(Tony Takitani)
While it’s not my intention to climb atop of the soapbox here, criticism pertaining to the pace or the length of a film seems to me to be an often-dubious thing. Sometimes, it’s apparent that lambasting a film for its duration is simply a sign of a weak attention-span; other times, when a film is said to be “slow”, it’s actually meant to be, only those with accelerated lifestyles will fail to see it that way. Maybe it’s a generational thing (MTV aesthetics, machine gun editing, drive-thru this, 24/7 that), that we live in fast times (blame technology), or just plain human nature (or the deterioration of). Either way, the problem is akin to trying to get a small child to sit still, and the only way it’s ever going to be resolved is if, by some miracle of evolution, we can hit Alt-Ctrl-Delete.

Emerging recently from films like The World, or even previous year’s stuff like Blissfully Yours, these are exactly the kind of things I’m hearing. And that doesn’t include all the walkouts beforehand. The peeps who get impatient or bored stiff I don’t really blame – they’re adventurous enough to dive in to begin with, but if they’re not conditioned for long silences, repetition, stasis or the abstracted/experimental/diluted narrative (plus all the other clichés of art), then they can’t be expected to come out smiling. I’m all for opening up the TNZIFF to as wider audience as possible, but when I hear excellent cinema bemoaned unnecessarily because it lacked story or was sleep-inducing, I know there must be something that can be done to direct the “casual” viewer towards a more rewarding experience without diverting them entirely from the (to badly generalise) avant-garde obscurities that are the backbone of this festival.

Recommendations are a start. Tony Takitani is hardly avant-garde in the complete sense, but in terms of negotiating a level playing field for those non-festival regulars with a certain “ajar” mindedness to what’s *different* on offer, it’s the perfect entry-point film. Consider that it’s based on a Haruki Murakami short story; that it’s Japanese (with subtitles!); that it’s almost entirely narrated; that it’s about little more than a man and his clothes-addicted wife. Arty-farty but not, it’s a glistening wisp of something not too dissimilar from a haiku – an elegant poetry of graceful tracking shots over lonesome surfaces that’s accessible, yet about as far removed from the convention of box office cinema as you’re likely to get. Importantly still, it glides by at an economical and, for the popcorn brigade, an unpretentious 75 minutes. Jun Ichikawa directs handsomely with all the bits and pieces at his disposal: a Ryuichi Sakamoto score, pristine cinematography, haute couture, and two wonderful actors, each in two seperate roles (Issey Ogata and Rie Miyazawa both extracting chameleon performances). The key here is that there’s some mid-ground; Ichikawa’s film is user-friendly, yet it’s no watercolour either. And when everything merges – and isn’t complicated by Big Concepts or Themes – it’s seamless, concise, and just hard not to like. On the spot, if ever a film fit the bill for the art-for-the-masses-for-the-snobs-for-the-rest of us, this is probably it.—TW

» tonytakitani.com