Tokyo Park

I saw this film as part of the Ghent filmfestival 2011. The announcement stated a bold reference to Blow Up (Antonioni; 1966). In the first hour the story seemed to go in a similar direction. An amateur photographer was paid to follow a woman walking in the park with her baby, and to mail the shots taken to her husband. The daily walks looked very innocent, but we were obviously led to believe that there was more to it. In the mean time we witnessed several small events in the personal life of the photographer, evenly spread out in time. None of these offered a clue what the film was all about. But a lot can happen in the 2 hours that this film was planned to take.

Even after 1 hour (halfway) still nothing like a plot emerged. But I saw no significant walkouts from a venue with 250 booked seats. I assumed to have missed something important that was obvious to everyone else, otherwise not so many people could be that patient for that length of time.

The series of small events continued, introducing a dead brother, a hospitalized mother, a possible love affair with a step sister, and a pattern in the locations where the shadowed woman took her walks. Still hoping that some plot was to be grown out of all these openings, I stayed until the end. It proved a disappointment, after all. I can merely wonder what the director of this film had thought to show us with all this emptiness. The only thing left for me was giving a 1 (lowest) mark for the public prize competition when leaving the theater.

Amazing that someone can fill 2 hours with just sequence of meaningless images, but "Tokyo Koen" is one such movie.

Based on a novel by Yukiya Shoji ,the movie is about a photographer that takes pictures of families in the parks of Tokyo. He spots a pretty mother and an infant daughter one day in the park and takes her picture. Then a strange man reprimands him for his action, but the man, who turns out to be a dentist asks him to follow her around and keep tabs on her actions.

If this sounds like the beginning of an interesting story, you're wrong.

Haruma Miura usually puts in a good performance, but in this movie he's smothered by the poor acting of other actors, and poor directing of the director.

Manami Konishi who played the step sister of Koji was the only supporting cast that performed as a supporting cast should. What others did in this movie were just atrocious.

So there you have it. This is one of the worst movie to come out of Japan in recent years. It's just astonishing that this movie won a prize at the Locarno International Film Festival. But who's ever heard of Locarno International Film Festival anyways ?