To Bathe in Filmic Waters

Tôkyô! | Michel Gondry, Leos Carax & Joon-ho Bong, 2008

“An anthology film, or omnibus film or portmanteau film is a film consisting of several different short films, often tied together by only a single theme, premise, or brief interlocking event.” A good description – short, concise, informative – though one thing our good friend Wikipedia fails to mention here when concerning this specific kind of filmic undertaking is that it hardly ever results in an impressive end product. Filmmakers have been joining forces to create movies like Tôkyô! for years and if we’ve learned one thing from this entire concept it’s that auteurs tend to have a lot of trouble getting on the same page. It doesn’t matter how many directors you draft in (Paris, Je T’aime) or how much talent you gather together (Boccaccio ‘70), there will always be something uneven about the finished article. In  this sense Tôkyô! upholds the tradition, but it’s not all bad – in fact, it’s quite good.

The film opens with Michel Gondry’s segment, Interior Design, which concerns a young couple named Hiroko and Akira who arrive at the Japanese capital with dwindling funds looking to take advantage of a friend’s kindness until they can raise the money to rent their own place. Both are creative types who would rather enjoy their, imaginative world of alley ghosts and  apocalyptic cities rather than the difficult predicament they are in, but their relationship holds strong until Hiroko begins to question her worth, both to Akira and to life itself. Her desperate worrying leads to a life-changing self-discovery, coming to a head in true Gondry style with a visually striking and somewhat Kafkaesque  sequence wherein Hiroko transforms rather embarrassingly into an ordinary wooden chair.  It is through this transformation however that she finds happiness in the apartment of a stranger, and whiles away her days supporting coats and stealing food while her new friend becomes increasingly baffled by the erratic behaviour of his new piece of furniture. Gondry linked up with famed graphic novelist Gabrielle Bell to co-write Interior Design, basing it upon a story from Bell’s recent work Cecil and Jordan in New York and ultimately it’s exactly the kind of wonderfully imaginative tale that Gondry’s creative approach fits. There are a few pacing issues however, despite the film’s length, though if one can overlook the slightly slow build up and contrastingly brief climactic sequence Interior Design is certainly rewarding.

Slightly less rewarding is the middle part of this cinematic triptych, Leos Carax’s Merde. Going into Tôkyô! this was the segment I was most looking forward to, having become a fan of Carax through his earlier work with Dennis Lavant and in particular the 1991 film The Lovers on the Bridge. As with this earlier title Lavant plays a homeless Frenchman in Merde, though this time with slightly more sinister motives. The film opens on a bustling Tokyo city, panning around and zooming in to an ordinary manhole upon a street lined with tall grey buildings. The manhole proceeds to rattle and out pops a crazed, bearded figure with long, red, unkempt hair and a curious green suit. This is, as the Japanese press have dubbed him, Merde, who appears without warning to terrorise the locals and eventually the entire nation into a reaction. Lavant is thrillingly malicious here as the title character, his ungainly gait and destructive approach to everything in his path is enthralling to witness. The problem is that Merde doesn’t really go anywhere from there. Aside from the opening sequence the segment tends to suffer from a lack of direction, almost as if Carax and Lavant had conceived this intriguing and somewhat terrifying character but then didn’t quite know what to do with him. The figure of Merde comes to symbolise anarchy in a city full of paranoid people, a slightly ham-fisted attempt by Carax at commenting on a post-9/11 society. Slightly more effective is his nod towards popular culture and the sensationalism of the modern media, for the terrible Merde becomes an icon who is imitated by kids, immortalised in plastic, worshipped by some and feared by most.

Finally there is Joon-ho Bong’s contribution, the aptly titled Shaking Tokyo, which continues the themes of urban alienation and social estrangement – raised previously by Leos Carax – though this time bathed in a slightly warmer light. Teruyuki Kagawa plays a nameless recluse or Hikikomori - a phenomenon so popular in Japan that it has its own social class – who has separated himself from society and set up his own world in a dingy Tokyo apartment. He has canned food stacked to the ceiling, a fridge full of bottled water, mountains of magazines and enough money to subsist entirely on take-away pizza if it should come to that. His reclusive, tranquil life is shattered however when he finally decides to make eye contact with the local pizza delivery girl who just so happens to be adorable. The pair share a fleeting moment before the ground begins to tremor and walls rumble as an earthquake shakes the doorstep. The girl faints and then quickly comes to, leaving his life just as abruptly as she enters it, prompting our Hikikomori to venture out into the blinding sunlight for the first time in years – he discovers, of course, that the world is not as he remembers it. Shaking Tokyo is a certainly the most tender part of the film, infused with the kind of joyful humour that can be found in all of Bong’s work from The Host to Memories of Murder, all the way back to his debut effort Barking Dogs Never Bite. As is his approach to romance in each of the above films, here it is awkward and somehow blind, but it does exist and turns Shaking Tokyo from a quaint tale of suppressed pain and estrangement into something entirely more affecting.

Our Rating: