Ryu is a contract killer who makes her living shooting people in Tokyo, and whose only friend is a guy she meets at the ramen museum in Yokohama. Meanwhile, David is a Spanish guy running a wine shop in Tokyo whose girlfriend kills herself. When his dead girlfriend's family then hires Ryu to kill him, the two instead begin a torrid love affair.
None of these things are spoilers - all this happens in the first act of the film.
If this already makes no sense, congrats - you've got this movie pegged. It's been a while since I've seen a serious film with characters who make such nonsensical decisions and whose actions seem to have all the consequences of a superhero movie. For example, the police don't even seem to investigate Ryu's many murders, despite the fact that she seems to be responsible for nearly all of Japan's gun homicides (they get about 10 total per year - that's not a typo - and she's responsible for at least three within the span of a few months).
The film is just not believable on any level. Tokyo itself is miscast - I never take film titles literally, but this one borders on false advertising. There are plenty of gratuitous cityscape shots to remind us where we are, and occasionally people speaking Japanese (not often enough considering it's, you know, Tokyo), but otherwise there is nothing uniquely of that city in the film and plenty that is completely out of character for it. There is no "map" here, and the only sound I found recognizable from Tokyo (a city that's a cacophony of unique sounds) was the slurping of ramen.
In fact, at times I felt much the same way about this film as I did about "Lost in Translation" - it often feels like a travelogue from somebody who has missed the point. Tokyo is depicted as a slow, dead city, filled with English speakers, western tourists eating sushi off of naked women, gun crime, and depressed residents who eat ramen all the time and go to love hotels and karaoke bars not to have fun, but to wallow in their misery. I understand contrarian filmmaking and it can be interesting to see a film that illuminates the dark side of a place, but western filmmakers *always* seem to try to show this side of Tokyo - it's no longer contrarian (if it ever really was), it's a common theme that's just plain wrong. At this point, it would be contrarian to show Tokyo as it is for most people - a loud, energetic and fast-paced city. Heck, "Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift" gets it better than this film does.
The main characters are both unsympathetic. At best, Ryu is a cold- blooded murderer, and no backstory is ever given to try to soften that. A narrator (her ramen friend) literally pleads with us throughout the film to feel sympathy for her, but he also tells us right from the start that he can't offer an explanation for who she is or what she does. David, meanwhile, is just a jerk - the night after his girlfriend commits suicide, he attempts to pick up Ryu in his wine shop, and almost never says a kind word to her after that (he doesn't know who she really is, so he thinks she's just some random pickup). She inexplicably seems drawn to him.
It would help if David wasn't miscast as well. Now, I don't mean any personal offense to Sergi Lopez and I am not too familiar with his other work, but given his character's jerk-ish personality it just strains credulity that a much younger woman (much less two of them) would be so sexually drawn to this doughy middle aged man, and in fact the sex scenes are borderline embarrassing to watch. David's character really needed to be a Johnny Depp type in order to work - a westerner you could really see women falling for no matter what, who could get away with saying hurtful things and still sound suave doing it.
About the only redeeming quality in the film is Rinko Kikuchi, who does her best with what she's given. She makes it clear that Ryu's a tortured soul despite not having many spoken lines and a script that inexplicably goes out of its way not to tell us why. The script works against her, but she almost manages to make Ryu sympathetic completely on her own. That's no small accomplishment.
I won't give away the second and third acts but suffice to say they are in keeping with the rest of the film. It never makes sense.
None of these things are spoilers - all this happens in the first act of the film.
If this already makes no sense, congrats - you've got this movie pegged. It's been a while since I've seen a serious film with characters who make such nonsensical decisions and whose actions seem to have all the consequences of a superhero movie. For example, the police don't even seem to investigate Ryu's many murders, despite the fact that she seems to be responsible for nearly all of Japan's gun homicides (they get about 10 total per year - that's not a typo - and she's responsible for at least three within the span of a few months).
The film is just not believable on any level. Tokyo itself is miscast - I never take film titles literally, but this one borders on false advertising. There are plenty of gratuitous cityscape shots to remind us where we are, and occasionally people speaking Japanese (not often enough considering it's, you know, Tokyo), but otherwise there is nothing uniquely of that city in the film and plenty that is completely out of character for it. There is no "map" here, and the only sound I found recognizable from Tokyo (a city that's a cacophony of unique sounds) was the slurping of ramen.
In fact, at times I felt much the same way about this film as I did about "Lost in Translation" - it often feels like a travelogue from somebody who has missed the point. Tokyo is depicted as a slow, dead city, filled with English speakers, western tourists eating sushi off of naked women, gun crime, and depressed residents who eat ramen all the time and go to love hotels and karaoke bars not to have fun, but to wallow in their misery. I understand contrarian filmmaking and it can be interesting to see a film that illuminates the dark side of a place, but western filmmakers *always* seem to try to show this side of Tokyo - it's no longer contrarian (if it ever really was), it's a common theme that's just plain wrong. At this point, it would be contrarian to show Tokyo as it is for most people - a loud, energetic and fast-paced city. Heck, "Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift" gets it better than this film does.
The main characters are both unsympathetic. At best, Ryu is a cold- blooded murderer, and no backstory is ever given to try to soften that. A narrator (her ramen friend) literally pleads with us throughout the film to feel sympathy for her, but he also tells us right from the start that he can't offer an explanation for who she is or what she does. David, meanwhile, is just a jerk - the night after his girlfriend commits suicide, he attempts to pick up Ryu in his wine shop, and almost never says a kind word to her after that (he doesn't know who she really is, so he thinks she's just some random pickup). She inexplicably seems drawn to him.
It would help if David wasn't miscast as well. Now, I don't mean any personal offense to Sergi Lopez and I am not too familiar with his other work, but given his character's jerk-ish personality it just strains credulity that a much younger woman (much less two of them) would be so sexually drawn to this doughy middle aged man, and in fact the sex scenes are borderline embarrassing to watch. David's character really needed to be a Johnny Depp type in order to work - a westerner you could really see women falling for no matter what, who could get away with saying hurtful things and still sound suave doing it.
About the only redeeming quality in the film is Rinko Kikuchi, who does her best with what she's given. She makes it clear that Ryu's a tortured soul despite not having many spoken lines and a script that inexplicably goes out of its way not to tell us why. The script works against her, but she almost manages to make Ryu sympathetic completely on her own. That's no small accomplishment.
I won't give away the second and third acts but suffice to say they are in keeping with the rest of the film. It never makes sense.