A friend once posed a question to me, that if a person whose been poor all their lives suddenly one day won the lottery, would they enjoy it, or would they subconsciously destroy what they’ve won just to revert back to the poverty, which they’re inadvertently grown comfortable with? I guess you can make the same assertion with “Tony Takitani” is a film in the vein of “Rebecca” which tells the sad tale of a man named Tony Takitani, who lived his entire life without anyone to love or care for. One day during work he meets Eiko, who takes the job as his secretary and their romance begins.

The question ultimately posed is that if you’re accustomed to being alone throughout your life, without anyone to care for, and you find happiness, are you capable of keeping it, or would you subconsciously destroy it or sabotage it? The focus of the film draws to both Tony and Eiko who find one another and discover some problems within their relationship. These are two lonely people who feel their void is filled only when indulging their obsessions, but once they eliminate the obsessions they feel parts them, they discover the void is really in their lives and their relationship, and then it takes a turn for the worse. Ichikawa examines that concept well.

Unfortunately, no analogy or theorizing in the world can escape the fact that “Tony Takitani” is a painfully boring and utterly mind numbing exercise in artsy filmmaking that never once qualified as entertaining, or true to life. I suggest watching this only if you’re really ready for a 75 minute exercise in utterly depressing and gloomy filmmaking without one single moment that will keep you wanting to watch. “Tony Takitani” is a consistently gloomy and incredibly sluggish film that feels over three hours yet it’s not even ninety minutes. We watch characters do nothing but sit around and narrate their own stories when the narrator isn’t, and I never found what the point of it all was. Loneliness is a prison would be the basic bullet point of the entire film, and the writers feel the need to cram this down our throats for nearly ninety minutes insistently.

And they do it through utterly manipulative plot twists that never make sense. Why did he have a problem with Eiko’s clothes binging? Why was she addicted really? Why did Tony feel the need to call up his secretary in the climax? Nothing ever really added up to cohesive narratives and it all felt as if it was placed on the screen just to gauge our emotions and force us to sympathize with this character. The narration doesn’t improve the lack of truly defined characters because all the writer feels inclined to let us know about them is that they’re sad and they’re lonely. Their house is a graveyard, and they are haunted by their memories. And then I woke up. Suffice it to say thanks to its utterly dreary and sleepy pacing and plot elements, “Tony Takitani” is tough to sit through.

Though Ichikawa's film has good intentions to follow the original source loyally, and lifts from films like "Rebecca" and "Vertigo", the film is soulless and utterly boring, because it's insists on being so melodramatic, and manipulative simply to gauge its audience. While it's not a purely awful film, it's almost unwatchable because it insists on testing its audience patience and emotions.

[   Shop   |   Link to Us   |   FAQ   |   Top^   ]
All written reviews material and content are a copyright of Felix Vasquez Jr. and Cinema Crazed.
Content borrowed without written permission will not be permitted.

¤ ¤ ¤