I don’t know the history of this production, but the idea seems formidable to me. ‘Tokyo!‘ (2009) is a triptych of short films set in Tokyo and directed by three directors who are not Japanese, but who are talented and make strange films, far from consensus and comfort zones. They are Michel Gondry, Leos Carax and Bong Joon Ho. I don’t know if the three directors were asked anything other than to make Tokyo the location where the story of their segments takes place. However, the result is more than that. Each of the three films represents a vision of the big city from the perspective of their personal anxieties and obsessions.
In the segment directed by Michel Gondry, a young couple is looking for their way in life and an acceptable home in the super-crowded metropolis. They live at a friend who has a tiny apartment, he makes experimental films, but to pay the rent and parking fines he needs to work wrapping gifts in a store. She feels like she’s losing her personality just supporting him. Until the loss seems to become real. In Leos Carax‘s segment, a strange character who speaks an unintelligible language emerges from the city’s sewers, does all sorts of bad jokes and mischiefs, until he starts throwing grenades from a weapons and ammunition depot left over from the war. He’s a manga-like monster, but has the almost human form of Denis Lavant, the director’s favorite actor. The Korean director’s segment presents us with a lonely character who hasn’t left his house for 11 years, avoiding any contact with the outside world and its inhabitants. The day and moment he looks for the first time into the eyes of the girl who brings him his weekly pizza delivery, an earthquake occurs. Will he find her again? Can people live completely alone, even in Tokyo?
I really liked the film. I’ve visited Tokyo several times. The contact of foreigners with Japanese culture and society, so special and sometimes intimidating and even frightening, is not a completely new subject. It has been addressed by Japanese and also non-Japanese filmmakers like Wim Wenders, Alain Corneau or Sofia Coppola. Nowhere, however, as in this triptych, which combines elements of Japanese culture with nuances of horror, everything filtered through the directors’ personal visions. If Gondry‘s film looks a bit like a Japanese film until towards the end, Bong Joon Ho‘s is placed from the beginning in an artificial settings (the lonely man’s house, the city without people), while in Carax‘s segment, Tokyo looks like in… a Carax movie. The fantastic is always present, sometimes visible, sometimes insinuated. The anxieties of the metropolis, of its inhabitants and visitors are present and amplified: the crowding, the loss of human relationships, the fear of monsters, war and terrorism, the destruction of nature, the earthquakes. ‘Tokyo!‘ tries and succeeds in convincing us that this city is on another planet.