TOKYO!: Review By B. Alan Orange

It’s hard to sit and dissect Tokyo! Especially since I don’t know the intent behind it. Nearly every single piece of modern day cinema coming out of Japan is laced with some sort of stinging social commentary. They don’t make so-called ‘Popcorn Movies’, as it were. Each film has a purpose and a reason for existing, even if it is only in the minds of the writer and the director. Tokyo! Pulls together three of today’s most exciting directors and plops them down in this cruel city for their own renowned take on its pulsating neon landscape of beauty and disgust. Watching their anthology, I’m not sure where each of their minds are at. Are they parodying the harsh climate of the Tokyo-based cinema scene? Are their personal views being strewn across a foreign land not of their making? Are they trying to apply Japan’s strict code of metaphorical recourse? Or are they just having fun, jotting out nonsensical postcards while on vacation? I think it’s a little of each, really. Either way, it’s a captivating trio of visually imperative works. There hasn’t been an anthology film this cohesive and tempered in (at the very least) the last ten years. Each slice of pie works in adjoining the other in unison, and it’s a treat to behold.

Things kick off with Michel Gondry’s Interior Design. A French filmmaker, Gondry invented the Bullet Time effect and prevailed in commercials and music videos before bringing his truly unique visual style to the big screen. His first film was the hardly seen Human Nature, which starred Patricia Arquette as a very hairy woman prone to climbing cardboard empire state buildings. He followed that up with the acclaimed Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Jack Black’s misplaced comedy Be Kind Rewind. Each one of his works offers a very hyper-realized rendering of perfected bizarreness. This electrifying juice is always injected into what could be considered a mundane situation. His piece here does not deviate from that path. It closely adherer’s to his previous short film works. Interior Design is a French story stuck in Japan, and only in its last act does it inherit some of Tokyo’s bizarre mysticism. This ordinary reality pitch on youthful endeavors quickly turns away from its inner city drama to become a slighted fairy tale. And it allows Gondry to utilize the visual tricks and stop-motion animation that he is most often celebrated for.

Yes, you will believe that a woman becomes a chair. Interior Design follows the plight of a young Japanese couple as they move into Tokyo city proper. Staying with a friend and strapped for cash, they both set out to find a place of their own and any type of employment. Akira is an aspiring filmmaker that employees annoying smoke machine effects and strobe lighting to his late night student film screenings. Hiroko is the supporting girlfriend without a goal. She is only there to help out and see them both through this tough time. During the day, Akira wraps presents for a retail outlet. Hiroko spends her afternoons clipping images out of magazines and stapling to the area above her borrowed bed. Old school chum Akemi has taken them in, but they soon overstay there welcome. Things become increasingly intense inside this small one bedroom flat. Even though Akira loses their car and costs them their savings, it’s Hiroko that must retrieve it. She also devotes herself to finding lodging for the two of them, which offers us an exciting look at some of the more astounding architectural designs of the city. She does serve a purpose, and she is giving herself completely over to the situation. But the others don’t see that. Not long into Akira and Hiroko’s stay, Akemi’s boyfriend shows up. Hiroko overhears them talking about how worthless she is. This cripples the girl, and she flees the situation, leaving everyone behind. Trying to find herself on the streets of a once inviting city, the girl loses her limbs and starts to sprout wooden appendages. Her plight becomes a nightmarish slog through life as she transforms into a plain, ordinary chair. It is picked up at the bus station, and brought home by a young businessman who places her in front of a computer. This is her life, happily ever after. She found a purpose. But at what cost?

Does this mean something beyond its surface level metaphor? Are we to look at the chair as Japan’s answer to the common, everyday housewife? Is a female homemaker a purposeless cause? Are women that remain faithfully and truthful, supporting their man at any cost, nothing more than an antique euphemism in the fastest growing culture in America? Why is this Frenchman making these observations outside his own stated glass empire? Gondry must have hovered over this culture for moments at a time, observing the cruelty of the female species. Those without a purpose are like ticks on a bleeding dog. Though short in length, you could draw some very lengthy debates out of Interior Design’s contextual layers. We don’t get to think about it for too long, as the second installment comes on like a monster.

