Product Description

Tony is an illustrator who's been alone all his life…until he meets Eiko, a beautiful woman who transforms his life. The only problem is that Eiko is a compulsive shopper with a penchant for high end couture that leads to darkly satiric consequences.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #50265 in DVD
• Released on: 2006-01-31
• Rating: Unrated
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, Full Screen, Subtitled
• Original language: Japanese
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 75 minutes

Amazon.com
Sound and visuals are what movies are made of, yet in Tony Takitani, director Jun Ichikawa somehow communicates primarily through feeling. This is a work of profound, aching sadness, made exquisite more by what isn't heard and seen than what is, as Ichikawa brings writer Haruki Murakami's short story to the screen with a sense of restraint, apparent in every aspect of the process (storytelling, acting, music, cinematography), that transforms the usual cinematic experience into something much closer to a prolonged meditation. Issei Ogata plays the title character, son of a jazz musician who gave Tony his strange, Americanized name. Like his father, who is no more fit to be a dad than Tony is to be a son, Tony lives a life of total solitude. But solitude isn't the same as loneliness, as the middle-aged man learns when he meets and marries the much younger Eiko (Rie Miyazawa). At that point, as we're told in voice-over (a wonderfully low key performance by Hidetoshi Nishijima, who actually does more talking than the characters themselves), the newly-content Tony now is beset by feelings of terror and dread as he imagines what life would be like without her. But Eiko is no more connected to the real world than Tony, and her addiction to designer clothes ("they fill up what's missing inside me") eventually leads to tragedy. That happens in a sequence that might be amusing, in a black kind of way, in any other film, but not in this one. As it is, it triggers some rather strange behavior on Tony's part, as well as his return to a state of impenetrable, ineffable melancholy. Tony Takitani is not a warm experience. The dialogue is spare, the scenery severe, the colors muted, and Ichikawa's directing, though masterful, keeps us at arm's length. But there is greatness in this beautifully-rendered, 75-minute movie. --Sam Graham

Customer Reviews

Brilliant
In perfectly transferring to the screen the laconic beauty of acclaimed novelist Haruki Murakami's austere prose - an impossibly difficult task in itself - with a minimalist touch so revered by the Japanese, Jun Ichikawa has delicately crafted a profound, emotional powerhouse that is Tony Takitani, arguably the director's most accomplished work to date.

Tony Takitani (Issey Ogata), whose actual name, as the film's omniscient narrator tells us, "is really that: Tony Takitani", has always lived a life of solitude. Not that he minds, or actually acknowledges, the loneliness though. His widowed, jazz trombonist father (again played by Ogata) is always on the move with his band, leaving Tony's domesticated childhood in the care of indifferent housekeepers. As he enters adolescence, and the old women are done away with, the boy sinks deeper into himself, growing up to become introverted and withdrawn. An immovable tower of reticence, he works at home as a freelance technical illustrator renowned for his meticulousness, unaware of the magnitude of the emotional void within him. That is, until along comes Eiko Konuma (Miyazawa Rie), a woman decades his junior.

While there may not be much in the way of a plot (Murakami's original short story itself was leagues below the sublime sumptuousness of South of the Border, West of the Sun, to say nothing of the soul-shattering The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle), the film more than compensates for this with its minimalistic aesthetics, the subtle but radiant performances from its two leads, and its thoughtful, lingering silences.

Ichikawa has often been described as heir to the great Ozu (who Ichikawa genuinely admires), and nowhere else, not even in his earlier Tokyo Kyodai or Osaka Story, is this claim better exemplified than in the ascetic structure and quiet dignity of Tony Takitani. With delicate care and an unwavering eye for the most minute of details, the oft-overlooked filmmaker interweaves exquisite threads - from distinguished composer Ryuichi Sakamoto's elegantly lilting, plaintive piano score, to cinematographer Taishi Hirokawa's rendering of the austere sets of Yoshikazu Ichida into a subdued palette of desaturated greys and white - to gracefully form a tapestry of superlative richness and depth; an immaculate evocation of the dreamy, melancholic world that is Murakami's.

