Film Number 37 – Tokyo!
Three separate stories by three filmmakers centering on the same place. This anthology film brings three big talents of World Cinema - Michel Gondry starts of the film, famous for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind and his many visually striking music videos. Leos Carax, director of Pola X does the second segment and the final part is helmed by Bong Joon-Ho who is responsible for what I think is the best monster movie this decade – The Host.
So Gondry’s piece titled” Interior Design” kicks things off and we are introduced to a moody rainy Tokyo. The soundtrack and cinematography envelope you straight away as we are introduced to Hiroko and Akira, a young couple who have decided to move to Tokyo. Akira is an aspiring filmmaker and has come to display his work, getting a spot at a porno theater to show his film. The couple stay with their friend Akemi in her very cramped apartment, as the film goes on Akira manages to get a job wrapping gifts and Hiroko looks for apartments. After only finding small dirty crammed places that cost too much Hiroko begins to feel more and more depressed, further spiraling into a hopeless situation.
After Akira’s screening goes well, she begins to feel their relationship crumbling, talking to a man at the screening she learns of the hardships that couples can go through with creative types, one generally feels invisible or underappreciated. As Hiroko flees the screening she starts transforming bit by bit into a chair, with this new ability to turn in and out of this position she begins to look for a new dwelling ending up staying with a man without his knowledge and living happily with a new purpose.
Gondry does a marvelous job with this segment injecting his visual expertise into every scene; he creates a wonderful motif with nearly every shot conjuring up an enormous sense of claustrophobia. The cramped and confined spaces emanate throughout, where even the streets seem small and cramped. The quirks are a constant, especially with Akira’s film screening, which is full of the kind of Be Kind Rewind make shift elements that Gondry has perfected.
For a while it seems as if the story isn’t really going any further than a simple character study as there is an awful lot of moments between Akira and Hiroko. Then suddenly with just a subtle flash of Hiroko’s newly generated wooden arm the film takes an immediate shift. Dark comedic moments of horror as Hiroko finds a giant hole in her sternum, her metamorphosis is handled brilliantly as she slowly loses her clothes transforming back and forth for sanctuary. The end is quite beautiful and bittersweet, a great little short, very rewarding and interesting to see so much story crammed in to 40 or so minutes.
The next short is entitled “Merde” which is also the name of the main character, a vagrant strange pale man wondering the sewers and streets causing trouble. Merde speaks no English and looks about as mental as you can get, the Hitchcokian beginning showcases the skyline of Tokyo, slowly zooming in aided by a score reminiscent of Herman’s Cape Fear theme. We start off with a tremendous deal of suspense as Merde walks past people stealing things and knocking them over in an amazing continuous tracking shot. He licks beautiful women and steals an amputee’s crutches before escaping to the dark depths of the sewers. Whilst down in the abyss he finds a bag of unexploded grenades, he then goes on a rampage of death and destruction landing him in jail.
As the public become either repulsed or infatuated with this new bizarre figure a giant trial is held and the wonderfully mysterious, dark comedic tone is very quickly lost. A French magistrate comes forward claiming to be the only person in the world that can understand Merde, here film pretty much completely falls apart as we are given incredibly long dull scenes of the two interacting. The disfigured and intriguing individual losses his edge quite quickly and the short becomes very tedious. Merde is sentenced to death, appears to die when hanged but somehow comes back from the dead and vanishes into thin air.
It’s a shame this had to come in the middle because it starts really well but falls flat. The story doesn’t really have much of a progression and the characters all start to become quite irritating.
The final part directed by Bong Joon-Ho is called “Shaking Tokyo” and concerns a man who is categorized in Japan as a Hikikomori – which is a type of person in Japan who choose to isolate themselves from society in confinement. Living in his house alone for ten years our main character who goes nameless, receives a giant sum of money in the mail every month that he uses to order the essential items that he needs. The man collects everything and stacks them up in space consuming ways, ten years worth of toilet rolls and pizza boxes line the walls. He has a strict routine involving never looking people in the eye when they deliver to him, he orders a pizza every Saturday and reads almost continuously.
On one fateful Saturday he makes the mistake of seeing the pizza delivery girl’s bare thigh, prompting him to look her in the eye, as they lock an earthquake happens causing the girl to faint. The an brings her inside and takes care of her slowly falling in love. Breaking his strong routine the man wants to see the girl and orders a pizza on a Tuesday. A different pizza delivery man turns up and the man learns that the woman has become a hikikimori herself. In a last valiant effort to save her the man leaves his house for the first time in ten years looking for her.
This part is not without it fair share of bizarre moments but it is somehow all grounded in this weird reality. The intricate little details of every shot work perfectly to construct the man’s strange little world. There are constant moments which really feel like a strange twilight zone kind of world. When the man does finally go out to the streets he is presented with this barren metropolis that helps the tone. It’s a great story for the film to end with beautiful and poetic.
In short Tokyo! suffers slightly from a weak middle part but you have to give credit for the sheer originality of the stories. They all have very striking visuals and are all well acted.
8 out of 10
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