Movie review: Tokyo!

by Alex Bentley

Tokyo! is an anthology of three short films tied together by their setting and the tagline, “Do we shape cities, or do cities shape us?” After viewing the film, it would appear that the three directors – Michel Gondry, Leos Carax, and Joon-ho Bong – most definitely fall in the latter category, though their interpretations of how Tokyo shapes its citizens are about as off-the-wall as you can get, with each filmmaker trying to out-do the others in terms of wackiness.

First up is Gondry with his segment entitled, “Interior Design.” The majority of his part is actually pretty normal, with a couple moving to Tokyo and trying to get settled while staying with the girlfriend's best friend. However, anybody familiar with Gondry's work (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Be Kind Rewind, and The Science of Sleep) knows to expect something strange. The boyfriend is obsessed with showing his (howlingly awful) film at a local theater, while the girlfriend, despite being the more stable one, struggles to find her purpose. That purpose finally arrives in an out-of-nowhere twist, the bizarreness of which sets the stage for the outrageous deeds to come in the next two segments.

Part two seems to tempt fate right away with its title: “Merde” (if you don't know what that means, go immediately to the closest French-to-English dictionary). Director Leos Carax, making his first film since Pola X in 1999, makes no pretense of normalcy. We are treated right away to the sight of a leprechaun-like creature - called, of course, Merde - crawling out of the sewers with no purpose other than to randomly attack people. Merde is eventually caught and tried for his crimes, with a more well-spoken but identical-looking French lawyer sent to represent him. None of the goings-on in “Merde” are easily explained, so let's just move on to the final segment.

Joon-ho Bong, who also directed the 2007 film The Host about a water monster attacking people in South Korea, stays on land this time around, focusing “Shaking Tokyo” on a hermit obsessed with several things, orderliness chief among them. He has empty toilet paper rolls stacked three-feet high in his bathroom, pizza boxes stacked chest high in his living room, and little-to-no desire to change his sheltered ways. That is until a new girl delivers his weekly pizza, setting into motion a series of events that come close to matching the strangeness of the previous two segments.

It's difficult to decipher what each director hoped to accomplish with their involvement with Tokyo!. None of the three is actually Japanese, so one could guess that their films are interpretations of other Japanese media (and anybody who's seen Nicolas Cage's Pachinko ads knows Japan loves to mess with your head). Any semblance of what it's really like to live in Tokyo is left far behind early on. Even the so-called “normal” touches are marred by moments of outlandishness, making each film feel like an exercise in trying the audience's patience. Some of it is entertaining, but most of it is much too weird to be considered art.

For an up close look at life in Tokyo, go rent Lost in Translation. Tokyo! has nowhere near the insight or level of satisfaction of that film.