Map of the Sounds of Tokyo

What can I say? The movie did not live up to the promise of its opening scene. It's well-shot and nicely lit, with a few postcard-perfect views of Tokyo, but the story makes no sense, the characters are poorly written, and Sergi Lopez is horribly miscast as the male lead. The ending is a formulaic cop-out.

The trailer tries to sell the movie as a sex thriller, which it's most decidedly not. It's a tale of two lost souls in a big city who try to find solace in each other, but fail, for various reasons.

Rinko Kikuchi performs well as a quiet fish market worker who moonlights as a paid assassin, but her character remains an enigma throughout the movie, which makes it difficult for the audience to connect or empathize with her. She bares her body more than once in fairly explicit sex scenes - and what a nice body it is - one only wishes the director could give us similar insight into her soul.

Sergi Lopez does his usual macho strut with a hint of menace which might have worked in a different movie, but feels utterly out of place in an upscale wine merchant from modern-day Tokyo. He is very unconvincing as Rinko's love interest, and is further hindered by his corpulent, scary hairy physique and significant age difference with his co-star. I could not for the life of me believe in chemistry between the two of them.

The omnipresent narrator, an older sound engineer who maintains chaste friendship with Rinko's character and gives the movie its title, is the most sympathetic of all, but he is more of a convenient voice-over device than a fully-fleshed character. Other parts are one-dimensional at best.

Recommended only for indiscriminate art-house fans, Japan fetishists, and furries.

'Map of the Sounds of Tokyo' is no Thriller. It's more of a slow drama centering on the young Ryu, that lives a lonely and silent life in the chaos of Tokyo. She spends her nights working on a fish market while from time to time hanging out with another lonely old guy. Her routine is only broken by the casual killings that she performs, though those things never become the center of the story.

Parallel to Ryu we see how the suicide of some girl in the town leaves her father grieving and broken, which is why his subordinate orders Ryu to kill the dead girl's boyfriend David from Spain.

In slow pictures we follow all those connected persons through their daily lives dealing with loneliness and grief. We often hear only the sounds of the city and silence from the protagonists, which helps to understand how lost they all are in this big world. You will not find the good or the bad guy in this piece. Most of the times the atmosphere is rather depressing with only a few glimpses of sunshine here and there, especially when Asian and European culture are opposing each other. I would compare the general feeling and vibe of the movie with Amélie, though the latter one leaves you at least with a smile and some hope at the end.

For me, the key to the movie seems to be that no matter where you are from or what you are doing for a living, we all want and need another person in our life. And also how easy it is to be alone in such a big city full of people like Toyko. And while I like the movie's depth and slowness, it is kind of hard to connect with any of the protagonists. No one is really likable and often they seem so passive about their situations.

Just how life, the movie is not perfect. But it may help you to slow down in this fast and loud world for a little time to value the people around you.

Having enjoyed greatly many of Isabel Coixet's movies (notably "Things I never told you" and "The secret life of words") I must say I was quite disappointed by this last movie.

It is difficult to point out what fails in this movie, but I certainly did not connect at all with its characters and situations. The movie is set in Tokyo, but contrary to "Lost in translation" here the movie tries to build half on Japanese characters and half on western ones, which really demands a deeper knowledge about japan. It is difficult for me to believe the Japanese part of the movie, first of all they all seem to speak very good English, which is, at least, difficult to believe, e.g. why would the Japanese girl, played by Kinko Rikuchi, speak good English at all?, why is the other guy working with the Spanish seller almost American? Must say maybe I am biased by my own experience with the Japanese people I met in japan, but certainly communication is in general much tougher than what Isabel portraits here.

Of course all the visual and sound stuff is really good, beautiful takes, nice sounds etc, but the story really does not make any sense to me from the beginning to the end. As the movie develops I got mostly bored, the sex scenes seem empty, repetitive and with no special purpose.

We do not get enough info to actually feel anything for any character, starting from the friendship between the guy recording sounds and the girl and ending by the business-man and his daughter. Everything seems fake to some extend and the whole story really appears to be built to serve as an excuse to go to Tokyo and enjoy the visual landscapes of the city (maybe just a documentary about the fish market would suffice).

Sadly, I must say I got nothing of what I was expecting: neither a nice insight into Japan, nor a situation I could connect with. I certainly would prefer to watch "Lost in Translation", read Amelie Nothomb or watch a good documentary about japan to see beautiful takes of the country, instead of spending two precious hours at the cinema.

In any case, I hope I ll enjoy better the next one from Coixet! (and I ll certainly keep enjoying Japanese food meanwhile)

I knew nothing about this film or the director and thus had no expectations. I liked the film's title and the opening scene was very striking. I found the story to be a bit convoluted but was very drawn in by the main character, Ryu and her interactions with the two men in her life, one an enigmatic sound recordist and the other, the Spaniard who was the lover of the woman who killed herself and the man that Ryu is supposed to assassinate. She doesn't reveal herself to either man though both ask her to. So we also have no idea who she really is and why she does what she does. This mystery is part of the genre and as such, I accept it. It makes her all the more vulnerable as she begins to blossom through love's power.

Well, what can I say? I am Spanish and I am a little familiarized with Japan and Japanese culture, my girlfriend is a Japanese girl living in Tokyo and I have visited the city. In my humble opinion, the portrait of Tokyo in this movie could be one of its limited virtues because at least is trying to show a different point of view focused not only on the typical tourist pictures but also on some not so glamorous places as small restaurants of ramen, a cemetery or a market for selling fish. Soundtrack is interesting and well chosen too, and nothing to complain about photography of the French Jean-Claude Larrieu. About Isabel Coixet, her work as a director is competent and even it has a "touch" more Japanese than Spanish (more concentrated on the silences or natural sounds than the dialogs or artificial noises, for example).

Until here the positive. Now the not so positive, always in my opinion. First, the story. A professional killer falling in love with his (her) victim and breaking his (her) own rules with bad consequences. How many times we have watched this kind of story in a movie? Too many times, I think. Second (and specially), the main actor. Sergi López. He is a respected actor here in Spain, but sorry, to choose him as the man able to light some fire in the cold heart of Ryu is one of the biggest mistakes I have seen in a casting for a movie. Sergi López, let's be honest, is not tall, not sophisticated, too old for Ryu and also scandalously fat for this kind of character. He is not charming, his face is the face of a farmer or a boxer and his voice is annoying in its vulgarity.

Again, sorry Sergi López, but nobody can believe that a very young Japanese girl can kill herself because of you, and also another young girl can fall in love with you until the extreme to risk her own life. Everything in only one month. Wow, are you some kind of Spanish chubby Bond with a special skill for melting Japanese girls? Isabel Coixet is a woman, and it's supposed a clever one. Does she believe the script? I don't believe it! And sorry sorry, even I can't believe López managing a wine shop for gourmet clients in Tokyo.