Echoes of the great master may indeed resonate faintly throughout the precisely-composed interior frames and distant shots, but the visual style here is entirely Ichikawa's own. The camera of Tony Takitani rarely allows itself to be static, preferring instead to lithely drift rightwards from scene to scene, unfurling languidly, not unlike an emaki scroll - a perfect complement to the narration peerlessly voiced, with an appropriately resigned equanimity, by Hidetoshi Nishijima (whose sentences are at times completed by the onscreen characters themselves, a unique and effective touch).

The film is as much a showcase for character comedian Issey Ogata as it is for Ichikawa's prowess as a director. Having only one previous notable onscreen role to name - that of the visiting Japanese software designer Ota in Yi Yi, a sort of benign Man in the Brown Macintosh (that is, if one were to view Edward Yang's magnum opus as a Taiwanese Ulysses) - Ogata delivers a magnificently poised performance, bereft of the side-splitting theatrics he's known for onstage, as an emotionally dislocated man finally able to discover meaning in his barren life, only to see it give way to inconsolable grief.

One beautifully-crafted piece of minimalist filmmaking, Tony Takitani serves, like Hirokazu Koreeda's Nobody Knows, as a happy reassurance that there exists in Japanese cinema alternatives to the manga-inspired ultraviolence advocated by the likes of Takashi Miike. A round of applause then to Ichikawa for creating this deeply haunting, deeply elegiac portrait of solitude and spiritual emptiness; as flawless as any adaptation of Murakami can be.

"Tony" A Visual Poem That Works... Occasionally
For everything I liked about "Tony Takitani", there is something about the film I disliked. In the end, I'm glad I saw the Japanese film on DVD, but if I had paid to see it at a theater, I wouldn't have been as happy. It takes the right type of person to appreciate this film and I don't know many of those people.

Tony Takitani (Issei Ogata), the son of a Jazz musician (also played by Ogata), grows up living a solitary life. From an early age, he learns to care for himself while his Dad is away, touring the far corners of the globe for months, years on end. Tony learns he has the ability to draw, but prefers to be very methodical and precise, so he becomes a mechanical illustrator. A darn good one at that, because he earns a good living. But as an adult, his life is empty; he sees his Dad every two or three years and has no one else in his life, focusing his attention on his work. One day, he meets a young woman, Konuma (Rie Miyazawa) and becomes enamored of her. Despite her objections, they fall in love and marry. But will Tony be happy after all?

Because Tony says little, the film is narrated, providing a sort of guiding poem to Tony's life, giving us occasional clues to his thoughts and feelings. As his world grows, with the addition of a wife, a housekeeper, others, they occasionally finish the narrator's sentences. This is an interesting idea, a partially successful, interesting idea. The narration paints a portrait of Tony's isolation, of his loneliness. Because he rarely speaks, we need a window into his world and the narrator provides that. Every time the narrator returns, we are reminded of this, giving us further evidence of the main character's life.

The narration helps to lend the film a fable quality. We hear "Tony began to cook his dinners for himself at an early age." for instance, as we watch scenes play out. Because someone is describing Tony's life, no matter the obtuse, somewhat poetic descriptions sometimes used, it makes us feel as though we are watching a picture book come to life. This, and the sad, rather unusual nature of his life, helps to make the film seem a little more unusual.

"Tony" has an interesting, visual style. A partially successful, interesting visual style. A majority of the scenes begin with the camera slowly moving across the horizon, from left to right. As the camera moves, we pick up a character and their actions until the camera moves beyond and picks up the next scene, moving from left to right. This technique helps the film seem more fluid, because the camera is always moving. Without this movement, "Tony" would feel very episodic. This camera work also creates a sort of visual poem complimenting the Japanese setting and time.

Unfortunately, the combination of the narration and the slow camera sweeping across every scene serve to make the film seem long. At roughly seventy-five minutes, "Tony" barely qualifies as a feature length movie. Yet, because of these two techniques, it feels as though we are watching an epic length film without any of the `epic'.

The performances are universally one note but even this sort of fits, no matter how annoying it might be. Because the camera is always moving, it rarely lingers on a scene for long. Essentially, we are watching a series of narrated tableaus illustrating the man's life. Interesting, but not entirely successful either. It would seem unnatural if any character showed a lot of emotion because we are only watching them for a brief period. But staying true to the filmmaker's ideas has created a very unnatural, slow paced film.

A watchable, but nonetheless unnatural and slow paced film.

the art of melancholy
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.