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Tokyo! review
:. Director: Michel Gondry, Joon-ho Bong, Leos Carax
:. Starring: Denis Lavant, Yû Aoi
:. Script: Michel Gondry, Joon-ho Bong, Leos Carax
:. Running Time: 1:30
:. Year: 2008
:. Original Title: Tôkyô!
:. Country: France, Japon
:. Official Site: Tokyo!
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Help! After Paris, I Love you, city sketches from within the belly of the beast have become fashionable, and given the number of cinegenic megacities on Earth, the mine of inspiration is not likely to be depleted anytime soon. After Panama, (and before London, Berlin, New York or Vladivostok?), Tokyo it is.
Somewhat going off the beaten path, the three directors working on this project choose to demonstrate a certain impertinence which somewhat saves the film from being purely anecdotal.
The debate on the supposed racism of the segment directed by Leos Carax, entitled Merde (Shit) doesn't interest us here, as it is obvious that this story of a homeless (played by Denis Lavant acting like Denis Lavant with his body, facial expressions and mumblings) speaking an improbable dialect and creating terror in the streets, must be seen in the second degree. Except that even considering this segment from a prudent and modest distance, the film gets far too lost in a big ugly farce to convince us to welcome back the return of the director of Pola X.
The other two segments fare better. Gondry reclaims his poetic spirit with Interior Design, telling the story of a young woman who settles in Tokyo with her boyfriend, leaving him so as to not curb his ambitions and eventually turning into a chair. Salvaged by a musician, she discovers a new life, and most importantly, a usefulness in the secret space suffered by ghosts.
A ghost film, Shaking Tokyo, directed by Korean Bong Joon-ho isn't quite haunting. The movie features a hikikomori, a person who decides to shut himself in at home and to cut himself from the world forever. He lives in perfect autarchy for 10 years, until he falls in love with the pizza delivery girl. Except that she decides to go home and live as a recluse in her own home. How to find her? Leave isolation and face the world again?
While all three parts of Tokyo! are forgotten fairly quickly, the film emerges from the coherent vision of a city often portrayed as sprawling, swarming, supersaturated with technology and finally over-sanitized. The three directors avoid clichés and appropriate the city in their own way to better impose their style and their own universe, which is perplexing: Tokyo! leaves a bitter taste of failure without causing nausea. It is without doubt each director's freedom of tone which saves it from total disaster, or from another point of view, allows everyone to sink into oblivion with instinctive solidarity.
Moland Fengkov
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