Tuesday 1 September 2009

Tony Takitani: Film Review

Title: Tony Takitani

Director: Jun Ichikawa

Year: 2005

Based on the short story written by: Haruki Murakami.


The usual focus of reviews on this site is anime and manga, but with flagrant disregard for form I have decided to take a leave from this, by providing my take on the film Tony Takitani. There’s no real need to justify this choice, the products of the of Far Eastern cinema (Japan and South Korea especially) are within our broad scope, if only tangentially.

I first became aware of, and enthralled by, the work of Haruki Murakami when I picked up the novel Dance Dance Dance in an airport, and ever since, I have been systematically acquiring his other works. Alongside his novels, Murakami also releases collections of short stories, and it is within the collection entitled Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman that I first read Tony Takitani. It is the story of a man who, as a child, spends most of his time alone, as his mother died shortly after childbirth, his father was a gigging trombonist, and Tony was often left alone by other children, due to his American / English / foreign name, which summoned up negative connotations in post-war Japan. He continues to distance himself from others well into his adult life, until he eventually encounters a woman for whom he departs from his socially distant attitude. It is a short story, then, that is a soft melancholic microcosm of an existence that can, at times, be incredibly lonely.

I am generally worried when I discover film adaptations of written works, as for every Lord of the Rings quality adaption, there are a hundred million Legend of the Seeker abominations. Rumours of a feature length Atlas Shrugged starring Angelina Jolie cause my body to malfunction and spurt acid into my cranium. Huge novels are not suited to make the leap to film, which is why Lord of the Rings takes place over three, and they have such gargantuan running times and an overwhelming amount of deleted scenes. A short story, then, is perhaps more suited to this sort of reimagining, and films bearing the wreaths of film festivals, as Tony Takitani does, have a special attraction to a certain kind of viewer, for instance, me. The cover was festooned with more quality reviews and quotes than I was able to shake my cynical stick at, and I was also able to pick it up for a stupidly low price. Go me.

The film is one of the most true adaptations I have ever come across, which I, personally, feel is a hugely important thing, especially when the original piece is of such high quality. It captures the mood of the short story fantastically, which is an extremely difficult thing when dealing with two mediums that are so far removed from each other. It must be nearly impossible to successfully and honestly recreate the same bleak sense of loneliness which came originally from only the written word, this time having to factor in every visual and audio factor, from angle to duration of shots, from the soundtrack to the lack of one. The makers must have understood that completely, and have done a masterful job.

Colour is of huge importance to the film, and the scope of colours in the film are largely drawn from a lacklustre pastel pallet, which with a few tweaks up the brightness scale could render the scheme overly bright and cheerful, but instead it is kept relatively dull. This helps to project the clean cut and sterile nature of the existence of Tony Takitani, meaning that though he wants for nothing in purely material terms, the colours are a constant reminder of his extended malaise.

The film is minimalistic, with dialogue chosen frugally and implemented beautifully, again reinforcing the social non-entity that Tony had developed into. Scenes play out at great length, with very little physical activity to lend the scenes a focus of action, as the life of Tony Takitani is one of profound emptiness. These drawn out scenes are decorated magnificently by frequent narration, which lends the film the feel of the short story, as it has the intimacy of a story literally being told, rather than merely having you experience the tale passively. The idea of having the story specifically being ‘told’ occurs repeatedly in the film, as often the flow of the narrator's monologue will leak out into the scene as it unfolds, where a character will continue the gist of the narration, despite physically being set in the story. I felt this was a powerful technique, as the story then felt as though it was being bequeathed from the characters themselves, as an insight into a life that would otherwise never have been experienced.

The soundtrack is wonderfully apt, with a simple recurring piano piece as its backbone. Perhaps more important, though, is the occasional lack of backing track. These breaks in the music are used to great effect, leaving certain scenes bare and bleak, again returning to one of the running themes of the story.

An iconic scene features Tony lying motionless on the floor of an empty room, and it is incredible that a scene where literally nothing is happening can be so moving. I am not a huge fan of seemingly “that’s so true” revelations in any medium, but it is likely that a proportion of everyone’s life is spent lying on the floor of an empty room, even if only metaphorically. If you would disagree with the last statement, you should probably give the film a miss, as the twice removed sensation of lying on a bed watching a film where a man is lying on the floor of an empty room would probably be considered by you a waste of valuable time, where you could be doing something pro-active, like fishing or bashing your head repeatedly against a wall. I don’t begrudge you your fishing, you can at least have the decency not to begrudge me my pastel-bleak ennui, thank you very much.

The entire film is tinged with an artistic soft touch, suggesting and trusting the viewer to make of it what they will, rather than bluntly presenting you with the conclusions you are intended to make, as modern yarns are wont to do. It is refreshing to have such a film, where the ending is not the crashing crescendo of manufactured and measured elation, but a fade out that suggests a continuation of life, as life does go on (unless, of course, you are dead), heedless of the lack of a Hollywood happy ending. The film ends in such a way as to suggest that the stage curtain has not been closed, that the story continues on without the audience. For what are any of our lives if not an experimental artsy film playing out in a theatre devoid of an audience? A string of self-referential blog entries containing hugely pretentious metaphors as their conclusion? Fuck you, then.

Tony Takitani is a delightfully unconventional film, which I would recommend to anyone with a brain and a haunting cello number playing the soundtrack to their lives. The film is probably best served dampened with the tears of the lonely, preferably in the midst of a particularly enjoyable bout of disheartening gloom.

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