Broken Mirrors

BROKEN FLOWERS

Directed by Jim Jarmusch

TONY TAKITANI

Directed by Jun Ichikawa

To see life clearly, you have to step back. Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers, about a middle-aged man's search for an out-of-wedlock son, and Jun Ichikawa's Tony Takitani, about a mild-mannered artist who falls for a shopping addict, illustrate this notion by putting esthetic distance between themselves and the viewer. Both films favor medium and wide shots that allow the eye (and mind) to roam. When they do move in, it's not just to get closer to emotions, but to contextualize details and give them poetic weight. These films define their characters not in the stale Hollywood manner (exposition, confessional monologues) but through observed behavior and precise yet seemingly incidental bits of description. They help us feel by making us think.

Broken Flowers stars Bill Murray as Don Johnston, a retired software mogul whose young girlfriend (Julie Delpy) leaves him for treating her, she says, more like mistress than a girlfriend. That same day brings the arrival of an anonymous letter, typewritten on pink stationery, informing Don that one of his exlovers secretly bore a son who's now 19. After a period of poker-faced moping in his ritzy bachelor pad-punctuated by visits from his unfailingly cheerful next-door neighbor, Winston (Jeffrey Wright), an Ethiopian family man and devotee of detective fiction-Don hits the road, tooling from town to town while listening to Winston's mix tape of African jazz and visiting exlovers who might have typed the letter. Their ranks include a freewheeling sensualist (Sharon Stone) with a like-minded teenage daughter (Alexis Dziena); an exhippie (Frances Conroy) who's become one half of a boringly chipper, married real estate couple; an "animal communicator" (Jessica Lange) who seems to have a deep bond with her assistant (Chloe Sevigny), and a biker chick (Tilda Swinton) who remains, after 19 years, lethally angry at Don.

Broken Flowers is being sold as Jarmusch's most mainstream effort, and not just because it stars Murray, a recessive, melancholy performer who's perceived as lovable only because he's funny. (A neat trick.) This one isn't an anthology (Mystery Train, Coffee and Cigarettes) or an elliptical stoner fable (Ghost Dog, Dead Man), but a foursquare narrative with humor that's arch yet cute in that Six Feet Under way. (The blandly carnal daughter is named Lolita.) Even at its most richly humane-Don furtively sharing a smoke with Winston behind the latter's house; Stone's character touching Don in a relaxed, proprietary way, as if they'd never been apart-the film doesn't function simultaneously on five or six levels like Jarmusch's amazing Dead Man. Most of the time it settles for one and a half.

But such gripes should be put in context. The director may have been feted at Cannes and anointed by the New York Times magazine as "The Last of the Indies," but Jarmusch at his most mainstream is still Jarmusch. Broken Flowers is, all things considered, a far more daring and honorable movie than Last Days, Hustle and Flow and other IFC-ready indies because it's unwilling to sanctify moldy clichés (the drug-addled rock star as Christ figure; the pimp with a ha-aard life who's cruel to women because he's hurtin' inside). Broken Flowers resists convention by denying Don (and us) closure and by puncturing searching-for-estranged-relative clichés as it goes along. (Don keeps making meaningful eye contact with nameless young men who might be his son, but these moments clarify nothing; ditto Don's tense encounters with exlovers, which teeter on the brink of revelation without ever tumbling over.)

Like the hero of Eyes Wide Shut-a temperamentally similar film-Don is a man-boy driven by sexual anxiety who embarks on a faintly Homeric odyssey, encounters women who represent different aspects of womanhood and sexual/domestic futures, and ends his journey only marginally more self-aware than when he started it. Jarmusch's climactic camera move encapsulates his esthetic preference: He circles and circles but resists the urge to push in. This respect for human mystery, coupled with Jarmusch's usual array of distancing devices, ensures that we understand Don more thoroughly than he understands himself. Every woman who might have fathered Don's son has evolved profoundly over the last 19 years, as has Winston, a married father of five; Don has just gotten older. These chasms of evolution and self-perception make Broken Flowers feel more tragic than comic, and let us feel not with Don, but for him.

Tony Takitani is an even more self-aware work than Broken Flowers-a brisk 75-minute adaptation of Haruki Murakami's short story that dares to highlight the story's literary roots. (Like The Age of Innocence, Croupier and the like, it boasts omniscient third-person-omniscient narration, and its characters sometimes break the fourth wall by joining it.) Yet here, as in Jarmusch's film, formal devices paradoxically help us sense the characters' predicaments more clearly and feel their sadness more profoundly.

The title character (Issey Ogata) is an art student raised by a widowed, often absent jazzman (also played by Ogata; this is a movie of mirror images, doublings and other Vertigo-like tropes). His instructors tell him his drawings are physically accurate yet lack feeling, and indeed, Tony seems to distrust spontaneity and emotion. (The narrator says Tony's at his best when drawing machines.)

Tony's intense affair with a lovely young woman named Eiko (Miyazawa Rie) shatters any hope of an orderly, explicable romantic life. She's a sweet, intelligent girlfriend (and later, wife), but she's hopelessly addicted to clothes. She even admits that clothes make her feel more complete, more real.

Happiness makes these characters unhappy. Eiko can't shop without worrying that Tony will think her weak, while Tony's joy at finding a mate is overshadowed by his irritation at Eiko's shopping and his fear that love alone can't satisfy her. ("I'm happy that you're getting more beautiful," he says, "but do you really need all those clothes?") One of the film's most potent montages depicts Eiko's European shopping spree in deliberately disconnected close-ups of jackets on hangers and new shoes on Eiko's feet, brilliantly illustrating that objects which obsess Eiko have become Eiko. A deceptively quiet film, Tony Takitani is not merely a tale of an artist whose wife shops too much. It's the human urge to fill loneliness with rituals and objects. Ichikawa explores the deep needs expressed through materialist craving without condescending to his characters or reducing them to cinematic figurines.

This is a remarkable achievement considering the film's highly artificial style. Ichikawa and his peerless cinematographer, Hirokawa Taishi, photograph most of the film with long lenses that isolate crucial moments and objects within a very slim plane of focus-a visual translation of Murakami's limpid yet exact prose, which eschews unnecessary detail. Even more daringly, Ichikawa links the entire narrative with left-to-right dolly shots that suture time and space with rectangular ellipses of blackness or whiteness. It's life as slideshow or Zoetrope-a series of clearly marked, irreversible tableaux. Many current releases are louder and hipper than Tony Takitani, but few are as visually bold and emotionally exact. It's as close to a perfect movie as you're ever likely to see.