Tokyo!’s middle act is a little more opened faced. French director Leos Carax’s Merde repurposes the original Godzilla film as a true look at its own stated meaning. Essentially, he takes Japan’s idealized self- hatred for its own country, as represented by Godzilla, and mutates it into a single man. This lone figure rises up out of the sewer and takes off down a city street, causing havoc as he goes. It really is a sight to behold. In one long running dolly shot, we watch this somewhat horrifying bum stomp past pedestrians as Akira Ifukube’s iconic Godzilla theme music plays in the background. A nation appalled, they regard this scraggly creature as a real life fiend. Carax’s beast is a weird looking dude, dressed in a leprechaun green suit with a cloudy eye and a lighting bolt shaped beard.

His shenanigans are tame at first. He steals money then eats it, shoves people out of the way, and pilfers the random cigarette. Fear mongering news anchors set him up as something awful. When he finds a stash of grenades in his underground layer, he turns these preconceived myths into reality. Walking under a bridge, he throws the explosive weapons without recourse, destroying cars and people. A SWAT team apprehends him. And he is soon being prosecuted. Speaking in an unintelligible language made of gibberish, the man dubs himself Merde. Which literally means sh*t. He describes his hatred for Japan, Tokyo specifically, to a translator, and is soon sentenced to death. The youth culture quickly clings to this bizarre creature, turning him into a worshipped deity. You don’t have to read twenty essays on what Godzilla means to the Japanese culture to figure out where Carax’s is headed with all of this. His short film is interesting in the ways it repurposes the myth. Even if you aren’t inclined to take any urgent meaning about the way Japan looks at itself away from it, you will be entertained. Because it is so perfectly executed. Merde is the best of the three films.

This triptych ends with a bizarre romance titled Shaking Tokyo, which comes from Korea’s beloved Bong Joon-ho. He is best known in the states for his masterful monster movie Host, which took the ideas and metaphors associated with the typical Godzilla movie and used them as a template for focusing on the problems in his own country. If you’ve seen Host, then you will be familiar with the quaint human drama that fuels Joon-ho’s more thrilling adventures. This short is no exception. The narrative revolves around actor Teruyuki Kagawa, currently one of the biggest stars in Japan. He plays a Hikikomori, which is essentially an agoraphobic. For the past ten years, he has spent his days stuck in his tiny apartment, ordering pizza every Saturday, and stacking up the boxes in unison, along with every used toilet paper roll he has ever breezed through. One unsuspecting Saturday afternoon, his entire life is turned upside down. For a beautiful young woman has come to deliver his pizza. He falls for her the moment he opens the door. And a seismic eruption rocks the very foundation that his apartment is built upon, knocking her unconscious. Boon-jo is essentially making fun of other Japanese filmmakers that utilize and bastardize their own overstated metaphors to wedge in every last bit of social commentary. He continues on this path, setting the girl up as a robotic humanoid with pleasure buttons. Teruyuki must push each one for a response. When she finally recovers from her black out, she peddles away never to be seen again. The very next Saturday, she doesn’t return with a pizza. So Teruyuki sets out to find her, leaving his home for the first time in over a decade. Their eventual reunion is once again met with a citywide earthquake, and it seems that Joon-ho is making offhanded remarks about how imprisoning life can be in Tokyo, even though it is the most highly populated area on any global map. The shortest of the bunch, this is a meaningful and poignant look at the boundaries love will make us cross. It ties up the anthology perfectly.

Tokyo! Is worth seeking out. It contains three strong cinematic voices that are intent on breaching their own cultural stigmatisms to look at someone else’s. Do they love Japanese cinema? Are they mocking it? Parodying it? Playing with its overtly thematic preaching? Who knows. Japanese cinema can sometimes be a quagmire of stultifying and doubtful importance. And that idea is certainly true here. How much you read into these three films is really up to you. It’s a fun watch. Tokyo! Whoop-doo!

(All of B. Alan Orange’s reviews are based on the Boo! or Whoop-doo! evaluation system.)