"Tony Takitani" (Language - Japanese) (2004) - Movie Review

Almost the entire film runs with the guidance of the voice over for “Tony Takitani” and yet it is surplus with emotions not being lost in with the real emotions of the characters. This Japanese film experiments the medium and works quite well for most parts. It is poetical, melancholic, tragic, sometimes laughable and most of the times being alone along with the Tony Takitani (Issei Ogata, who also plays Takitani’s father Shozaburo Takitani and as a minor glitch plays the young Takitani too which does not suit well). It is close study of a man who lives his life for majority as a lone wolf but gets the taste of being with someone, a woman and when it is deprived of it again, he is helpless.

Directed by Jun Ichikawa, sometimes testing the limits of patience and various times unveiling the emotional culpability of the character which it turns on us watching him. His name is different as it bores American name of Tony and his father rightly imagining the influence of the culture, names him so. Tony loses his mother when he is at the age of three days. Then he is taken care at least till he reaches high school by maids while his father goes around playing for Jazz. It is a mutual abandonment from both ends. His father stops caring and he stops caring for the existence of others around him. He is not a sociopath but a man grew up designed himself to be alone. He lives in a house which hardly appears palpable but the camera is set so to have a window/door of openness but Takitani resides inside this easily transparent view in a shell.

He is not emotionless. He is not a prodigy in the job of drawing machines but is good at it. He does not love it but likes which gives his daily bread. He is a man with no ties around him. He does not have friends and by the look of it, is quite old. His life looks impossible but highly probable. It asks us how our characteristics of being a social animal gets absent in him? He is very much a possible character and an amicable one only keeping it to him or rather waits for the person to show that. It comes in the form of Eiko (Rie Miyazawa) who wears her clothes as an art. Later we learn her obsession for the clothes and her addiction to it. He likes her and for the first time in his life want to be with some one else apart from him forever. Humans of course are social animal.

He enters the matrimonial eventuality and things should go wrong, right? Of course other wise a film of happily living couple cannot be taken as the rest of the film. He begins to get used to the feeling of being with some one. The evidence of a living entity in a house which was marked with the distant sounds of mechanical sequential rumbling is strange but likeable for him. He slowly forgets how to be alone. It is the feeling we accommodate a new experience. It can be crudely compared to the purchase of an electronic gadget, once you get to be with it, you wonder how you survived without it for such a long time. Takitani learns that feeling but now fears the solitude. He learns to deal with it but now comes his wife’s obsession towards clothes. They do not fight but discuss and Eiko does realize the extent of her addiction. It might be odd to have some one being addicted in buying clothes and lets us look at ourselves. Our own reasoning to buy new clothes for an occasion and the fantasy of being in it and when it multiplies, we do understand Eiko’s addiction.

The movie plays down the dialogue and elevates the narration to convey the poetic value of the screen images. The camera being handled so fresh and the lateral movement sometimes even denying having a full face exposure of the characters is shocking but novel. During many lateral movements of the camera, that particular shot does not get a different camera angle but when Eiko is introduced, we see another angle yet not her full face. And it is unreasonable but aesthetically one of the subtle feelings of admiring the beauty. Similarly when the outdoor shots are made, the back ground is enlarged so much with the presence of the exterior surroundings of vast sky and dense city wherein the characters walks in small but notable. There is uniqueness in the presentation and even the dullness of it is highly appealing.

What can be learned from this aloof personality? Or what exactly does this short story tells us about this person? Takitani is put into loneliness again as you might see in the film and as narrated learns to forget the presence of another soul being in his life. We realize his dealing with the grief is erasing the memory of living with someone. And we see he is getting good at it. He goes back to the pre-Eiko life. We are completely convinced that he has forgotten of the company but the end makes us realize that he actually has forgotten to be alone.