Jun Ichikawa's 2004 movie, Tony Takitani, is visually very distinctive. It's all grey and sepia, with just tiny touches of muted colour (Ichikawa says he "decolorized" the print to make the shades more muted.) The camera constantly pans from left to right, often cutting off your view as an obstacle gets in the way. The sets are minimalist, and the lead actors play two roles each. The piano soundtrack becomes almost another character. The story is mostly told by a quietly spoken narrator, but the characters sometimes complete his sentences, distancing themselves by using the third person.


Himeji, Japan, 2015



It's a movie about loneliness. Tony's father spent time in solitary confinement in Shanghai, wondering whose turn it would be to be executed next. When he is released, he goes back to Japan, and marries. He gains a son, but his wife dies. As a musician, he's often on tour. So Tony is a solitary child, whose alien name isolates him still further. But he becomes a highly successful illustrator.

If you're lonely and you never find a connection to someone, that's very sad, but if you're lonely, and you find someone, and that connection is then broken, then that's tragic, because you then know exactly what you're missing. This is what happens to Tony.

He meets Eiko, a woman 15 years younger than he is. He marries her. The only fly in their ointment is that she's a clothes addict. She enjoys wearing clothes, and she enjoys buying them -- lots of them. Eventually, Tony tries to restrain what he sees as her addiction. Tragically, the move she makes to go along with his concern (returning some clothes to the place she has bought them) ends up with her perishing in a car crash (while seemingly torn and distracted by her act of surrender).

Left with a huge hole in his life, and a large amount of clothes, Tony hires someone Eiko's size to be his gofer -- and to wear her clothes. Which is, he knows, a weird idea... Hisako, the young woman he selects, tries on some of the clothes in the enormous dressing-room, and breaks down in tears. She says she's crying because she's never seen such beautiful clothes, but we find out later that she's not actually that interested in fashion, so we wonder why she was crying, and we suspect it was because of the sheer pointlessness of this whole life business -- all these clothes, unworn; this whole relationship, so lately formed, now broken; death, the inevitable end of everything because life comes with built-in obsolescence.

Tony reconsiders, tells her this won't work out, and cancels their arrangement. This leaves her with explanations to give about where she obtained the first week's worth of beautiful clothes, which he says she can keep. We hope this won't somehow isolate her among her friends...

Later we see Tony try to call her. She reaches the phone too late to answer. But he's looking at her picture. Maybe he'll call again...

Ichikawa, at least according to Manohla Dargis, lightly suggests some historical context: "Early in the film, Tony's father lies in a Chinese jail cell; decades later, his son curls into the same position in an empty room in his house. Tony's cell may be self-constructed -- he reaches out only to Eiko -- but the prison in which that cell sits was not built by him alone." What has made Tony like this? What has made Japan like this?



The movie is based on a short story by Haruki Murakami, published in The New Yorker in 2002. Which I read, just out of interest. I'm not massively a Murakami fan, I have to admit. I loved Kafka on the Shore, which I read in 2007, and found exciting and innovative. But I hated The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which I tackled a few years later (they were written in 2002 and 1995, respectively, so maybe I was a bit unfair in judging an earlier work by the standards of a later one).

Reading the story, also entitled Tony Takitani, you can't help but notice that the only people who have names are Tony and his father. None of the women has a name.

The movie pretty accurately reflects the story, but there are some interesting divergences.

The key difference is that whereas Ichikawa leaves the ending ambiguous (will Tony try again to strike up a relationship with this human being so like his wife?), the story holds out no such hope. He remembers the woman he had attempted to hire ("her image remained strangely unforgettable"), but once his father has died, and he's got rid of the record collection he inherited from him, which he initially stored in that now-vacated dressing-room, "Tony Takitani was really alone".

In the movie we're given a tiny insight into Eiko's obsession. As Katie Duggan puts it: "She has no qualms about admitting that the clothes attempt to fill the void within herself. Tony is a skilled illustrator, with a particular ardor for drawing plans for commercial machines, but he cannot create anything that addresses her internal emptiness -- or his own. Instead, their hollowness is left to echo as they reverberate off each other."  In the story, the unnamed wife's motivations are not explained at all. She just likes to shop... As the two get to know each other, Murakami says: "They never seemed to tire of talking. It was as if they were filling up each other's emptiness." But did they? Or was that act of filling very one-sided?

