Tony Takitani (Jun Ichikawa, 2004)

For the most part of his life, Tony Takitani has cherished a solitary existence . As a middle-aged bachelor, he sets store by his solitude, content in a job that allows him a measure of self-containment, and oblivious to everything else. As a voice-over narrator explains, the status quo seems “the most natural thing in the world.” It isn’t a lonely life but one inured to the absence of family. Tony’s one remaining relation is his itinerant father who has always been away on gigs playing the trombone in a jazz band.

But the proverbial curve ball comes hurtling his way in the form of Eiko, a stylish, young and beautiful fellow artist at work. Tony is drawn to her for some strange reason that he can only attribute to her materialistic obsession – a mania for fashion and expensive designer clothes. All of a sudden, something without precedent has clicked in Tony Takitani, the human instinct to love.

But this is merely one half of Tony Takitani’s story. What perhaps it is in a deeper sense is not just the advent of love, but the eventual recuperation from loss. This film charts the emotional awakening of Tony Takitani.

Far from the routine implications of the everyday themes of love and loss, Tony Takitani is no prosaic story, but a hauntingly poetic character study of its titular protagonist. It’s a slow and meditative examination of a character who is discovering belatedly what it means to be human.

Director Jun Ichikawa observes the cycle of bliss and bereavement with equal restraint and equanimity. He constructs a chamber drama like a Japanese scroll, as we follow what feels like one 75-minute-long tracking shot from beginning to end. The cinematography proceeds with a slow and stately inevitability propelled by its lead character’s instinctual, immutable feelings.

Tony Takitani is a hymn to love and loss and Ichikawa stays within that purview. When Eiko, whom Tony has married, dies in a car crash, Tony’s decision to make Hisako, a dead-ringer for Eiko, wear his dead wife’s clothes as a sign of his mourning may recall what happens in Hitchcock’s Vertigo. But it stays a safe distance a way. There is also no enshrinement of the relics of Hisako – a whole room of clothes and shoes – that might reference the ghoulish extremes of Truffaut’s The Green Room.

There is a kind of spiritual release in the scenes where Tony decides what to do with the earthly reminders of both Eiko and his father. What Ichikawa has captured in Tony Takitani is the transcendence of the earthly, a reaffirmation of what is essential and truly important. And Tony’s last act will make you nod in approval.

Mind Game (Masaaki Yuasa, 2004)

If Japanese animation is riding high in recent times, it seems easy to point to Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli as its most popular exponents. With their films outselling Hollywood products at the top of the box office, Miyazaki and company have become the most recognizable ambassadors of anime at home and abroad. They are, however, not the be-all and end-all of anime. There is a diverse range of anime being churned out of cartoon-crazy Japan. It’s not at all a monolithic tower built by one company.

If you deem the Ghibli output to be too safe, too timid and too antiseptic, Mind Game can be a good antithesis. Although not an extreme example, Mind Game doesn’t fit any easy category either. In a nutshell, the clash of adult themes and dream logic makes Mind Game either a dazzling watch or a frustrating experience. What is certain is that Mind Game will make you see anime in a different light.

The story is simple enough, but the interstitial spaces in between aren’t. Nishi, an aspiring manga writer, meets Myon, an intimate in high school, after a long time. It's a meeting that rekindles old feelings for Nishi. Myon invites him to the family sushi bar, where yakuza thugs show up looking for Myon’s father. Unable to find their man, the thugs start to raise hell, in the mayhem of which Nishi kills one of them. Nishi, Myon and Myon’s sister escape in a car and are chased through city streets. They overshoot a bridge, land in the river and end up being swallowed by a gigantic whale. They discover not just an old man trapped in the whale’s belly for 30 years, but a veritable world that can provide a certain refuge.

What remains unsaid, however, is that this is just one possibility of the story. It’s not far from the realm of the possible that none of this happened, that Nishi may have been killed instead of the gangster, that Nishi and Myon never met at all, that the entrapment within the whale’s belly is all a figment. Mind Game lives up to the promise of its title and weaves together the real and the possible in one dazzling and astonishing movie.

