City surreal

Uneven anthology film Tokyo! presents three
imaginative takes on the Japanese capital

BEST OF THE BUNCH: Michel Gondry’s Interior Design

by MARK SLUTSKY

A city as sprawling, kinetic and visually crowded as Tokyo should be catnip to filmmakers, and in Tokyo!, a new anthology presumably inspired by the success of Paris Je t’Aime, three non-Japanese directors try their hands at telling stories set in the capital city. The results are mixed. Very mixed. Of the three films here, one is quite good and the other two are just awful.

The first, and best film, Interior Design, is directed by Michel Gondry, and I’d go so far as to say it’s his best movie in years. A young couple, Hiroko and Akira (Ayako Fujitani and Ryo Kase) move to Tokyo with only a vague idea of what they’re going to do there. Akira is a filmmaker who’s rented out a porno theatre to show a bizarre-o pretentious low-budget movie he’s made and Hiroko isn’t quite sure what she wants to do with herself, leading to some complicated and surrealist results. It’s a sweet little movie with a great attention to the visual details of Tokyo living, and the only film that really seems to specifically capitalize on the city’s character.

Strange that the segment about a monster living in Tokyo’s sewers is not the film by Joon-ho Bong (The Host). Merde, by well-respected French filmmaker Leos Carax (The Lovers on the Bridge) is, frankly, appalling. Denis Lavant plays a leprechaun-like creature who emerges from the Tokyo underground to harass people and soon enough, throw grenades at them. Carax seems to be making an obscure point about Japanese imperialism or… something. It’s tedious, awkward and yet somehow horribly compelling.

Finally, Shaking Tokyo is the entry by Korean filmmaker Bong, a film that makes even less of its setting than Carax’s. Teruyuki Kagawa plays a hikkikimori, or shut-in, who hasn’t left his house in a decade and whose only human contact is with the delivery people who bring him his food. When he decides he needs some human contact and ventures out, the results are facile and kind of embarrassing. It’s five minutes of ideas stretched out into a 40-or-so minute featurette.

TOKYO! OPENS AT THE CINÉMA DU
PARC THIS FRIDAY, MAY 29