Carte des sons de 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.

This had all the credentials to be a memorable film experience.

It's by a Spanish woman who films in Tokyo attempting to have something revealed about women and the erotic mystery, and she is from the most architecturally musical city of Spain, Barcelona. So you'd expect her to have sensitive insights, to be sensitive to place, and for these to be somehow amalgamated into visual music about the yearnings.

Our entry is an inscrutability about women. Why did the ex-girlfriend commit suicide? What lurks behind the silent exterior of the girl who works nights at the fishmarket? A Spanish man has touched both.

So she (the filmmaker) puts inscrutable women at the center, one of them dead, the other an idealized cipher, the dark-haired sullen girl from manga who quietly yearns and destroys herself. She creates an affair that amounts to merely sex, fantasy and waiting for a truth that never comes, the man is just not worth her love, and yet ends it with sacrifice. So poetry about falling for a man who has nothing to give back and being cut deeply when he leaves, a complete tragedy of misspent emotion.

It has some evocative images, it seems you can point a camera anywhere in Tokyo and capture a mood, but it's all stickied to the film like polaroids on a photoalbum, a superficial loneliness to carry back home from the visit; the noodle bar with steam rising from pots, the empty karaoke bar, neon streets and fissures. So much opportunity missed to mingle with things.

So the film here in the same swoop fails to intimately know Japan, fails to know more than heartbreak, and fails to capture a fundamental mystery about touch. It may be that this woman has just not known love or was deeply hurt when she tried and still thinks it was her fault.

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.

Isabel Coixet is a director I always liked since I saw My Life Without Me (2003)a few years back. Since then I tried to see the rest of her films.

This one just like Elegy (2008), seems to be Coixets attempt at becoming a more mainstream director, a bankable director able to do genre films.

However, Coixet seems very unfamiliar with genrefilmmaking and this film is very flawed, lacks focus and also brings almost nothing new the thriller genre.

Coxiet dramathriller about a Japanese girl who works at the fishmarket and also doubles as an assassin is basically your average story about a lonely assassin doing his/her job without emotion until one day....

Coixet tries to fill this tired, cliché ridden subgenre with filmpoetry, beautiful visuals, odd script and different approach but somewhere leaves the viewer with feeling that she knows almost nothing about this subgenre.

Experimenting with genres, mixing style and content in order to do something new and still stick to genretraditions is one hard thing to do.

Coixet doesn't handle this well, but there are good things to say about Rinko Kikuchis fishmarket girl, Sergi Lópezs wine merchant etc. Coixet has always been good directing actors and once again we get a film full of wonderful performances.

Had Coixet seen Le samouraï (1967), Xich lo/Cyclo (1995), Seom/The Isle (2000)etc we would have probably seen a different film altogether, instead of this flawed film.

However, see this film regardless of what the critics say, it has very nice performances, visuals etc.

And maybe next time Coixet will make a better genrefilm.

'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.