Directors Michel Gondry, Bong Joon-ho, and Leos Carax each direct a segment of this triptych feature about life in 21st century Tokyo. The saga begins with Gondry's segment, entitled "Interior Design," about a young couple who moves in with an old friend while attempting to establish themselves in Tokyo. Hiroko (Ayako Fujitani) and Akira (Ryo Kase) have just arrived in the city. They're eager to launch their careers, but first they'll have to find a place to stay. Though Hiroko's old friend
Akemi (Ayumi Ito) opens her doors to the ambitious young couple, her boyfriend isn't exactly thrilled by the new living arrangement. As Akira takes his first steps toward becoming a filmmaker, the neon jungle beckons to Hiroko. Before long, Hiroko begins to experience a startling metamorphosis that instills her with a newfound sense of peace and purpose.The second chapter, Leos Carax's "Merde," follows the debased exploits of an unsightly subterranean creature (Denis Lavant) who emerges from the Tokyo sewers to taunt and torment the unsuspecting denizens of the city. Stealing cash, pilfering cigarettes, frightening old ladies, and even going so far as to salaciously lick schoolgirls, the gibberish-spewing troublemaker dubbed Merde sparks a media frenzy that sends all of Tokyo into a panic. The situation spirals as Merde discovers an arsenal of hand grenades in his underground lair, and begins throwing them in the streets at will, creating an environment of total urban terror. Later, Merde is apprehended and pompous French magistrate Maître Voland (Jean-François Balmer) arrives to defend the deviant in a Japanese court. The only person capable of speaking his client's unintelligible language, Voland stands at the center of a media circus that soon engulfs all of Japan. When Merde is convicted by the court and sentenced to death, justice takes a turn for the surreal.The trilogy winds to a close with Bong Joon-ho's "Shaking Tokyo," in which a reclusive pizza addict who hasn't left his apartment in over a decade falls for a pretty delivery girl at the very same moment an earthquake hits Japan. A so-called hikikomori who never dares venture outside, the lonely shut-in (Teruyuki Kagawa) subsists almost solely on pizza delivery. When a beautiful delivery girl shows up at his door and promptly faints when the ground begins to shake, it's love at first sight. Later, the agoraphobic man discovers that the object of his affections has become a hikikomori herself, and boldly ventures out of his apartment in order to declare his love. The moment he sets eyes on her, the ground starts to rumble once again. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi
Paris, New York and even Toronto have all gotten their due in a recent wave of city-centric omnibus films that let world-renowned auteurs run wild in their streets. Yet none of these yielded anything as strange or as idiosyncratic as Tokyo!
Perhaps it is inevitable as three foreign directors train their lenses on that unique island culture of the East that all three are propelled by fantasy or science fiction, and suggest more alienation from Tokyo than affection for the great city.
All three films deal with things hidden, or disappearing, or suppressed. But Tokyo, if anything, becomes more of a mystery after Tokyo! than it was before.
If you've seen Paris, je t'aime or New York Stories, you know the rate of return on these urban omnibuses is variable, and so it is here. Go in expecting minor pleasures and you'll be fine.
My problem is that even though the three weird stories are intriguing and of interest in their own right, but when compiled as one film they seemed undeveloped.
If Tokyo! has a unifying idea, it's the devastating effect loneliness has on the psyche, an interesting choice given Tokyo's status as one of the world's densest cities.
Sandwiched between Gondry and Bong's variously euphoric entries, Carax's contribution seems either a work of deep cynicism from an inveterate party-pooper or a welcome satirical sour note from one of the great talents of 80s and 90s French cinema.
This triptypch of short flicks about the Japanese capital by non-Japanese filmmakers is wildly intriguing to me, as someone who has never been there but would like to visit...
With the three-director -- Michel Gondry, Leos Carax, Bong Joon-ho -- multistory film Tokyo!, the first really exciting piece of filmmaking of 2009 comes to town.
Grasping a unifying theme from the three distinct tales is one of the pleasures of watching the movie. Loneliness gets my vote, but Tokyo! is adventurous enough to spark many different theories.
Since Paris has an anthology film on the theme of love, Tokyo gets one on the theme of weirdness, from Michel Gondry, Leos Carax, and Bong Joon-ho. Three segments: the girlfriend of an experimental filmmaker feels useless until she undergoes an inexplicable metamorphosis; a shambling man-creature named Merde rises
from the sewers to wreak havoc on Tokyo; a shut-in falls for a girl with buttons tattooed on her body. The best segment by a wide margin is Carax's "Merde": genuinely funny, it's like one of those experimental Saturday Night Live sketches about an uncomfortably strange character who harasses the people around him, except it doesn't grow wearisome after two minutes.
May 23, 2010
Greg S
Super Reviewer
Loved the first of these three short stories, third one was pretty good also. Second one... well... not to say it was a bad short film, but it certainly left me cold and I could do without ever seeing it again.
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