Tokyo! Blu-ray

Paris may be the City of Light and New York may never sleep, but there is an undeniable energy to Tokyo. In this anthology film, three renowned filmmakers--Michel Gondry, Leos Carax, and Bong Joon-Ho--each direct an imaginative featurette about the city. Gondry (BE KIND REWIND) presides over INTERIOR DESIGN, a film that features all the director’s hallmarks as it follows a couple who moves to the metropolis. MERDE from Carax (THE LOVERS ON THE BRIDGE) centers on the eponymous character (Denis Lavant), a formerly sewer-bound monster who finds his way aboveground and begins to create chaos. Finally, Bong, the mind behind the international hit THE HOST, directs SHAKING TOKYO, a quirky romance about a hermit who forms an attachment to his pizza delivery girl.

This triptych of short films about Asia’s most misunderstood metropolis features three directors known for cinematically capturing the uncanny, and showing the individual oddity and anxiety that lurks beneath the surface of our smooth social interaction. While the two Western filmmakers, Michel Gondry and Leos Carax, simply relocate their favorite themes to Tokyo, the Korean director Bong Joon-ho more successfully allows the city to dictate the style and content of his segment. Gondry’s "Interior Design" depicts Hiroko (Ayako Fujitani) and Akira (Ryo Kase), an aimless artistic couple who overstay their welcome in a friend’s tiny apartment. Their illusions about finding success in Tokyo are gradually dissolved by the reality checks of their abysmal apartment search, some severe parking violations, and an embarrassing screening of Akira’s shoddy debut film. Hiroko’s antidote for her disappointment is to forcibly fluctuate the boundaries between reality and her perception, which ultimately results in an unusual transformation. "Merde," Carax’s contribution, is the most memorable of the trio, but also the least successful. Denis Lavant plays a grotesque miscreant who periodically emerges from the sewers to terrorize the city. The sequence itself becomes a monstrous barrage of symbolism, as Carax variously invokes Tokyo’s issues with immigration, terrorism, technology, translation, and the memory of war. Bong’s "Shaking Tokyo" is a slow ode to the subculture of "hikikomori," Japanese agoraphobes who refuse to emerge from their homes. A shut-in (Teruyuki Kagawa) lives a contented life in his immaculately ordered apartment, marked by the straight lines of his stacked books and the harmonious circles of paper-towel rolls and water bottles. When a series of earthquakes and an encounter with an alluring pizza girl force the recluse to venture outside, Bong begins to blur the sharp defining lines and edges within the frame, washing out the crisp focus with an ethereal surge of light.

Tokyo! Reviews:

"[Gondry] dials back his trademark whimsy, giving his tender story of Japanese slackers a naturalistic, lived-in feel until a surreal twist....By turns playful and melancholy, provocative and sentimental, all three of the shorts that make up TOKYO! seem like direct responses to the city itself..."-- Mark Olsen, Los Angeles Times

"Bong Joon-Ho's 'Shaking Tokyo' tackles a phenomenon within Japanese society, the hikikimori, or shut-ins, but it's done with a refreshingly light touch and perhaps a touch of hope."Washington Post

3.5 stars out of 5 -- "Taken as a whole, the three parts of TOKYO! provide a challenging picture of contemporary Japan."-- Todd McCarthy, Box Office

"On one level Mr. Carax's film is a GODZILLA spoof. But with its conspicuous references to World War II atrocities by Japanese soldiers in China, memorialized in underground graffiti, the movie is also a critique of Japan's suppressed historical memory."-- Stephen Holden, New York Times

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