Similarly, while a lot is left to our imagination, the movie does offer some suggestion of an explanation for Hisako's dressing-room breakdown. In the story, it's very unclear. We are told that this would-be employee is almost overpowered by the sight of the dresses; her reaction "felt like sexual arousal". She tries on some dresses, and then: "Her body swathed in a dress of the woman who had died, she stood utterly still, sobbing." Tony can't understand why the woman had cried. He instructs her to come back the next day. But it is on returning to the dressing-room, and realizing that these clothes are merely shadows of the woman he has lost, that he decides to cancel this strange employment. Whereas Tony's reactions are explored, the woman's are left unfathomable.

In the story, her thoughts as she unpacks the clothes she's been allowed to keep are kept pretty much on the material level, too: "Imagine the time and money that must have gone into buying all those clothes! And now the woman who did it is dead. I wonder what it must feel like to die and leave so many beautiful dresses behind." Seriously? Is that really all she thought?

I admit I may be reading too much into things here, but questions have been raised about Murakami's female characters, and I have to wonder whether this story, too, especially when thrown into relief by the subtle changes made by the film, suggests a bit of a reluctance to take women seriously.

Unusually for me, I enjoyed the movie more than the story.



John Curran's 2014 movie Tracks explores a different kind of solitude. It is based on a real journey, made in 1977 by Robyn Davidson, who covered the 2,700 km separating Alice Springs from the Indian Ocean in company with her dog and four dromedaries.

OK, so she's not always on her own. She finds many helpful people along the way (and also many idiots, of course). And she is "visited" from time to time by National Geographic photographer Rick Smolan. She's not always a grateful host (although she does value his support, and they do at one point have a bit of a fling). She has had to accept what she sees as his intrusions because the magazine is subsidizing her trip.

For many, many miles, however, and for great sweeping tracts of time, she's on her own with her dog, the camels, and either the burning sun or the starry, starry sky.

It's never made entirely clear why she is doing this. She lost her mother very tragically as a child; and she seems to have unfinished business with her father. But why this makes her want to undertake this extremely hazardous desert journey is not explained. Which is fair enough. To what extent do we even know ourselves why we want to do the things we want to do?

I enjoyed the movie immensely. The landscape is raw and beautiful. You can feel that dust in your throat, that fierce dry heat on your skin. Your eyes light up with hers when they finally see the vast expanse of that big, blue ocean ("never having seen a body of water larger than a puddle before, her camels were mesmerized").


Western Australia, 2003






Our own first glimpse of the bit of ocean off the west of Australia. Apologies for the radically squiffy horizon...

And there's something hypnotic about watching plodding feet: Robyn's sandals, Dig's little paddy-paws, the camels' amazing two-toed blocks, webbed and furry. I've always had a bit of a thing about camels. So elegant... So frankly peculiar...


Camel Research Centre, Bikaner, India, 2011




Near Jaisalmer, 2011





It's somehow a humbling movie. You lift your hat to her, as the initiator of this bold odyssey. You lift your hat to the Aboriginals whose forefathers, millennia ago, managed to make their home and build their culture in this inhospitable territory. You lift your hat to the isolated settlers she comes across, who live such simple, doggedly independent lives.

Robyn is played by Mia Wasikowska, and it is uncanny how much she looks like the original "camel lady". The photos at the end of the movie and in this National Geographic article show how faithfully the film adaptation recreates the shots and their background.

The real Rick Smolan (who, with the real Robyn, spent time on the movie set) observes that "part of the modern day appeal of Davidson's tale is that it would be almost impossible to do again today. 'The reason the filmmakers made the film is because it's a burden that we can't ever untether ourselves from civilization now. They are hoping [people] will find the story interesting because it's about trying to find yourself.'"

Davidson does indeed feel that the trip worked a kind of magic on her: "When there is no one to remind you what society’s rules are, and there is nothing to keep you linked to that society, you had better be prepared for some startling changes."

Fascinating movie. Go camels...


Bactrian camels in Mongolia, 2016