film, eyeballs, brain

I think it might have been Sofia Coppola – was it in that awkward interview that was part of the DVD? — where she reveals that Lost in Translation didn’t have to be set in Tokyo, and could have been anywhere. (Or was that Danny Boyle talking about Mumbai and Slumdog Millionaire?) There’s an odd sense in which Tokyo!, the surreal cinematic triptych featuring films by Michel Gondry, Leos Carax, and Bong Joon-ho, takes the city, its streets, and its cramped apartments for inspiration, but seemingly little else.

Part of what makes Tokyo! so potentially appealing to critics (and to myself, at least) was the backgrounds of its directors, none of whom were from Japan (or Tokyo, for that matter): one (Carax) from France, one (Bong) from South Korea, and one (Gondry) just possibly from outer space. The idea, I think, was that their particular national sensibilities – or, at least on a more generic level, their being not-Japanese – would inform and create different perspectives on Tokyo. But such an appeal, i.e., that difference, seems premised on a kind of national essence – whether Japanese or French or Korean – that doesn’t quite sit well with me. Still, here we have three very different directors, with different cinematic sensibilities (though I confess I haven’t seen anything else by Carax), but the result is something of a misfire all in all.

I’ve never been to Japan or Mumbai, but there’s something about those two films mentioned above in the first paragraph that’s very clearly anchored in location, even if storywise the plots can be transplanted. It seems, at first glance, that there’s nothing specifically Japanese about Tokyo!… and yet I find myself slipping into that same “fallacy” about Japaneseness. (How exactly would I envision something “typically” Japanese? Would I have been satisfied if Gondry animated some giant marauding Hello Kitty, creating havoc across a country landscape?)

First comes Gondry’s Interior Design, and the setup seems familiar, like variations on a theme: the self-absorbed yet charming creative Akira (in this case, a filmmaker played by Ryo Kase), and his melancholy girlfriend Hiroko (Ayako Fujitani, the daughter of Steven Seagal, of all people). The difference here is that the film focuses instead on the woman, who is hunting for a halfway-decent apartment all over Tokyo, so that they can stop mooching from a friend. (Meanwhile, Akira’s movie, called The Ecstasy of Degradation – looking like a hilariously art-damaged version of Emperor Tomato Ketchup – premieres in a porn theater.) But Hiroko fails in her quest, especially with the meager funds she has. She can’t even find a job in a department store – Akira proves to be a better wrapper of gifts than she is – and she starts feeling useless.

Interior Design is based on a story that was originally set in New York (in a comic book collection by Gabrielle Bell), and it shows; Hiroko’s search could have been in Manhattan and it probably wouldn’t have made much of a difference. It’s hard not to like Gondry’s films – his stuff always has the charming air of a precocious kid puttering around in a box of paints and saying, “Look at what I can do!” – but this short film isn’t as immediately likeable as his others. There isn’t the equivalent of the scene in The Science of Sleep (2006) when Gael Garcia Bernal tosses the puffs of cotton into the air and they magically hang in space. The bizarre transformation at the end perhaps comes a little too unexpected, and a little too late; ultimately, it’s merely the stretched-out visual punch line to a sad joke. (This may sound obnoxious, but I still think this is Gondry’s best work ever.)

“Merde” – or to be more specific, the more slightly euphemistic “merdre” — is the first word uttered in Alfred Jarry’s proto-Surrealist hand-grenade of a play, Ubu Roi. It’s also the name of Carax’s film, the second in Tokyo!, and it can’t be coincidence. It would, however, be a cheap shot to call Merde merde, but it’s the weakest of the three, despite the fact that it’s the film that’s most specifically Japanese, as it were. There’s a fantastic and hilarious opening, for sure: a man in a green suit and a red beard (played by Denis Levant), emerging from the sewers, terrorizing shoppers in the Tokyo streets. But the joke wears thin pretty quickly, with the symbolism becoming increasingly heavy-handed – for instance, the monster discovers a hidden tunnel with a memorial to “the heroes of Nanking”, and he later uses a cache of grenades to wreak havoc on the city.

The monster is finally caught, and Merde (that’s his name) becomes a sort of Manson-like celebrity figure, seen training in an al-Qaeda camp, or palling around with Shoko Asahara. But no one can understand his gesticulations and gibberish except his French lawyer (Jean-Francois Balmer), and here’s where the whole farce bogs down even further, as both interrogation and trial have to be translated from Merde to French to Japanese. Yes, I get the Japanese monster-movie reference, and how Japan is haunted by its history, and the central question of translation and meaning, and the Kurt Schwitters-style sound poetry, but I still couldn’t wait for Carax’s painful satire to end.

I’m a big fan of Bong Joon-ho – enough, at least, to spot a couple of actors from Bong’s previous films in cameos here – so it’s no surprise that his skillfully-edited and beautifully-photographed segment, Shaking Tokyo, is my favorite. Teruyuki Kagawa (he also plays the downsized sarariman in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Tokyo Sonata) is a hikikomori, a man who has shut himself in from the outside world for the last ten years.

Bong has dealt with this theme of urban loneliness and isolation before in Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000), but not in such an elegantly compact manner. (There’s also a cleverness to his camera which I hadn’t seen previously, where we see the apartment in seemingly uncut pans, and the man himself in different places throughout; it’s showy but helps to emphasize how Kagawa’s character has fully nested into the house.) His affliction doesn’t end there; he subsists on pizza deliveries, and obsessively stacks the pizza boxes (and empty rolls of toilet paper) like a fortress around his increasingly cramped apartment. (It’s reminiscent of the little food stall in The Host, from 2006, except that it’s supposed to wall him in, and not necessarily protect him from the outside.)

And when, after an earthquake, a pizza delivery girl played by Yu Aoi (whom I last saw in her first movie, Shunji Iwai‘s All About Lily Chou-Chou) faints at his doorstep – well, you’ll have to watch at least Shaking Tokyo. Too bad you have to slog through one merely-okay and one mediocre film to get to it.

Popularity: 2%

Possibly related posts:

1. Bong Joon-Ho, “The Host” (2006).
2. Kiyoshi Kurosawa, "Tokyo Sonata" (2008).
3. Ace Hannah, "Mega-Shark vs. Giant Octopus" (2009).