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Tokyo!
Three filmmakers attack the Japanese capital
Merde is one in a trio of short films about Tokyo
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Imagine a trio of innovative foreign directors taking their artistic shot at making short films about one of the world’s most concentrated and chaotic cities. Enter the experimental triptych Tokyo! and France to Hollywood wunderkind Michel Gondry, Korean monster-movie director Joon-ho Bong and Gallic bad boy Leos Carax in their metaphor-laden, highly original stories of life in Japan’s capital.
The film begins with Gondry’s Interior Design and ends with Joon-ho’s Shaking Tokyo, both relatively meditative pieces that bookend Carax’s over-the-top, subtly titled Merde. Interior Design starts as a couple crash with their somewhat welcoming friend in her tiny Tokyo apartment and ends with the female of the couple metamorphosing into a piece of furniture. In-between is probably the closest these films get to giving us insight on the day-to-day quotidian life in Tokyo while making a commentary on how self-involved artistic ambition might not be the best route to romantic fulfillment in the big city. Shaking Tokyo is Joon-ho’s odd rendering of a hikikomori—or “one who refuses to leave their apartment”—and the pizza delivery woman that draws him outside after more than a decade. While lush in its apocalyptic connotations, the piece ends with a fizzle of corniness. The meat of Tokyo! seems to rest in-between, with Merde, a bizarre yet strangely accessible film about a twisted, leprechaun-like, chrysanthemum-chomping man with a milky eye. This character, Merde, emerges from the Tokyo sewer to first harass and then kill citizens by throwing grenades he found in a leftover underground bunker from WWII. What is clear is that Merde, as he is sentenced to death and becomes an international cult celebrity, represents a commentary on nationalism in the Age of Terror.
While the viewer doesn’t necessarily get out of Tokyo! a greater understanding of the city, the point seems more to limit three innovative artists to filming in one place. The results, while mixed, are certainly intriguing.
Opens March 6.