Adapted from Haruki Murakami's 1992 novella, Jun Ichikawa's mournful miniature is as delicate and elemental as a paper crane. It's the kind of movie where a major character's death takes place almost imperceptibly offscreen but the camera lingers on a shot of her empty closets, her absence felt more keenly than anyone left behind can express. The son of an itinerant jazz musician, Tony Takitani (Issei Ogata) is a mechanical draftsman who dislikes the "immature" work of his art school classmates for being "adorned with artistry and ideas." Tony Takitani certainly contains both, but Ichikawa labors to make it look unadorned, as if the camera were just passing through a man's life, leaving nothing in its wake.

Flooded with natural light, Tony Takitani's rectilinear spaces evoke the ritual beauty and stifling conformity of traditional Japanese life. Their carefully controlled environment protects the movie's characters, but it leaves them helpless when they venture, or are thrust, outside it. Moving left to right in evenly paced tracking shots, Taishi Hirokawa's camera is as inexorable as time, as implacable as fate. Although it runs barely and hour and a quarter, the movie gives you the sense of a life fully captured, its signal moments chosen with Bressonian exactitude.

Ichikawa doesn't totally surrender to his characters' formalism; a few self-referential touches serve as release valves. Ogata plays both Tony and his jazzbo father, Shozaburo, while the same actress, Rie Miyazawa, appears as Eiko, Tony's shopaholic wife, and Hisako, the assistant who takes her place. Tony and his father often finish the narrator's sentences, and once Eiko interrupts a crying jag to take over the story herself, a pirouette Miyazawa handles with flawless grace.

Inevitably, Tony Takitani will be subject to charges of airlessness, that it's as suffocating as the characters it portrays. But the movie's sleek modernism is subtly distinct from their silent anguish. When Tony muses, "I never thought I was particularly lonely," the city skyline that stretches out beyond his silhouetted figure conveys a self-awareness he may never reach. Unfortunately, the import of such shots is badly dulled by the fact that the movie's distributor chose to forgo a press screening and make the film available to reviewers only as a badly compressed DVD — a shame, since to all appearances Tony Takitani is a movie that needs to be seen in a theater, where its images might be more enveloping and less asphyxiating.

Tony Takitani Adapted and directed by Jun Ichikawa A Strand release Opens Friday at Ritz at the Bourse recommended