E-Mail This Article to a Friend TONY TAKITANI

JAPANESE | 75 MINUTES | KENDALL SQUARE

This adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s short story chronicles the life of an illustrator (Issey Ogata) who breaks the pattern of his solitary existence by marrying a 15-years-younger colleague (Rie Miyazawa). She proves the ideal companion in every respect but for her compulsion to buy designer clothes. In director Jun Ichikawa’s punctilious but soothing mise-en-scène, people and furniture appear cut out against fields of bland color. Ichikawa makes superb use of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s depressive piano score and of sparse voiceover narration that sometimes gets out of synch with the action (as in Bresson’s Une femme douce, with which Tony Takitani invites comparison). The anti-fetishism of the director’s style seems paradoxical for a film about clothes, but it suits one that’s also about loss and disconnection. The way Ichikawa shows things invites the audience to possess them, but only as a flat image in which no intervention is possible or even desirable.