Michel Gondry’s Interior Design, from Tokyo!

French directors Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) and Leos Carax (Pola X) and Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-Ho (The Host) might not be the first names you’d expect to be attached to an film project about Tokyo. But their outsider status lends dynamic, sometimes unsettling contrasts to their segments for Tokyo!, a triptych in the tradition of New York Stories (and part of an emerging trend of omnibus cinematic odes to the world’s great cities, which also includes Paris Je T’aime and the upcoming New York, I Love You). Despite microscopic budgets, all three directors managed to produce insightful, unconventional takes on life in Japan’s biggest, busiest city, creating what producers Masa Sawada and Michiko Yoshitake have described as “a fantasy in three movements.”

“I have the impression that people in Tokyo don’t express themselves much, but they are polite and always follow the rules,” says Gondry. Appropriately enough, his film, Interior Design, explores the world of a young woman who struggles to express herself after she and her boyfriend move to Tokyo to start a new life. Gondry originally set out to adapt Gabrielle Bell’s whimsical comic Cecil and Jordan in New York into a feature-length film, but “that didn’t really work out,” he explains. “The shorter we got, the better it was.” Featuring Gondry’s trademark in-camera effects (this time to show a girl turning into a chair), the thirty-minute film is both visceral and comic; in a word, classic Gondry.

Carax is back after a ten-year hiatus from filmmaking with Merde, a commentary on a film world he thinks “is shit.” Set in a sewer, it stars Merde, an insane beast of a man who leaves his soggy lair only to rampage the streets of Tokyo, licking school girls and eating money as he barrels down the city’s streets. After discovering a forgotten stash of World War II-era grenades in a sewer canal, he brings the weapons to the surface, causing serious terror. Perhaps the most interesting part of Merde, which is hands down the strongest part of Tokyo!, is the language that Carax invented for his main character, a mix of Russian, French, and various African dialects that is fully translatable. (For example, women are called “condja,” a play on “La Joconde,” the French nickname for the Mona Lisa.)

The final film is Joon-Ho’s Shaking Tokyo, which follows a hikikomori (a member of Japan’s massive class of young urban recluses) who ends years of isolation to venture outside to save an attractive pizza delivery girl. An earthquake hits just as he reaches her, and even though the world is literally falling down around him, he decides he likes life better on the outside. But what do a hikikomori, a crazy man-child from the sewers, and a girl who turns into a chair say about an outsider’s view of Tokyo? While Japanese audiences may be struggling to figure it all out, the filmmakers meant no disrespect. In fact, as Carax readily admits, these films “could have been set in any city.”

WWW.TOKYOTHEMOVIE.COM

Leos Carax’s Merde, from Tokyo!

Bong Joon-Ho’s Shaking Tokyo, from Tokyo!

KEYWORDS: Bong Joon-Ho, film, Leos Carax, Michel Gondry, Tokyo