The Eyes of

I'm from Texas and I love the film, Tokyo Eyes , and thus this review, longer and more winding than the trail from the Alamo to Lonesome Dove .

"Photojournalist communicates with subjects through lens" (headline in the Daily Yomiuri Friday, November 20, 1998) Ruiko Yoshida says "communication is the nonverbal exchange of trust and understanding captured in the flash of an instant."

"I wish I could take photos without the use of a camera," Ruiko said.

The Western Scientific Gaze and Popular Imagery in Later Edo Japan: the lens within the heart by Timon Screech, Cambridge University Press, 1996 ($80.00 and 305 pages).

In Jean-Pierre Limosin 's film Tokyo Eyes , the lens is ubiquitous. The lens is the message. The Shinji Takeda hero is a computer game software designer who puts on thick, distorting glasses when he goes out of his 1DK with his pistol. That way everything he 'sees' isn't what it is, making it easier to be the Dirty Harry of Tokyo......lotsa people make his day.

Hinano-chan is the floor sweeper at a beauty salon and her brother is the detective looking for the Tokyo punk version of the Dirty Harry perp. One fine day Hinano sees the guy in the glasses and follows him with a video camera...the lens shooting the lens, so to speak. Limosin says that tOkyO in roman letters gives "two O's . . . like a pair of glasses." So everybody looks at everybody else and everything in sight through a lens......and so, some say, the film shows that nothing in Japan is what it seems; all is filtered, distorted, distanced.

Takeda and Hinano are superb, light years away from the TV sit-com actors and actresses here, but the eye-popping, scene-stealing role is the crazy yakuza, played by Takeshi Kitano, show stealer--and director of Hana-bi , that great hit everyone in Paris has seen--you know, the one that won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1997.

Tokyo Eyes opened September 9, 1998, in Paris, in Japanese with French subtitles. It is now playing across Japan, probably without the French subtitles. It was among 24 films in one of the competitions at Cannes and you can see the other 23 titles along with the original poster (maybe the only place you will ever see it) here . That site is in French, but the English (poster-less) is here . If you want to read a short review in Japanese, go here . And for great photos and information in Japanese, surf on over here .

Go see Tokyo Eyes.....and when you get home, send me an e-mail and explain the ending, please!

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copyrighted for the entire universe
http://www2.gol.com/users/kay/eyes.html
by Kay Vreeland:
prepared with Netscape 4.5 Composer,
on a Sharp Mebius MN-7750,
invoking Adobe PhotoShop 3.0,
under the influence of SEAL 's album "Human Being"