actions, which in turn, diverts his state of love and companionship to loneliness, once again.

With his wife gone, Tony becomes downtrodden, and then obsessed. In a Vertigo-esquire twist, he hires a woman who is the spitting image of his wife to take care of the house while wearing his wife's fashion couture wardrobe. The hired housekeeper's reaction to the extensive collection of wardrobe is more or less, abnormal--and of which, unexpectedly serves as a waking call for Tony.

Tony realizes that the only way to obliterate the obsession of his wife is to obliterate all of her clothes. As The Christian Science Monitor pointed out, one of the underlying themes of the film is "the complex relationship between objects and memories." As the narrator aptly tell us: the clothes are like lurking shadows; ghosts, if you must. What was once worn by a breathing, living body has now been only relegated to the closet. Tony could not bear looking at the clothes without thinking about her.

His father, the one who has long neglected him, passed away not much longer afterwards. Tony does the same thing to his father's belongings (a trumpet and a collection of records): he obliterated them. For what good are objects if they only remind one of pain? One could argue that although Tony and his wife shared different feelings about objects (she wanted to obtain them, whereas he wanted to obliterate them), they had one thing in common: both internalized objects into their inner selves.

The relationship humans have with objects is only a secondary theme. The film, for the most part, is simply about loneliness and how an individual such as Tony deals with that state of loneliness.

As you can tell, I love this film (otherwise, I'd probably not write so damn long). But this film is not for everyone. A couple in the movie theater gave up within twenty minutes into the film. A lady in front of me told her companion (when the movie was over) that she was tempted to sleep throughout the showing.

But if you are a sucker for atmospheric portraits of loneliness, slow and beautiful pans, and crazy about the empty urban architectural spaces in Edward Hopper's painting, then please, by all means, see Tony Takitani.

Tony Takitani is a shy, introverted middle aged man seemingly destined to live a life of loneliness - until, that is, he meets and falls in love with a sweet and beautiful woman with a strange and insatiable obsession with fashionable clothes. After a few months of wedded bliss, tragedy strikes the couple and Tony is once again plunged back into a life of melancholic loneliness and grief. The film, written and directed by Jun Ichikawa, is based on a short story by Haruki Murakami.

"Tony Takitani" is an odd little Japanese film that, in form as well as in content, sticks very closely to those short story roots. I would say that a good 60% of the tale is conveyed through voice-over narration rather than dialogue between the main characters. The drama is so stripped down, spare and simple that it is easy to miss the broader theme that permeates the film. For this is clearly a movie about the power of obsession (both on the part of Tony and on the part of his wife), but it is all done in so deliberately low-keyed a manner that the film - unlike so many others on the topic - never overstates its message. And the performances by Issei Ogata, Rie Miyazawa (in a dual role), and Yumi Endo are equally low-keyed, subtle and understated. The movie's extremely slow pace, far from alienating or boring us, actually pulls us into the strange, virtually wordless drama that is unfolding before us. Even though it runs a mere 75 minutes in length, "Tony Takitani" feels well-rounded and complete, as it casts a hypnotic spell over its audience. Give it a chance.

Every frame is like a painting. The film is like an art gallery, we walk through each scene with slow-tracking transitions while Sakamoto Ryuichi's hauntingly beautiful piano score plays. The faint colors of Tokyo has never been so breath-taking.

After watching, I felt alone, cold and inspired. Strictly for audiences who are open to new things, because this is likely the first movie you'll see of this kind. Don't expect a complicated storyline, this is an observant piece of cinema focusing on the study of characters. It moves slow but is never boring. Be patient and just enjoy what is shown to you on the screen.

This is how you really tell a great story visually. Mr Ichikawa Jun should be the man to adapt all of Murakami's stories.

Hard to imagine fans of Murakami's not enjoying this, even Riyuchi Sakamoto's fans too should be pleased by this (his minimalist etudes are almost a character walking through the film). As a fan of both, I was pleasantly surprised to read of this adaptation (of a story I had fortunately not read), and the film was definitely worth a watch to me.

