Movie Review: Jun Ichikawa's Tony Takitani: One False Step - Page 3

All the same, it would have been possible to respect the allegory and still make it more extroverted. This could have been done by building up the contrasting characters of Tony's father (also played by Ogata) and Hisako (also played by Miyazawa), a young woman Tony hires to wear Eiko's clothes after she's gone, to suggest more pointedly what Tony has excluded from his experience. It could also have been done, alternatively or at the same time, by playing into the irony and making it funny. Tony is, after all, a fool, for not grasping Eiko's character and even more so for not knowing himself better. The crack-up of a control freak is often taken to have something inherently comic in it (e.g., Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby (1938), Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story (1940), Jeff Daniels in Something Wild (1986), Julianne Moore in Laws of Attraction (2004), etc.) because it's the means by which the protagonist is called, despite himself, to take part in the ongoing regeneration of human society. It's comic unless you regret the passing of the life the uptight protagonist gives up. In this sense Tony's story is decidedly not comic—not once he misses the opportunity to connect with Hisako.

Ichikawa has chosen to keep Tony what he is at the start, someone who can't learn from his experience and move forward. But it doesn't follow from this choice that we should be sad just because Tony is. One of the wonderful qualities of allegory is a certain objectivity about the material. In this regard it was a fundamental mistake for Trevor Nunn to play for pathos the expulsion of Malvolio from the happy company at the end of his adaptation of Twelfth Night (1996); the allegory requires he go. The intricacy and complexity come, rather, when Olivia sends after Malvolio, also as the allegory requires. At the end of Tony Takitani, when the protagonist is sobbing on the couch with his head turned away from us, it would not be an out-and-out mistake, but it would be literal-minded, you might even say arbitrary, to expect us to sorrow along with him. We can understand the depicted emotion, but are we supposed to be wishing Eiko back, or Tony's lonely life before her? As the movie's use of narration and its visual program make clear, Ichikawa does maintain a degree of objectivity. He does not, however, take advantage of this objectivity to give the allegory a more complex resonance.

Article Author: Alan Dale

Alan Dale earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He currently works as a corporate tax attorney in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies …

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