Japanese films

Last night I watched a DVD of the Japanese film, Tony Takitani, directed by Jun Ichikawa a few years ago and based on the novel by Haruki Murakami. It’s a strange, short (75 mins) affair about a lonely boy who grows up to be a lonely man until he falls in love with a young woman obsessed with buying designer-clothes. The atmosphere is of slow left-to-right pans in uncluttered interiors set to languid piano music by Ryuichi Sakamoto.

But what’s really interesting is the accompanying Making Of movie which is actually longer than the film it’s about. The shock is that the entire film was shot outdoors, with half-open sets constructed on a stage in a vacant lot in Yokohama. Why? Hard to know - it wasn't really explained. But there was a lumiscence about it, and if you looked closely you could occasionally see a strand of hair blown across a face. Amazingly it didn't rain through the entire shoot.

It got me leafing through Donald Richie’s A 100 Years of Japanese Film. Here’s my Top 10:

- Tokyo Story (Ozu, 1953)
- Seven Samurai (Kurosawa, 1954)
- In the Realm of the Senses (Oshima, 1976)
- Sansho the Bailiff (Mizoguchi, 1954)
- Spirited Away (Miyazaki, 2001)
- Tokyo Drifter (Suzuki, 1966)
- Shall We Dance (Suo, 1996)
- Elegant Beast (Kawashima, 1962)
- Woman in the Dunes (Teshigahara, 1964)
- Godzilla (Honda, 1954)

No room for Takeshi Kitano…