On Screen

Tokyo! is three 40-minute shorts by two French filmmakers,
Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) and
Léos Carax (The Lovers on the Bridge), and one South
Korean director, Bong Joon-ho (The Host). The best of the three
is Gondry’s “Interior Design,” and the worst is Carax’s “Merde.” In the
middle is Bong’s “Shaking Tokyo,” which is about a
hikikomori—an urban recluse, a person who has deliberately
isolated him- or herself from social life and lives day by day with
only a minimum of interaction with the world outside. All three films
have one fantastic element. In Gondry’s short, it is a woman who
changes into a chair; in Carax’s, it is an alien race; in Bong’s, it is
a tattoo of a button that changes the mood of a woman when it is
pressed.

Like The Lovers on the Bridge, Carax’s short—which,
also like The Lovers on the Bridge, stars the ugliest man in
French cinema, Denis Lavant—is too loud and bombastic. Carax goes
after the 20th-century history of not just Tokyo but of Japan. By
making Lavant into a mini-Godzilla, Carax smashes to pieces the
seemingly pleasant surface that represses Japan’s racist, xenophobic,
and militaristic energies. The short is too loud, extreme, and messy.
Carax has no sense of delicacy and care. He has the kind of mind that
likes rough sex. Bong’s short, on the other hand, is just too slow, but
it has a very sweet ending and a terrific earthquake sequence. Gondry’s
short, “Interior Design,” is simply marvelous. It’s about a couple who
move to Tokyo on a rainy night and crash in their friend’s small pad
while trying to find their own place. The couple’s plans quickly
collapse, and there is little or no hope of them finding a new place
and steady work. The mounting pressure instigates a strange
transformation, and the short ends in a truly wonderful and warm place.
“Interior Design” restored my faith in Gondry’s imagination.