Map of the Sounds of Tokyo (Mapa de los sonidos de Tokio)
About Film
Session Times
Sunday 4 April 8:30pm
REVIEWS
Trendy global-fusion ambience, glossy melancholia and raunchy but female-oriented sex scenes. Jean-Claude Larrieu’s rich close-up camerawork has undeniable style, caressing surfaces and textures in classy, slightly desaturated colour. A sparingly used soundtrack mixes urban jazz and bossanova themes with indie rock ballads."
SCREEN DAILY
Lee Marshall
If Isabel Coixet’s films were subject to a mandate of good cinema, this film would obey each of its ten laws. And the first law would be the following: You will give it an over-elaborate, suggestive, radiant and rather conceited title…. Map of the Sounds of Tokyo. Implausibility before normalcy; distance over closeness; tragedy over warmth; structure and aesthetics over chance; musicality over noisiness; torridness and indecency over softness… It is as easy not to connect with Isabel Coixet’s films as it is to be inexplicably charmed by them. Her narratives, pinned to reality, to certainty, can just as well pass you by without brushing you as they can drive a hole through your heart. Coixet does not hold back her enthusiasm for the place she depicts, (…) she whimsically adapts the trends of black cinema onto dramatic and romantic cinema, (…) she unashamedly combines the thriller genre with that which is elegant.The film is utterly consistent (with the coordinates of its very filmmaker) and promises the duplicity, intent and emotional twist that one expects from it”.
ABC
E. Rodríguez Marchante
Isabel Coixet directs one of the best films of her career. Tokyo, with its sounds, its rain, the footsteps of its people or the bustle of its traffic, plays the part of a third character.
IMÁGENES DE ACTUALIDAD
Boquerini
Isabel Coixet’s film shares many similarities with the film Last Tango in Paris by Bernardo Bertolucci. Coixet’s microcosm, a hotel room that represents the carriage of a Paris Metro train, bears the usual hallmarks of her films: mannerist, affected, colourist. This time Coixet has found the formula that makes her work less artificial: she has added affectation to her usual affectation; the sophisticated (and falsifying) Tokyo forms the ideal backdrop for Coixet’s style. Map of the Sounds of Tokyo flows like a waterfall thanks to a polished production, never high-flown, nourished by a stream of sounds and smells. Good work”].
EL PAÍS
Javier Ocaña
An exercise in style, wonderfully filmed.
CINEMANÍA
David Bernal
Isabel Coixet attempts to convey the veritable soul of this so very enigmatic place to the inquisitive onlooker. But that is not all: she goes about integrating the geography of the Japanese soul with a sought-after emotional and erotic volcano. Everything is enveloped by intensity, profound tragedy and feverish romanticism in this tale of thwarted love. The film’s aesthetics nurture extravagant pretensions. I do not question this film maker’s sincerity when talking about feelings of the heart, fraught romances, lonely hearts who find each other, the closeness of death and other emotional paraphernalia”.
EL PAÍS
Carlos Boyero
Far from shying away from public places, this film embraces them openly and makes them its main trump card. And all thanks to the immediacy of its aesthetic tics (the producer Wong Kar Wai and the film’s advertising), its most direct referents (yakuza films, ‘Lost in translation’ and ‘Last Tango in Paris’) and, most importantly, the city of Tokyo itself, which, through cinema, literature and art, has become one of the great icons/referents of post modernity – an exotic blank slate where anything goes”.
EL PAÍS
Jordi Minguell
Isabel Coixet constructs her narratives with precision. Pleasure and pain must always be within the boundaries.
CAHIERS DU CINEMA
Ángel Quintana
We can recognise in Coixet a filmmaker who, through a succession of masks and exercises in style – of an indie bridging of the gulf of eastern poetics has achieved her own voice. And that voice is ever more in tune. Wong Kar-wai and Haruki Murakami, are only distant references in the texture of a powerful work of fiction, with the soul of a short story, Coixet unadulterated and more layered than she appears.
FOTOGRAMAS
Jordi Costa
An undeniable aesthetic sense of projection and framing, which reaches its climax in the sexual encounters between the protagonists in the indescribable and very kitsch Tokyo love hotels. The splendidly macabre Rinko Kikuchi. The actress gives a self-controlled performance and manages a character full of contradictions outstandingly.
EL MUNDO METRÓPOLI
Alberto Luchini
The Barcelona filmmaker has the sensibility and talent to know how to delve into the subject of death, always taking life and hope as starting points. Isabel Coixet demonstrates her ability when capturing the feelings and situations, nearly always in apparent contradiction, of two drifting beings, who hope has seemed to turn its back on”.
TIME OUT BARCELONA
Lluís Bonet Mojica
In Isabel Coixet’s films, the characters suffer a great deal. From love and desire, from the pain of an absence or of stalking death. This is a work of tones, sounds, combinations of intensity and soulful spaces. A personal and suggestive work”.
LA VANGUARDIA
Jordi Batlle Caminal
An extraordinary journey to the core of a foreign culture. Namely, to the core of oneself. The further away, the deeper inside. The intent is to put oneself a safe distance from passion in order to portray through supposedly insignificant expressions the true nature of drama. Coixet quotes Kore-Eda and Kore-Eda quotes Ozu, Yasuhiro Ozu. An undeniable aesthetic ability and brilliant staging. A director’s coming of age.
EL MUNDO
Luis Martínez
The haughty Rinko Kikuchi. When she is alone on screen, her gaze, her sexual coldness, unsettles the viewer and creates seismic movements. The splendid ‘made in Coixet’ shots, subtly pop in their aesthetics, find their natural habitat in Tokyo.
PÚBLICO
Rubén Romero
The director narrates the lack of communication by means of a poetic and meticulous style. Served up on a dandified plate, with saturated photography and an inclination for the poetics of detail.
PÚBLICO
Sara Brito
Map of the Sounds of Tokyo is a reminiscence of the real as mysterious and nostalgic. A seductive film”.
CINE PARA LEER
Norberto Alcover
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