A bit like a scarf floating in the air as you drive along the freeway, you are caught by the sublime moment so much so you turn around at the next exit, drive back but see no sign of it. Murakami delights in the ephemeral nature of scarves, as well as other accoutrements like life and love. He also likes to set up a sort of fawning love, that has sexuality muted beneath a whisper, and yet somehow he avoids any fetishistic feeling. He does often dabble with dopplegangers, and in this case we find an emotional stunt double.

The film is not quite a tone poem, there is a story...but that is second to the general atmosphere created here. It is as if the scarf is gone, but you think you can catch a whiff of the fragrance it exuded?

The sharing narration is done nicely, prominent but never over-employed. One character might narrate the flashback of another, of complete each other's narration...it all helps to create the feel of a fable, and the trace of a storyteller's hands. The hint of another's hands smoothing the pleats of the outfit you are wearing?

I'm not entirely sure I buy into the loneliness of Tony, he may just have a sort of desolate soul by nature. Just as his initial love, despite her fashion addiction, somehow does not come across as superficial and hollow, it was more like she was under a form of magnetism to match her beauty with her wardrobe.

I had finished reading the short story Tony Takitani in Murakami's Blind Willow, Sleeping Women then a week later I saw the trailer for it on one of my cable stations. The story was still very fresh in my mind and I was very interested to see how it would be adapted to screen. I could not believe how just how utterly faithful this movie has stayed to the book. It captures the story, the feeling, the characters so completely. I sat there so enthralled with this film I don't even think I blinked. I can not praise this movie enough or the director who had respect enough for the author to not change the story to suit his own ego. This is a beautifully poignant yet understated story of love, obsession, loneliness and acceptance and proves you don't need sex, guns and special effects to captivate an audience....for any Murakami fan who has read the story please do yourself a favor and watch this movie. This is simply one of the most faithfully adapted "book to movie" films since Death in Venice. It is superb.

I happened across this film on the 'World Movies' channel, coincidentally the day after I read Murakami's story (in 'Blind Willow, Sleeping Women'). I really liked the story. So much so that after the first half-hour of the film, I was reading it again, trying to use the book to block out the TV screen. What is the point of this movie? Wait, movie? It isn't really a movie at all, if your requirements for movies go beyond 'being on film'. This is a children's picture-book version of the story. This is the movie's process: Recite the story, almost verbatim, and play tracking shots ad nauseum over the monologue, showing banal instances of what the monologue is saying. Tony and the girl move in together? Lets show her pouring milk! Wife obsessed with clothes? Lets show her wearing clothes! Hell, lets show her, in consecutive tracking shots, wearing SEVERAL DIFFERENT outfits! That'll really drive the point home, that she's a clothes addict. Oh, and don't forget to have a lonely, melancholy piano constantly playing behind the monologue. Because everything's GOT TO BE MELANCHOLY! AND LONELY! God knows we've got no possible other way to convey that, besides the monologue. What do you think we are, filmmakers?!

However, I have advice for the director: Go back to 'Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman', and try to adapt 'A Poor Aunt Story'. If you can manage to do that one in the same way you did this one, I'll chain myself to the Eureka Tower, and refuse to come down until you've won the Golden Palm. I have advice for potential viewers, too: The story is just over 20 pages long. You can read it in a quarter of the time it would take to watch this slide-show/movie. And it's even got some humour in it, too. Not everything has to be MELANCHOLY.

Visually, this film ranks with those of classic Japanese directors to a degree one rarely encounters today.

Every shot is a gem that reinforces the tight sterile world the characters inhabit.

The film narrative is a comment on the materialist obsessions of Japanese life, as well as the exclusion of the Japanese aesthetic--deriving from both Japanese fascism and the influence of Western culture.

I would certainly like to see more of Jun Ichikawa's films made available on video.

Tony Takitani is the Japanese "man without qualities", a modern reflection of alienation in a money-driven society. Based on the short story by Haruki Murakami, he is without strong family attachments, an "outsider" who is unable to fully give of himself to another person. Like the unnamed hero in Henri Barbusse's L'Enfer, he has "no genius, no mission to fulfill, no remarkable feelings to bestow". It feels natural to him to be alone. To evoke Murakami's world of silence and serenity, Ichikawa fills the screen with blank spaces and uses only a simple theater stage with very few actors and little dialogue. The thoughts of the characters are conveyed only in low-toned voiceovers that, along with a decolorized palette and a dreamy piano score by Academy Award winner Ryuichi Sakamoto, establish a mood of solitude and melancholy.