While the current run of anime affords us visually and thematically safe and harmless fare, Mind Game offers what is deemed deviant and taboo: scatological humor, buxomy, hentai imagery, the raw and gritty aspects of the underworld, orgies and other plentiful sexual references – all done in a surprisingly none-too-cynical manner. As Robin Nishi, the creator of the manga on which Yuasa based his film, reveals: Mind Game was never meant for the masses but a niche audience.

It’s a niche that is further narrowed down by the film’s multiple realities, its convoluted bifurcations. The imagery that reels off is like the imagery of a near-death experience (indeed it is, Nishi, in one strand, ascends to what must be purgatory and bargains for his life): the images are staccato-quick, forming split-second trains of montage. Everything literally goes here; one has the sensation that many different anime movies -- dozens, perhaps even hundreds -- are excerpted and spliced together.

Mind Game is all about the many possibilities that life presents. It’s about second chances. In Robin Nishi’s words, it’s about “physical death and reincarnation.” And Mind Game fulfills its visual promise to show us world after world of possibilities, the world we are choosing, the world we omit. Whether all these images cohere for us seem secondary. Life, after all, is about taking a leap of faith.

Memories of Matsuko (Tetsuya Nakashima, 2006)

Bless her poor soul. All she ever wanted was to do right by her loved-ones. All she ever did was to give a part of her self with little expectation of reward. But hers was not a perfect world. Life would boomerang on her despite her best efforts. This, in essence, is the sad trajectory of Matsuko's worldly existence.

At first blush, it seems like a subject matter meant solely for a downbeat film. Memories of Matsuko, however, manages to achieve a more complex feat, a more multifaceted and more polyphonic film than might appear on paper. It tones down the tragic in favor of a hyper-realistic portrait of the comic and the dramatic. It’s a movie that tries and succeeds in not playing it straight and yet retains the sad eventfulness of its heroine's story. Oscillating between its evocation of humor and pathos in 127 minutes of sheer emotional push and pull, it aims true for the heart.

We learn about Matsuko, however, by second hand and in flashbacks. By the time the film begins, she is a box full of ashes. Her nephew Shou, a directionless youth, has been tasked by his father to clean out his dead aunt’s apartment. Shou hardly knew her. Yet in death, Matsuko might just affect the tenor of his disaffected life.

Matsuko’s fall from favor is rooted in childhood -- her father rejecting her in favor of her sickly younger sister -- but culminates when she protects her high school student who is suspected of theft. She takes the blame for it and is discharged from her duties in dishonor. Her family, most especially her father whose approval Matsuko seeks, disowns her.

Thrown out of the family, Matsuko rebounds from one abusive relationship to another, as she looks for companionship that has long eluded her. Almost all her lovers, however, prove to be wrong choices: There’s an aspiring but heavy-handed writer who takes his own life, a married man who is simply jealous of the writer, a pimp, a yakuza thug who is as fearsome as his tattoos. When she seems to have found the right man, she is thrown into jail for a crime she has been running away from.

Finely balanced between comedy and drama, Memories of Matsuko is leavened by pop tunes and musical numbers whose lyrics are relevant to the moment and the fate of its heroine. It’s a film that mixes tone in just the right proportions and emerges as both entertainment and as serious meditation on a life tracing a downward spiral.

The life of Matsuko is pretty much the stuff of soap operas – only her life seems without payoff and redemption. The film, however, never faults her for her ill-advised decisions, although there is a lot of them. Prostituting herself? No. Murdering her lover? No. Refusing help when she most needs it? No.

This is the achievement of Nakashima’s film: Matsuko remains sympathetic all throughout despite her flaws. Memories of Matsuko feels neither too oppressively heavy nor too insistent on pulling at our heartstrings – at least not until the end. We are simply dazzled by the visual sumptuousness on the screen, the gloss and the crisp, rich colors that recall the best color movies (Gone With the Wind is one of the conscious references.). We are likewise diverted by the many incarnations of Matsuko, as well as the colorful characters that she meets: her shady jobs, the porn actress, the suicidal writer, the yakuza gangster, her bedridden sister, the boy band.

As her murder unfolds at film's end, the bittersweet irony clarifies: Matsuko has genuinely touched a few lives, even those who could only respond with treachery. When it's all over, there is but a single abiding image: her face and lips puckered at us, a woman not ashamed to make herself look silly just to make our day.