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Japan · 2005
1h 45m
Director Jun Ichikawa
Starring Issei Ogata, Rie Miyazawa, Hidetoshi Nishijima, Takahumi Shinohara
Genre Drama
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Illustrator Tony Takitani was an outcast growing up, but his detached existence comes to an end when he meets and falls in love with a woman named Eiko. However, when Tony learns Eiko is secretly addicted to shopping for clothes, he wonders what else she could be hiding.
Christian Science Monitor by David Sterritt
The movie's underlying theme is the complex relationship between objects and memories, worked out through a taut, compelling story and superbly understated acting. Ryuichi Sakamoto composed the atmospheric score.
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.
Ultimately, this is a striking-looking film -- consciously recalling the paintings of Edward Hopper in its architectural use of space -- which, like its protag, is a little short on real feeling.
New York Daily News by Elizabeth Weitzman
The result is a quietly simple fable that hits you hardest after it's over.
You really have to be in the right mood to sit through Tony Takitani. You have to be ready to take in a thoroughly depressing story that moves...very...slowly.
TV Guide Magazine by Maitland McDonagh
This minimalist meditation on loneliness and loss is so spare and drained of color that it seems always on the verge of fading into invisibility.
The New York Times by Manohla Dargis
A delicate wisp of a film with a surprisingly sharp sting.
Entertainment Weekly by Owen Gleiberman
It's a quiet dream of a movie, a vision of loneliness giving way to love, then to loneliness again; it's like "Vertigo" remade in a sedately haunted style of Japanese lyricism.
The New Republic by Stanley Kauffmann
Not many of us, I think, would want to see many films made this way, possibly not one more, but this one is an intriguing glance at the director-as-god, deigning to treat human frailty with imperial sway, assuming that his art justifies this slender material.
No adventurous filmgoer will want to miss Tony Takitani.
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