Issei Ogata who portrayed Emperor Hirohito in Sokurov's The Sun, plays both father Schozaburo Takitani and son while the elegant Rie Miyazawa is both Tony's wife Eiko Konuma and Hisako, an unemployed woman who Tony hires to work for him. Schozaburo was a jazz musician who went to China during World War II and was arrested and returned to Japan after the war. When the boy was born, he was given the American name of Tony on the suggestion of a friend. Tony grew up feeling lonely as his mother died when he was only two and his father was mostly out of town on tour. He developed his talent as a mechanical illustrator and enjoyed the work. By the time he was thirty-five he had managed to save a lot of money but he did not realize how lonely he was until he was almost forty.

Tony had never considered marriage, had never seen a need for it. Then without warning, he fell in love with Eiko (Miyazawa). The first thing he noticed about her was how she wore her clothes. In Murakami's words, "there was something so wonderful about the way this girl dressed that it made a deep impression on him; indeed, one could even say it moved him. There were plenty of women around who dressed elegantly, and plenty more who dressed to impress, but this girl was different. Utterly different. She wore her clothes with such naturalness and grace that she could have been a bird that had enveloped itself in a special wind as it prepared to fly off to another world. He had never seen a woman wear her clothes with such apparent joy." Tony realized this was his only chance at marriage and insisted that she cancel her marriage plans with a younger man so she could marry her.

Tony now felt that his loneliness was over. Eiko, however, still felt an emptiness. She needed to buy more and more expensive clothes to maintain her self-image. She bought more clothes than she needed and admitted that it was an obsession that she was unable to control. Tony was so afraid of losing her and returning to his lonely existence that he did not ask her to stop shopping until her expanding wardrobe filled an entire room. Then he asked politely, "I wish you would consider cutting back a little on the way you buy clothes," he said. "It's not a question of money. I'm not talking about that. I have no objection to your buying what you need, and it makes me happy to see you looking so pretty, but do you really need so many expensive dresses?" Eiko agrees but this decision leads to tragic consequences and loneliness seeps into him once again. Tony Takitani unfolds slowly, chapter by chapter as in a book, and one scene seems to blend laterally into another. The film is slow, darkly poetic, and almost surreal, yet it builds in power and emotional resonance until you are completely snared by its inner rhythm and left to quietly explore its implications -- when you are alone.

After seeing "Tony Takitani," it's like I just ate something I have never tasted before, and it left some strange taste in my mouth. Even though I can't say I like what I just ate, but it tastes so interesting that I wanna to taste it again if I get the chance. That's how I feel about this poetic Japanese film.

The film is very slow, like watching a flower blooming on a drizzle day, the film never wants to rush into anything. Tony Takitani is a loner, he is always by himself, until he finally met a woman Eiko. Eiko is a perfect housewife, making Tony forgot about what being alone means. But Eiko has one problem: she can't stop shopping for clothes. What is Tony gonna do about it? What's the consequence might be? I will leave that to you to see the film. But to me, watching this film is not about the plot or the characters, which neither impressed me. The visual is the core of this film, that's what makes me reluctant to say this is a boring film. Quite the contrary. Sometimes, the film makes me feel like watching the animal world on PBS, with the never shutting up narrator. Why doesn't the film let the characters to talk, but constantly uses a voice over? I find it very annoying.

To people who never had sushi and sashimi, I always encourage them to try them, it will be nothing like they ever had before. So try to watch this film if you can have a chance. Just like sushi, I can't promise everybody will like it, but the experience is never to forget.

I'm a big Murakami fan and was fortunate to see Issey Ogata live in Chicago a decade ago. When I read this story, about six weeks before seeing the movie, it struck me as an atypical Murakami story, but then I'm not sure what's typical of his work, anymore. It does revisit his theme of the disappearing wife/girlfriend, but not in quite the same way as "The Wind-up Bird Chronicle" or "Dance, Dance, Dance." There's jazz. There's a WWII P.O.W. thread. There's a vehicular accident. There's a guy who seems to be living on the edge of his own life. All regular Murakami themes, but for some reason, when I read this story, it struck me as operating on a different plane from most of his other stories, maybe because it lacked the high-energy freaky magical realism of "Wind-up Bird Chronicle" or "Wild Sheep Chase." So while all these other flashy stories have been romping around in my imagination as potentially the first movie made from a Murakami work, this quiet and sad little tale snuck right past me.

