Many young filmmakers present today’s Japan as either a grotesque fun house or bleak wasteland. Jun Ichikawa, on the other hand, can find a fugitive loveliness in birds flitting across the sky of a Kichijoji dawn or in headlamps flickering through the streets of a Shinjuku night. Though he may give his cityscapes a beatific glow that most Tokyoites miss when they’re running for the train at 7 in the morning, Ichikawa is not merely prettifying but seeing more deeply, more specifically than the average subway straphanger - or director.
In Tokyo Marigold, he patches together a mosaic of urban moods and lives - of Tokyoites who may be freer of the restraints of the past than their parents were, but who lack their sense of connection with the world around them, who may know the smartest shops, the “in” dating spots, but are falling into desperate isolation.
Oases of an older, more human-scaled city still exist, but for the film’s heroine - a young woman named Eriko (Tanaka Rena) who has broken up with her boyfriend and is drifting through her days - they offer only temporary refuge.
She finds a new job as an office worker for a small foreign car dealership, but the real change comes when she attends a go-con - a group matchmaking party - and meets Tamura (Ozawa Yukiyoshi), an elite salaryman who is charmingly awkward and tongue-tied.
But when she calls Tamura and they go on what seems to be the perfect date, he makes a confession: He has a girlfriend who is studying in America. The end of a budding affair? Not quite. Eriko can’t get him out of her mind. When she chances to see him again, she falls even harder - and they resume their interrupted romance. Throwing caution to the wind, she asks him to stay with her for a year, until his girlfriend returns.
He agrees, and Eriko begins to move from the shadows to the light. But as the weeks turns into months, we realize that Mr. Right is a wrongo. While claiming to like Eriko for her sunao (straightforward, pure-hearted) personality, he is taking advantage of her for his own murky ends.
In the hands of another director, Tokyo Marigold might have become a weepy cautionary tale illustrating the precepts of that notorious dating guide, The Rules. Ichikawa, however, subsumes the he-done-her-wrong story line into a lyrically evocative portrait of a relationship. Once again, Ichikawa has redefined, not simply genuflected toward, the best traditions of humanist cinema. He may pay homage to such masters as Ozu Yasujiro and Eric Rohmer, but he has developed his own distinctive style and vision for his own time.
Mark Schilling