Omnibus films are typically uneven endeavors, comprised as they are of assorted works usually linked by only one common thread. And true to form, Tokyo!, a compilation of three short films by renowned directors Michel Gondry, Leos Carax and Bong Joon-Ho, isn’t an entirely consistent affair. Yet lurking within these Tokyo-set narratives does lie a shared pulsating thread of isolation. In this surprisingly rich anthology, it’s not merely location that proves the primary connective tissue, but a sense of individuals – on a personal and collective scale – struggling to cope with detachment from themselves, their fellow citizens, and their surroundings. Manifesting itself in ways fanciful, austere, unsettling, absurd and magic-realist, this lonely condition may be treated in tonally dissimilar ways by this trio of diverse tales, yet a strain of solitude, and of literal and figurative aimlessness, nonetheless helps this triptych’s vignettes coalesce into an affectingly atmospheric portrait of the city and its inhabitants.
Neither outstanding nor disappointing, Gondry and Bong’s contributions instead prove intriguing, if up-and-down, examples of two directors refining and/or broadening their typical purview. “Interior Design,” about a couple who temporarily move into the cramped metro flat of a friend while the guy (Ryo Kase) attempts to launch a film career and the girl (Ayako Fujitani) searches for her life’s path, is a far more reserved, un-romantic examination of artistic invention for Gondry, who avoids outright whimsy in his depiction of self-definition as a highly personal act of creativity. Poking fun at cinematic pretentions, casting Tokyo as an impersonal, restrictive-box environment, and wrapping up his story with an unexpected quirk of fate that’s less adorable than quietly contemplative, Gondry’s segment may not be as effervescent as The Science of Sleep or Be Kind Rewind, nor substantial enough to earn intense emotional engagement. Still, there’s something gently moving about his female protagonist’s achievement of purpose through surrealistic physical transformation.
A tad less successful is Bong’s “Shaking Tokyo,” hinging as it does on some too-cute elements that grate rather than endear. Bong’s short focuses on a shut-in (Teruyuki Kagawa) known as a “hikikimori” who’s spent the past eleven years holed up in his apartment, avoiding even eye contact with the delivery people who bring him his weekly pizza. When he catches a glimpse of the pizza girl’s (Yu Aoi) garter belt, and then instinctively looks into her eyes, his sheltered world begins to truly crumble, the earth vigorously shaking in an excessively on-the-nose manifestation of the character’s inner change. Bong’s compositions are as spatially immaculate as his protagonist’s sterile, neatly arranged living abode, but between the girl’s computer-button tattoos – which activate her, like a Mac – and the everyone’s-a-recluse finale, “Shaking Tokyo” feels a tad too obvious in its address of estrangement, at least until the piercing, almost-redeeming penultimate shot of a hand attempting to shield one’s eyes from the sun’s wavering rays.
And then there’s Leos Carax’s crazy, ambiguous, go-for-broke middle segment “Merde.” In his first work since 1999’s Pola X, Carax opens with a Hitchcockian scene-setting cinematographic tour through Tokyo’s skyscrapers that winds down as an iris-shot of a manhole, from which emerges a disheveled Caucasian man (a freakish-looking Denis Lavant) with a twisted goatee, long filthy fingernails, and one milky white eye. In a subsequent, superlative tracking shot, this monster storms down a crowded city street stealing and consuming cigarettes, chrysanthemums, and money, all set to the score from Godzilla. After massacring innocents with grenades, Merde (as he’s known) is captured in the sewers where he dwells, and subsequently defended in court by a French lawyer (Jean-François Balmer) with similar physical characteristics who – as evidenced by an insanely protracted, un-translated chat with Merde – can speak the madman’s gibberish language. Living amidst WWII tanks and armaments, and suspected by the Americans and Japanese of involvement with al-Qaeda and the Aum cult (respectively), Merde proves a shrewdly amorphous stand-in for irrational terrorism, right through both his trial (in which he admits to hating “innocent people” and slanders the Japanese for having eyes that resemble “woman’s sex”) and an arresting execution sequence that’s deft enough to both evoke Syndromes and a Century and playfully set up an American-set sequel.
