Out-of-town directors create fantasy Tokyo

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Denis Levant wreaks havoc as a vagrant named Merde. (LIBERATION ENTERTAINMENT)

WHERE the 1989 film New York Stories portrayed the Big Apple from the perspective of three American directors (two of which were dyed-in-the-wool New Yorkers Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese), this film interprets the city of Tokyo from the perspectives of three out-of-towners.

Possibly, the film's Japanese producers were sufficiently impressed by Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation that they expected more of the same.

That's not what they got, however. What they get is three films with a common denominator of fantasy.

French fantasist Michel Gondry (Be Kind Rewind) starts things off with an all-Japanese story, Interior Design, in which a woman (Ayako Fujitani, the daughter of Steven Seagal, apparently) accompanied by her filmmaker boyfriend, moves in with a friend in an already tiny apartment, only to succumb to feelings of uselessness. The resolution to her dilemma plays out in magical Gondrian fashion -- she literally becomes furniture -- in a short film that touches on the isolation of the outsider in a society where a lack of purpose is the ultimate taboo.

That theme plays out in the last film of the trilogy, Shaking Tokyo by Korean director Bong Joon Ho (the director of the brilliant retooling of the Asian monster movie, The Host). Its central character is an unnamed "hikimori" (Teruyuki Kagawa) an urban hermit who limits human contact to paying off the various people who show up at his door delivering supplies.

After 10 years, he makes eye contact with a lovely young pizza delivery girl (Yu Aoi) who collapses into his apartment when an earthquake strikes. The girl sports "button" tattoos that seem to reboot her system when pressed (a neat reference to the conscious mash-up of technology and sexuality that is uniquely Japanese) and our hero finds himself tantalized, only to discover that the object of his latent affection is on the way to becoming a hikimori herself.

French director Leos Carax offers the entry that actually dares to be rude to its host country, starting with its title Merde. That happens to be the name of a vagrant (Denis Levant) who crawls forth from the sewer to wreak havoc on the populace, first by walking the streets, robbing, licking and assaulting anyone in his path, and later upping the ante with a bag of Second World War-era grenades he finds in his subterranean haunt.

Caught and brought to trial, Merde is defended by a similarly alien-looking French lawyer (Jean-Francois Balmur) who claims to be one of only three people who speak Merde's language.

Where the other films are wry, non-offensive reflections of contemporary Japanese society, Carax clearly enjoys stomping on nicety, picking at the scab of Japan's role in the war, and having Merde voice his offensive, racist observations of the Japanese.

Perhaps that's why the middle film leaves the strongest impression, and even the Japanese would have to appreciate where Carax is coming from. Esthetically speaking, Carax's film is a Godzilla on an otherwise serene Tokyo cityscape.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Movie Review

Tokyo

Directed by Michel Gondry, Bong Joon-Ho and Leos Carax

Cinematheque

14A

3 1/2 stars out of five

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition July 10, 2009 D4