MOVIES IN WHICH CITIES TAKE A titular role tend to be excessively complimentary of their settings, often to the point where they sometimes feel like promos commissioned by the local tourist board. Woody Allen's recent Vicky Christina Barcelona and th
e sickly sweet omnibus, Paris, Je T'Aime, are two recent examples of this kind of advertorial film-making, with the latter the most egregious offender. Given this, one might assume that a film by the name of Tokyo! would follow suit, especially since it is comprised of three 30-minute shorts made by foreign directors casting their outsider eye on the de facto Japanese capital. Mercifully, it's something far stranger, with professional oddballs Michel Gondry, fellow French film-maker Leos Carax, and South Korea's Bong Joon-ho exploring dehumanisation, xenophobia and isolation across stories that are whimsical and melancholic or downright disturbing.
Proceedings kick off with Gondry's effort, Interior Design, which is the most accessible and warm-hearted of the three, even though it revolves around a young woman who undergoes a strange, Kafka-esque transformation after moving to the city with her aspiring film-maker boyfriend and increasingly fails to find much purpose to her own existence. Gondry's films always have a pleasingly imaginative and wondrous homemade quality to them, and this is no different. Special effects are used sparingly to pull off Gondry's illusions in amusingly simple fashion.
Carax's film is much more demented. Named Merde, it's as deliberately unpleasant as its title. A nutty riff on Japanese monster movies, it revolves around the emergence of a subterranean man from the Tokyo sewers who proceeds to terrorise the public with increasingly dangerous behaviour that results in him being hunted down and put on trial. This feral human speaks in a strange language that only a select few mysterious Frenchmen seem able to understand. Merde takes increasingly odd turns as the beast's trial progresses, and by dropping in specific references to Japanese war crimes, Carax suggests he might be a manifestation of a country's long-suppressed sins, an idea made more explicit with his mock sequel set-up that suggests the next Merde film will take place in the USA.
Finally, Bong Joon-ho's Shaking Tokyo homes in on another strange loner, in this case a hikikomori, which is a Japanese term for a type of agoraphobic who retreats into their apartment, often for years at a time. Played by Teruyuki Kagawa, this hikikomori has created a rigorously structured life, symbolised by the way he recycles the empty boxes from the pizzas he consumes daily into rigid stacks that line his tiny apartment. The plot kicks in after an earthquake brings him into brief contact with a shy pizza delivery girl. With his curiosity piqued, he ventures outside where he finds things much changed.
Tokyo! does suffer from the unevenness to which all such omnibus projects are party (Merde, in particular, feels out of place). Nevertheless, it's more provocative and imaginative than most. All three films have a bit of a sci-fi feel to them and they each find interesting ways to explore how a large and populous urban environment can be an intensely lonely, alien place, in spite of all the vibrancy, excitement and opportunity that appears to be on offer on the surface.
