TOKYO SEDUCTION

I really enjoyed Map of the Sounds of Tokyo. It's nothing brilliant but it's very well done. Extremely strong on atmospherics, textures, and surfaces.  Lots of rain, lots of steam, lots of neon colors. Very dream-like.  Stony in many respects.  You never quite know how things will play out and while the film is way more interested in style than it is story, it's always involving thanks to the two central performances, by two very different actors (Rinko Kikuchi and Sergi Lopez). The stunning, Wong Kar Wai-esque cinematography by Jean-Claude Larrieu is easily the best aspect of the movie and the explicit sex scenes (writer/director Isabel Coixet clearly has a thing for oral gratification) always keeps the vibe sexy and loose.  Like Enter the Void, there's lots of cool-to-a-foreigner Tokyo-set imagery which always keeps things interesting; it's a place I'd love to visit one day.  The tale that Coixet has cooked up, that of a hit-woman falling in love with her mark, is farily predictable, but that didn't bother me because I was always visually interested in what I was looking at.  It's a mood piece, and as such, it's a rich success.