Review of Tokyo Park

Tokyo Park (2011)
Starts like Antonioni's Blow Up, but promises much more than it delivered
17 October 2011
I saw this film as part of the Ghent filmfestival 2011. The announcement stated a bold reference to Blow Up (Antonioni; 1966). In the first hour the story seemed to go in a similar direction. An amateur photographer was paid to follow a woman walking in the park with her baby, and to mail the shots taken to her husband. The daily walks looked very innocent, but we were obviously led to believe that there was more to it. In the mean time we witnessed several small events in the personal life of the photographer, evenly spread out in time. None of these offered a clue what the film was all about. But a lot can happen in the 2 hours that this film was planned to take.

Even after 1 hour (halfway) still nothing like a plot emerged. But I saw no significant walkouts from a venue with 250 booked seats. I assumed to have missed something important that was obvious to everyone else, otherwise not so many people could be that patient for that length of time.

The series of small events continued, introducing a dead brother, a hospitalized mother, a possible love affair with a step sister, and a pattern in the locations where the shadowed woman took her walks. Still hoping that some plot was to be grown out of all these openings, I stayed until the end. It proved a disappointment, after all. I can merely wonder what the director of this film had thought to show us with all this emptiness. The only thing left for me was giving a 1 (lowest) mark for the public prize competition when leaving the theater.
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