Spare style of ‘Tony Takitani’ hits a rich vein

“Tony Takitani” is an exquisite film, as elegant and precise as an impeccably cut diamond. It’s small in scale but wholly mesmerizing, holding us captive as it demonstrates how much enveloping richness can be conveyed with a minimalist style.

“Tony Takitani” is also a deft synthesis of cinema and literature, as filmmaker Jun Ichikawa was determined to do justice to the world of the celebrated Japanese author who wrote the original story. With both writer-director and novelist in complete control of their mediums, what results is a delicate evocation of a very particular environment, one that Ichikawa tellingly describes as “solid, but also floating a few centimeters above reality.”

That would be the universe of dreamy realist Haruki Murakami, Japan’s most popular writer and a major figure across Asia, a novelist whose latest book, “Kafka on the Shore,” sold nearly half a million copies in Japan in its first two months in stores.

Like Murakami’s novella, composed after the writer bought a thrift-shop shirt emblazoned with the name “Tony Takitani,” Ichikawa’s film starts with the creation of an elusive mood of loneliness and alienation. But there is more here, including a parable about the consuming nature of the consumer society, a tale of obsession that echoes “Vertigo,” as well as an involving personal drama.

To convey these particular sensations, Ichikawa has consciously adopted a pared-back directing style. He’s cut the film’s running time down to a spare 75 minutes, commissioned a delicate score from celebrated composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, and even used the same two actors to play the piece’s four major roles.

Working with cinematographer Taishi Hirokawa, Ichikawa has also constructed an artful and elegant visual style that complements the story, including slow camera pans to move unobtrusively from time period to time period. No shot seems at all ordinary but nothing is forced for effect.

The words, very close to Murakami’s original, are haunting in an extensive voice-over narration that’s periodically punctuated by one of the characters suddenly piping up and finishing the narrator’s thought in his or her own voice. It’s an off-balance conceit that invariably catches us up in pleasant surprise.

“Tony Takitani” starts with a forthright declaration that “Tony Takitani’s real name was really that: Tony Takitani.” That designation led people to assume that he was “a mixed-blood child,” but he was actually “100% genuine Japanese,” though with a curious history that the film proceeds to explore.

Tony’s father, Shozaburo Takitani (played, as is Tony, by Issey Ogata), was a jazz trombonist who cared about little more than his next gig. His wife died soon after their only son’s birth, and he was persuaded by a U.S. Army major he jammed with to name the boy after him.

Feeling cursed by a first name that made other Japanese look at him strangely, Tony grew up as a self-reliant boy, and he kept himself apart from other people even as an adult. He achieved prominence as a meticulous illustrator, someone known to be the best where drawing anything mechanical was called for.

Tony’s self-sufficiency is shattered when he meets a young woman the film (she’s nameless in the story) calls Eiko Konuma (Miyazawa Rie). He is struck immediately by the way she dresses. “She wore her clothes naturally,” the narrator says, “as though enveloped by a special breeze.” She tells Tony that she feels “clothes fill up what’s missing inside me.” That should have been a warning sign, but it wasn’t.

For Eiko is a woman who, “in the presence of clothes, is entirely unable to restrain herself.” Once she marries Tony and has access to his considerable salary, she begins to buy what Tony reluctantly (because he loves his wife) acknowledges is “an alarming number of clothes.” What he decides to do about that and the results of his decision are the crux of this film’s dramatic structure.

But “Tony Takitani” is only partly about its slowly unfolding story, which makes its oblique sensibility especially hard to pin down with words. A film that could not be more carefully put together, without a frame or a word out of place, it is elusive, undefinable, one of a kind.

*

‘Tony Takitani’

MPAA rating: Unrated

Distributed by Strand Releasing. Director Jun Ichikawa. Producer Ishida Motoki. Executive producer Yonezawa Keiko. Screenplay Jun Ichikawa, based on a story by Haruki Murakami. Cinematographer Taishi Hirokawa. Editor Sanjyo Tomoo. Music Ryuichi Sakamoto. Decorator Takahashi Shimako. Running time: 1 hour, 15 minutes. In Japanese with English subtitles.

At Laemmle’s Sunset 5, 8000 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood, (323) 848-3500; and Laemmle’s One Colorado, 42 Miller Alley, Pasadena, (626) 744-1224.