Tokyo!: Three Directors Divide the City

Comme des Cinémas

Denis Lavant runs amok in Bong’s segment.

Details

Opens at Varsity, Fri., April 3. Not rated. 110 minutes.

Related Content

• M83 Brings Their Epic Synth Rock--And a Saxophone!--to the Paramount Theatre
  April 27, 2012
• The Host
  August 17, 2011
• The Short List: This Week's Recommended Shows
  June 15, 2011
• The Green Hornet: Seth Rogen's Star Vehicle Turns Crime Fighter Into Jerk
  January 12, 2011
• "Kurt Cobain's Cardigan" and 9 Other Songs by Musicians About Musicians
  September 22, 2011

More About

• Michel Gondry
• Leos Carax
• Bong Joon-ho
• Visual Arts
• Interior Design

Like this Story?

Sign up for the Events Newsletter: What's happening in town? From underground club nights to the biggest outdoor festivals, our top picks for the week's best events will always keep you in on the action.

Privacy Policy Cancel Continue

Does anyone remember Japan? The tri-part Tokyo! revisits the Land of the Lost Decade—or at least its largest city—courtesy of tourist filmmakers Michel Gondry and Leos Carax, plus South Korean neighbor Bong Joon-Ho. Gondry's opening "Interior Design" is a vaguely Jarmuschian hipster entertainment about an aspiring filmmaker and his slacker girlfriend who arrive in Tokyo and immediately succumb to the inexplicable hassles of metropolitan life. "Interior Design" evokes Gondry's pet distinction between animate and inanimate in Japanese terms; "Merde," the first Carax film of the 21st century, is a more confrontational riff on the most celebrated of Japanese monsters. Dubbed the "Creature From the Sewer" by deadpan newsreaders who link him to al-Qaeda, Aum Shinrikyo, and Siberian witchcraft, this chaotic eruption is shown to embody Japan's historical repressed, as well as Europe's guilty, conscience. As much a form of performance art as a movie, "Merde" offers the funniest urban rampage since Bong's The Host. Bong's own "Shaking Tokyo" is a quieter monster movie that addresses hikikomori, a specifically Japanese form of agoraphobia in which a young person retreats into his or her room, sometimes for years. A love story (possibly involving a robot), it's the anthology's least flashy filmmaking, but the truest to its location—lugubrious, a bit sentimental, and hopeful that Japan will again emerge from its shell.