Although the allegory feels deliberately restricted to a narrow, bleak range, Ichikawa does not treat it as a heavy form. His work here tells a tale, but his style has more of the qualities of lyric. Finally, however, there's something a mite too delicate about the depiction of Tony enclosed in his misery. Ichikawa is far too fastidious to go in for spell-it-out histrionics, and his work is not as numbing as the work of other super-refined masters of desolation. In other words, he's not the Woody Allen of Interiors (1978) or the Michelangelo Antonioni of Eclipse (1962) and Red Desert (1964). All the same, Tony Takitani does similarly lack variety of tone and incident. In its way, this fancy funk of a movie is as consciously designed and as limited an "object" as Tony's life before Eiko; it's as beautiful, but also as slight, as Eiko herself.

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Alan Dale is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies of the 1990s and Comedy Is a Man in Trouble: Slapstick in American Movies.