Using Ogata in this story also seems atypical, not that I'm fully conversant with his career, but when I saw him, he was doing a one-man show of mostly hilarious material stretched out on the Lily Tomlin-Marcel Marceau continuum. He's also a lot older than Tony Takitani is in the early scenes where he plays him as a college student, and that's something Ogata doesn't do much to disguise. That may be the most typical Ogata thing in this movie. In the stage show I saw, he used minimal makeup and did all his character changes in full view of the audience, including the drag turn, and, dang, if he didn't look like Lily Tomlin's twin sister! It was nice to see Rie Miyazawa in two non-kimono parts. And this is seriously non-kimono. Having both leads play two roles apiece is charming and a great showcase for these talents.

I loved how faithful it was to the story as a literary object without being stilted. It was reminiscent of Paul Sills' story theatre and had the quality of a fable. It was both literary and cinematic, no easy feat. And, speaking of feet, Rie Miyazawa's are very expressive in this picture.

All of us have felt loneliness at one time or another. Probably not to the extent that Tony (Issei Ogata) felt. His father made sure he would be lonely by giving him an unusual name which prevented acceptance from the beginning.

After years of loneliness, he takes a beautiful wife (Rie Miyazawa). He is no longer lonely, but becomes fearful that he will experience loneliness again.

The beautiful piano music that plays throughout and the minimal sets remind us that loneliness is ever present. The film moves slowly, just as loneliness might move.

Tony is fairly happy after marriage, but another problem crops up. His wife is obsessed with clothes. We are talking Imelda Marcos obsessed. She is addicted to buying and it consumes her to the point that she cannot stop without withdrawal.

Her obsession causes her death and Tony is alone again. He struggles through the loneliness in strange fashion. We have moved from the action of his married life, back to the minimalism.

Jun Ichikawa did a magnificent job of using voice-over and music and set to create the perfect mood and a perfect retelling of Haruki Murakami's novel.

So much has been said about this film - most of it very positive. For those who love films with little plot or character development, this film is for them. It is about loneliness and isolation. It is also very slowly paced. Pretension also comes to my mind because we, the viewer, are asked to accept significant illogical plot points presumably because it seems artful to do so. Come on. We are asked to believe a very attractive, stylish young woman would, after a few dates, agree to marry a much older, lonely man who apparently does not have much personality. If the reason she does is because he can provide for her all the designer clothes she could buy, she must surely be a very superficial person. Yet, these two apparently find marital bliss although her clothes closet gets bigger and bigger to the point a whole room has to be taken over to accommodate her lack of control. Uh, really!!! Not once is addressed addiction as a serious personality disorder. Rather we are asked to find beauty in that somehow these two mismatched characters with serious problems are happy except for that elephant (or should I say clothes horse) in the middle of the room. I am perhaps viewing this film from too literal a viewpoint yet I came away thinking that I have been snookered. The photography is impressive as are the performances. Too bad the film is like a fortune cookie. Not much food value with a message no one takes seriously.

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!

He leads a simple life as an illustrator/designer, but suddenly becomes aware of his profound emptiness when he meets a younger woman in his middle-ages. She is the embodiment of "the perfect housewife", except for one thing, she as well have a profound emptiness inside her that she avoids facing through shopping brand clothes, Tony Takitani on the other hand is filled with joy over being married to her. When her shopping has went far beyond being an unhealthy addiction he tries to direct her away from it, which she agrees on, but then things does not stay as they wish.

I am not Murakami's biggest fan, I see his strong qualities, but am not to delighted with everything. Like his crazy metaphors that sometimes doesn't quite seem to say anything at all, his extensive half-intellectual hipster name-dropping and that you can read (at least some) of his works any way you want to as they are loaded with symbols and signifiers that doesn't add up anywhere in total, but you can take some of them and add them up someplace, things like that take away from the experience. That is they're too open for their own good, or for my enjoyment. This movie however does not have any of that and therefore is for me the essence of the good Murakami experience.

