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Tony Takitani / Love is the Devil

A couple embracing in bed.
July 7, 2023 - 7:30 pm
In-person: 
Intro by Alec Fellman, KAB America.


Admission is free. No advance reservations. Your seat will be assigned to you when you pick up your ticket at the box office. Seats are assigned on a first come, first served basis. The box office opens one hour before the event.


Tony Takitani

Japan, 2004

Based on a short story by Haruki Murakami, Tony Takitani traces a delicate, melancholic tale of love, loneliness and obsession. The pensive son of an itinerant jazz musician, Tony (Issei Ogata) lives a life of resigned isolation until he meets and marries a younger woman, Eiko (Rie Miyazawa), with an overwhelming compulsion for designer clothes. The couple build a quiet life together around Eiko’s shopping habits until tragedy intervenes and Tony must face how to go on. Ryuichi Sakamoto’s spare, gentle piano lines are ever present throughout, providing the poignant emotional undercurrent to Ichikawa’s elegantly restrained images and pacing.

DCP, color, in Japanese with English subtitles, 75 min. Director: Jun Ichikawa. Screenwriter: Jun Ichikawa. With: Issei Ogata, Rie Miyazawa, Shinohara Takahumi.

Love is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon

U.K./France/Japan/U.S., 1998

Writer-director John Maybury’s biography of Francis Bacon (Derek Jacobi) focuses on the British painter’s by turns tender and troubled affair with petty criminal George Dyer (Daniel Craig). Bacon’s grotesque, unsettling portraiture acts as Maybury’s own image book of refracted faces and fracturing psyches. From Bacon’s high camp drinking bouts to the terrifying nightmares that afflict Dyer, the two become enmeshed in each other's self-destructive drives just as Bacon’s celebrated career was reaching its zenith. Ryuichi Sakamoto matches the on-screen flights of passion and madness with a jangled, gristly, industrial score that gets deep under the skin.

DCP, color, 87 min. Director: John Maybury. Screenwriter: John Maybury. Wth: Derek Jacobi, Daniel Craig, Tilda Swinton.