Map of the Sounds of Tokyo

Some days ago, before Christmas holidays, I was talking by mobile on the street right in front of my office. The guys whom I work with were smoking outside as usual, and I was making a personal call, so we all were flooding the sidewalk. Then, I saw this woman, crossing among us and turning to the right to check the show window of a real state office.



I thought "ostres, la Coixet!" and pointed at her from behind to the group of smokers, to confirm if I was right. They told me that she lived in Gracia and could be seen there from time to time. Though I like cinema very much, I've got to tell that I haven't seen any of her movies yet, but what I've been able to see is that they can be found at as weird places as the video rental place near my apartment while I was living in Japan, in the middle of rice paddies; and that's something.



Her last movie is "Map of the Sounds of Tokyo" and I'm looking forward to seeing it soon. So far, I've just being able to browse the book she has published about the movie in a bookstore while waiting for my train. I'm not expecting any great movie, though, since I've seen a pretty obvious list of common places as it is usual among this type of gafa-pastas, who are recently getting more and more interested in Japan, as a new edition of the so well-known hippie interest for the East.



The plot is kind of a stereotype itself: a girl suicides and her father wants to take revenge on her boyfriend, a gaijin -a Catalan who has a wine shop in Tokyo- and hires the services of a professional killer, a beautiful girl that works in Tsukiji, the fish market, cutting tuna into pieces. From what I've seen in the trailer, there is plenty of sex between them, which is nice. Somewhere in the tale, a sound engineer records the sounds of Tokyo, as a way of portraying the city, I guess, thought I don't really know how he fits in the story.

The guy from Barcelona is Sergi Lopez, an actor with a strong personality and even stronger Catalan accent. I like him though most of his movies are French, and everybody knows what this means: being on the verge of existentialist boredom by excessively long conversing scenes.



The killer is Rinko Kikuchi, the no-panties school girl in Babel. I don't know if she is as weird as she looks, both in movies and in reality. Her enigmatic looks seems to me bit of a pose. Personally, I love her shiny dark and long hair in the movie, and those eyes. Who wouldn't like being killed by such eyes?

I have my own opinions about Japan, my own experiences and my own stories, but I'd like to see Japan from another perspective, that of someone from my own culture, despite she is probably just a visitor there and her vision pretty shallow. I think it can be somehow refreshing to me right now.