I always found Murakami's writing to be inexplicably overrated, but since his books usually come with so many film references/clichés attached, I decided to give this movie a fair try. Also, as silly as it may sound, the movie's gorgeous display poster (not the same one shown at IMDb, by the way) caught my eye and made me suspect it could be a movie worth watching.

Not even close to that, 'Tony Takitani', although beautifully shot, caught me off-guard with its borderline sleep-inducing soundtrack (composed by the otherwise competent Ryuichi Sakamoto), bleak characters, even bleaker voice-over and the resulting zero emotional impact. I tend to like slow-burners a lot, but there's no fire in this movie at all, I'm afraid.

The problem in my opinion is that any sense of excitement intended with the odd characters (literally the only thing that could possibly keep someone's attention beginning to end in this movie) is killed by the annoying, flat-voiced narrator, that literally leaves no room for the audience to get interested in the characters or the story or guess about what's coming next. I found myself often cringing and wanting the guy to just STFU and leave the story roll by.

Also, Tony Takitani -- and most of the supporting characters -- gives me the same impression I got from the Murakami books I've read: a character that looks weird just for the sake of being weird.

I hadn't read Murakami's original story, and therefore can't comment on how truthful the movie is to its original source, but that's beyond the point: as a cinematic experience, Tony Takitani sucks. Badly.

I guess I know now how it feels like for some of my friends that keep on telling me how awful Gus Van Sant's 'Last Days' is and still fail to convince me not to watch the movie (I hadn't yet, but eventually I know I will). Anyway, I just wanted to share that 'Tony Takitani' is one of the most upsetting movies in (my) recent movie-going history.

Its never easy to translate the literary word to a motion picture. Only recently the formula of turning comic books to films as been tweaked to success, with relatively good execution of one super-hero movie to another with far less failure rate than the past, namely the 80s & 90s.

When it comes to novels\short stories this is clearly not the case. Mostly because of a lack of objective and the narrative challenge. This film fully succeeds in its objective in portraying the world H.Murakami draws in his short story, but fails to provide a narrative that would otherwise exploit the various themes and meanings intermingled in the story. Its to H.Murakami's credit he's able to play these off in a short story ( which, regardless if you like the story or not, is a stroke of genius ), but the film fails miserably to imitate this achievement.

When I found out about the film I seriously wished for it to be a 100- 120-minute film. A visual translation of a written story isn't about translation but expansion, a seriously difficult affair for the writer & director to pull off well within the context of the original source material, hence why rarely such efforts really succeed. This film is a perfect example: The only part where this film really shines is the ending. Its as if H.Murakami re-visited his story, it makes for a nice add-on that explores the feelings of the main character in depth. If you read the story the only real reason to watch through the film is to witness the last 5 minutes.

Don't get me wrong, this is a good film. Many will find it boring, others will like the minimalism. It is this minimalist approach in narration that kills it. The characters are poorly fleshed out, the only reason this aspect worked out to a watchable level is because the actors simply pull off a superb job. H.M is known for his interesting characters and they're interesting for reasons. Again, to H.M's credit, he managed to pull off deep characters in a short story setting ( hence the importance of the first bits on H.M's short story, which this film simply ignores ). Reading the story you do get the feeling you know Tony even though H.M really didn't give you much to work with.

You cannot establish this equally well in film (due the nature of what a motion picture is ) without additional narrative. The director acknowledges this basic film-making fact, and instead of tackling the problem creatively he ends up putting a guy ( a great narrator, by the way ) and reads the narrative from the book!!!!!

Yeah yeah, there are some tools used to flesh out the characters like the bland looking colorless apartment of Tony's, & I really enjoyed this immensely, giving me more reason to hate the fact they depended on the guy reading the book as the primary form of narrative!

It destroys everything. Characters are far from fully fleshed out ( as I looked forward to, I guess ), pacing is too slow without really much content to justify it ( as opposed to Akira Kurosawa's work ). What I anticipated as a 100-min film turned up to be 75 minutes of over- stretched sequences made less dis-jointed by the poor solution of narrating the story by reading parts of the book.

Too bad, because this one had so much potential.

Off to watch "Norwegian Wood", hoping it'll be less disastrous.