"Now I'm Useful": Tokyo! Review

Tokyo! is three short films by three different directors (Michel Gondry, Leos Carax, and Bong Joon Ho) doing each of their visions of the city.  While the trailer was wonderful, the movie as a whole is not worth seeing in theaters.  Gondry's "Interior Design" and Bong Joon-Ho's "Shaking Tokyo" are both interesting, look good visually, and are pretty engaging overall, but "Merde" by Leos Carax is the most painful 25 or so minutes I've spent watching a movie since I can't remember when.

"Interior Design" follows a young couple (Akira and Hiroko) trying to find a place to live in Tokyo.  Akira is trying to make it as a film maker and Hiroko does everything she can to support her self-indulgent, typical-film-student boyfriend.  I won't spoil anything plot-wise, but will say that this is the best of the three shorts in Tokyo!.  If you're a Michel Gondry fan (as I am) its worth renting when it comes out.  Its very visually interesting, contains his typical magical realism but has a darker tone, exploring darker themes and only lifted by black humor.  The characters are developed pretty well in a short period of time, and you become especially attached to Hiroko, who is slowly turning into a wooden chair (which is awesome).  Once again, "Interior Design" is the highlight of the whole movie and definitely worth renting so you can skip what I will describe next.

"Merde" is the next short in the movie, and the title (meaning "shit" in French) is perfectly fitting.  I wanted to needle-fuck my eyeballs throughout the entire time this was being screened.  It has the stupidest, most annoying, goblin-hobo-leprechaun creature that lives in the sewer and only comes out to terrorize the streets of Tokyo.  We see in the sewer remnants of Japan's brutal imperialist past ("Heroes of Nanking" is spray-painted on the wall where this creature resides).  Ok, I get it, this is the "shit", the brutal and oppressive events of empire that modern economic power-house nations (like Japan) want to forget about and keep buried in order to project a better image of themselves to the increasingly globalized world.  But you can't always bury that shit, and it may come back to haunt and condemn you.  A potentially very interesting theme that was executed in the worst way possible.  You don't care about anything while watching this, the creature is hard to watch and speaks his own language of ridiculous, horrible noises that punish your ears.  "Merde" ruined the entire experience.

The final short in the film was Bong Joon-Ho's "Shaking Tokyo".  While I did not enjoy it as much as "Interior Design", this was also interesting and done well.  It follows a hikikomori, which is a japanese term for what's basically a modern hermit, a man who hides from the city in his apartment.  Choosing to follow a man like this, and that Japan has a specific term for it, is a statement about the city on its own.  It's also neat visually to see the shots of this man's apartment, fully equipped with obsessive-compulsively organized towers of hundreds of delivered pizza boxes.  There's also a humor and a sweetness to it and an awesome shock at the end of it, that is indeed waking up what Joon-Ho sees as the isolated, repressed, and alienated people of Tokyo.  Watch "Interior Design", skip "Merde, and watch this.  Tokyo! has interesting components, but is not Paris, je t'aime, a movie with the same idea but much better.