31 August 2006
"In the parallel worlds of Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, the magic happens between the lines. His spartan lyricism, rendered in deceptively plain and airy prose, tends to shade without warning into deep, dizzying melancholy. It's hard to fully grasp the chemistry of this process, and presumably harder still to transpose it to another medium.Both protagonist and story are barely there, but "Takitani" is Murakami in miniature, a brief, precise inventory of the novelist's themes: cosmic loneliness, the shadow of mortality, jazz, the coincidence of materialist abundance and spiritual barrenness. Ichikawa retains a portion of the text as voice-over.
Shot in a wan, neutral palette that emphasizes its protagonist's muted desolation, Ichikawa's film is, in more ways than one, a model of economy: The elder Takitani's Shanghai stint is conveyed in a series of sepia stills; most of the interiors utilize a single, repeatedly re-dressed set. Languid, left-to-right tracking shots, one image wiping into the next, give the impression of a picture book's slowly turned pages. Ryuichi Sakamoto's spare, insinuating piano score conjures an atmosphere of dreamlike suspension, as does the low-key voice-over, which at times trails off, only to be picked up by the characters. Oneiric as it is, though, Tony Takitani conveys a powerfully tangible sense of loss and loneliness. In both concrete and existential terms, it's a film that dwells on what the dead leave behind and how the living carry on."
- Dennis Lim
VILLAGE VOICE
I just couldn't believe my eyes when I flipped open the papers today and came across the review of this movie!! I saw a poster of it online a few months back, and had reconciled myself to the fact that they probably wouldn't screen it in Singapore. But lucky us, they are! So yeah, catch it at The Picturehouse.
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