With this year's Cannes Film Festival less than a week away, Radio Televisión Española has revealed the first trailer for Isabel Coixet's Map of the Sounds of Tokyo, which will be included in the main competition.

The film, which is described as "a romantic and sentimental thriller", will be publicly released in Spain on August 28th. Coixet (My Life Without Me, Elegy) claims it's the most dramatic of all her movies, narrating the life of a woman who's "tough, lonely, mysterious, and wounded".

In regards to setting the film in Japan, the director acknowledges she's been fascinated with the country from an early age due to the literary works of authors like Banana Yoshimoto and Yukio Mishima. Her fascination has continued to grow in recent years thanks to the novels of Haruki Murakami.

Plot:

"Ryu (Kikuchi) is a solitary girl whose fragile appearance is in stark contrast with the double life she leads, working nights at a Tokyo fish market and sporadically taking on jobs as a hit-woman.

Mr. Nagara (Takeo Nakahara) is a powerful impresario mourning the loss of his daughter Midori, who has committed suicide. He blames David (Sergi López), a Spaniard who runs a wine business in Tokyo. Mr. Nagara's employee, Ishida, was silently in love with Midori and hires Ryu to murder David...

A sound engineer (Min Tanaka), obsessed with the sounds of the Japanese city and fascinated with Ryu, witnesses this love story which searches the shadows of the human soul, reaching deep into places where only silence has the power of eloquence."

Here's the trailer. It's not particularly work safe (full-on nudity).

Official website

Update (5/11): The official website has been updated with a higher quality version of the same trailer. Uploaded it to the player.

Update (5/12): Replaced the trailer with the English-subtitled version which was recently released.

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Tags: hideo sakaki, manabu oshio, map of the sounds of tokyo, min tanaka, rinko kikuchi, takeo nakahara