Long typed as an Ozu-esque humanist, Ichikawa Jun spectacularly abandoned the subdued Ozu-esque style in Tadon and Chikuwa, a 1998 film based on two short stories by Shiina Makoto. In Ichikawa’s films characters often seethe with suppressed emotions, but in this one they explode. Ichikawa films these explosions using surreal computer graphics - not the most Ozu-esque of devices. But he also links two heroes and story lines, improbably but satisfyingly, at the end.
Tadon is the story of Kita, a cab driver who spends his days listening to the conversations of strangers, but is never allowed to join in. After months of tooling about the urban maze, while other human beings ignore his existence, Kita’s mind begins to play tricks. In an inner monologue, he begins to wonder whether he is moving through the streets - or whether the streets are moving through him.
Then he picks up Anzai, a salaryman on his way to an assignation with a young lover. On the way, Kita talks with the desperate urgency of a man on the edge. But Anzai, thinking only of the delights to come, toys with him. When Kita asks him what he does for a living, Anzai says he makes tadon (charcoal balls). Kita goes along with this joke, but inside he is ready to burst. When he does, Anzai becomes a tadon maker forreal.
The hero of “Chikuwa” is Asami, a novelist with a writing block. Sucking an unlit cigar like a malignant lollipop, he stride out of his apartment into the Tokyo night. Stopping at an outdoor stand, he orders chikuwa - a sort of fish paste hot-dog. When the stand owner says he doesn’t have it, Asami takes out what he calls his “personal chikuwa” and....
His next stop is a Japanese-style restaurant where he is a regular. The manager has redecorated the place, but to Asami’s fevered brain the new atmosphere is menacing. Worse, the restaurant is packed with leering, grimacing fools. Then his meal arrives and it looks like... Enough to say that Asami not only loses his dinner, but his mind.
The two heroes are, not comic grotesques, but lonely guys with sensitive souls who can’t adjust to the world around them. Ichikawa films them with his usual sure grasp of character and fine eye for composition and color. He injects even his scenes of stylized mayhem with ironic beauty.
As Kita, Yakusho Koji unravels with a velocity and force that amuses as much
as it appalls. Meanwhile, Sanada Hiroyuki’s Asami descends into madness with a Dostoyevskian flair - and gets to play with neater, if grosser, effects.
Ozu’s characters may have logged many hours at the dinner table, but none
ever projectile vomited in Technicolor red. Thus does the art of film progress.
Mark Schilling