Tokyo!

Dir: Michel Gondry, Leos Carax, Bong Joon-ho

2008

****

If I was asked to pick any three directors to join together and form an anthology film (in 2008), then I reckon Leos Carax, Bong Joon-ho and Michel Gondry would have been high up on the list. Interesting how none of them are actually Japanese, but then I think the idea was to gather three directors who weren’t from Japan, to see the city through their eyes, rather than from the eyes of someone who lives there. That sort of thing doesn’t always work but here it works exceptionally. That said, I wouldn’t say that the short films are about Tokyo as such, rather they are just set there. Michel Gondry begins the film with his short titled ‘Interior design’. It follows young couple Hiroko (Ayako Fujitani) and Akira (Ryō Kase) who have come to Tokyo from the provinces and are staying with a friend Akemi (Ayumi Ito) in her tiny one-room apartment until they can find a place of their own. They have no money and no work but they have a solid and mutually supportive relationship that will seemingly carry each other through any challenge. Akira is an aspiring filmmaker whose debut feature will soon screen in the city and will hopefully lead to a more solid career; in the interim, he lands work wrapping gifts at a local department store. Unfortunately Akemi's demanding boyfriend grows weary of Akemi's house guests leading Hiroko to hit the streets of Tokyo in search of another suitable apartment. Hiroko only managed to find a series of rat-infested hovels that neither she nor Akira can afford on their limited salaries. After Akira's film screens to dubious acclaim, one spectator informs Hiroko of the inherent struggles in relationships between creative types: often, one half of the couple would feel invisible, useless, or unappreciated. Hiroko relates to these feelings wholeheartedly in the wake of her numerous trials and tribulations in the unfamiliar city of Tokyo, and starts to question her role in the relationship. Hiroko wakes up one morning and sees a small hole where light is going through her. When she goes to the bathroom and unbuttons her shirt, she's shocked to see a hand sized hole in her chest with a wooden pole down the middle. As she walks down the street, the hole gets bigger and stumbling as both her feet turn to wooden poles. Eventually Hiroko is turned into a chair, only her jacket is left hanging on the back. People walking past are unaware of the chair's presence until a man picks it up and takes it home. There, she feels ignored as usual but also useful and needed, so she decides to stay. Our protagonist is happy and yet we are sad for her. It’s quite a melancholy tale and visuals are unmistakably the work of Gondry. The second story is by Léos Carax and your enjoyment of it will depend on whether you think Carax is a genius or a nut. The film is called Merde (French for shit) and the main character of the story is an unkempt, gibberish-spewing subterranean creature of the Tokyo sewers called Mr Shit. Denis Lavant plays the titular character who rises from the underground lair where he dwells to attack unsuspecting locals in increasingly brazen and terrifying ways. He steals cash and cigarettes from passersby, frightens old women and salaciously licks schoolgirls, resulting in a televised media frenzy that creates mounting hysteria among the Tokyo populace. After discovering an arsenal of hand grenades in his underground lair, Merde slips into full-on assault mode, hurling the munitions at random citizens and creating an atmosphere of urban terror, which the media promptly laps up and reflects back to its equally voracious television audience. This is Carax’s version of Godzilla. Enter pompous French magistrate Maître Voland (Jean-François Balmer), a dead ringer for the sewer creature's gnarled and twisted demeanor, who arrives in Tokyo to represent Merde's inevitable televised trial, claiming to be one of only three in the world able to speak his client's unintelligible language. The media circus mounts as lawyer defends client in a surreal court of law hungry for a satisfying resolution. Merde is tried, convicted and sentenced to death until justice takes an unexpected turn in his final moments. The final story is called Shaking Tokyo by Bong Joon-ho. Teruyuki Kagawa stars as a Tokyo shut-in, or hikikomori as they are known, who has not left his apartment in a decade. His only link to the outside world is through his telephone, which he uses to command every necessity from a series of random and anonymous delivery people, including the pizza that he orders every Saturday. The Saturday night pizza is his only treat, every other meal being the same. Over the years he has collected his rubbish including hundreds of discarded pizza cartons, jars and toilet roll tubes that he meticulously stacks in and around his cramped apartment. One Saturday things change. His pizza arrives thanks to a lovely young woman (Yū Aoi) who succeeds in catching his eye. Suddenly an earthquake strikes Tokyo, prompting the beautiful young delivery woman to faint in her client's apartment, causing the hikikimori to fall hopelessly in love. Time passes and the shut-in discovers through another pizza delivery person that the improbable object of his affections has become a hikikimori in her own right. Taking a bold leap into the unknown, our hero crosses the threshold of his apartment and takes to the streets in search of his mystery girl, at last discovering his kindred spirit at the very moment another earthquake strikes. Unlike the first film, suddenly someone’s sadness becomes a happy ending. I thought the three films worked well as a collection but because they were so different from each other. While none of the films seem to explore Tokyo directly, they do address the alienation of living in a large and cramped city while exploring the little fairy tales that came happen among the concrete office blocks. There is a surreal magic to all three films that range from melancholic to down-right odd. Carax loved Denis Lavant’s performance as Mr Shit so much he brought him back a few years later for his equally bizarre feature Holy Motors. A tiny but tasty box of assorted chocolates for peckish cinephiles to enjoy between meals.