Tony Takitani
Happy new year, dear readers! In the next days, you might think that it looks like I have made a new year’s resolution to watch more movies, especially when considering the fact that I have not watched much recently. That is most certainly not the case; however, MUBI US has a 30-day trial before it institutes its new system. That system consists of adding and deleting one movie from the library per day such that you always have the choice amongst the 30 most recently added movies, all for 5 dollars a month. I am not sure if I like that – somehow it feels strangely restricting on what you can watch and when, yet at the same time, that very restriction can be a godsend when you have a hard time picking something (like I often do).
In any case, this is a unique opportunity for me to see tons of movies, and you can be sure that I will want to make use of that.
“Tony Takitani” was picked almost randomly from the current movies MUBI offers, and I have been meaning to see it ever since the anime blogosphere at the time was totally in love with it. There are a bunch of die-hard Murakami fans amongst them, and they raved about the film like crazy. For the first perhaps 20 minutes, I had no idea what they were talking about. The film was awfully slow and I wasn’t really sure how I liked the premise of a woman who is crazy about clothing and a husband who doesn’t know how to deal with it. In reality, the film is almost a masterpiece – beautifully photographed, well-written and its story is so Murakami-like sad. It took me awhile to understand that because the composition of the film only becomes clear at the end. Similarly, the sadness of the film can only be seen as a whole. It is those last few minutes in the film where the depth of the characters really come out. The husband who is afraid of the loneliness without his wife, the wife who tried to change her essence out of love for her husband, the woman who weeps because of somebody else’s dead wife – all of them act in this strange realm of Japanese strangeness we know so well from Murakami. Ryuichi Sakamoto’s music underlines this melancholy wonderfully, and the subdued color scheme of the entire film helps as well.
The melancholy and fatality of lovei in this film reminded me of Takeshi Kitano’s Dolls, and if you like the beauty of that, you should definitely take a look a this movie.