FILM REVIEW – TONY
TAKITANI Slow, beautiful, minimalist. but very depressing 2004 Japanese film about a lonely deeply
depressed and melancholic man, the eponimous Tony
Takitani.
Tony’s father was a jazz musician in the 1930’s, who. Due to his free-exptression musical interests, was arrested and imprisoned as the Japanese marched on Manchuria. Surviving the war only to find out that his wife died in the firestorm over Tokyo, he is left with only his son.
Named Tony to fit in with the dominant American culture, Tony finds himself instead merely alienated from his own countrymen.
Tony studies art, but limited love life makes him dismiss the medium as unrealistic romanticism and so he turns to technical engineering drawing, and gains some success.
He falls in love with a girl fifteen years younher than himself, and threatens suicide to seduce her away from her established boyfriend.
After a time, he realises that his new bride has a problem – she is a shopaholic, and obsessed with designer
clothes. She buys so many that Tony converts a large room in their house to a wardrobe for her. When her obsession intensifies, Tony talks her into taking her most recent purchaes back to the shops. She does, but then she regets it and turns the car around, driving back at speed. The next thing we know is that she is dead. Whether this was suicide or an accident in her rush back to the shop is unspecified.
Months later, Tony adveryizes for a house-keeper, and specifies that she must be able and willing to wear his ex-wife’s clothes as her uniform – the girl who takes the job is unused to such expensive clothes. She steals some for herself, and gets teaed by her friends. Tony dismisses her but lets her keep what she has taken. He now sells off the remaining clothes, replacing them soon afterwards with his now deceased father’s jazz record collection, but soon disposes of that too, and tales to sitting alone in the empty wardrobe rom.
At the end he meets the man who had dated his wife before he had taken her on – the man callously asks Tony if he is glad to see the last of her as he is himself – Tony makes it clear that he regrets her death deeply – the film ends. Haunting, slow, but never boring.
Arthur Chappell