Now, the film was undoubtedly beautiful. The director also shoots TV commercials, and the control of colour and editing was commercial-slick: the film observed the rules of what one might call "depressive-aesthetic Japanese chromophobia", registering a subtle range of greys, greens and off-whites. Ichikawa scrolled his camera past the action in subtle but virtuoso pans which contained hidden edits linking one scene with another; a close-up of the stretching feet of the beautiful wife washing her car, for instance, panned under the car and directly into the scene of the accident that kills her. The wife's shopping trips to expensive boutiques are treated with similar abstraction, the camera panning across brushed stainless steel staircases, glassy windows, rows and rows of grey or white clothes. All this is further aestheticized by Ryuichi Sakamoto's score, a "Back-To-Basics"-style Satie-esque piano melody fed through "Music For Airports"-style reverbs. The music is used way too much in the early part of the film, hammering home spurious poignancy like some sort of delicate bludgeon.
Things I did like in the movie, though, were (and this always seems to be the case) incidentals. A shot of the wind stirring the leaves and branches of a tree. Shots of Yokohama seen through windows. Fleeting expressions of ambivalence passing across Ogata's face as he sketches with a pencil (he's a successful animator by trade). The sound of the pencil on the pad. The film's "Japaneseness", invested in a desurgent melancholia, the poetry of everyday life, a certain understatement and introversion (the characters never seem to look at each other or talk directly to each other). Pale blues, pale greens, pale greys. Ogata's bowl haircut, which somehow guarantees his essential trustworthiness. The complete absence of the idiotic impacts and normative aggression seen in all the trailers which preceded the film.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure,
And we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.