The conceit is already a cliche -- assign critically acclaimed directors to fill a feature-length movie with individual short films, each a brushstroke of the city they love.
The likes of Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese contributed to 1989's New York Stories, there was Paris Je T'Aime, and even our own Toronto Stories last year.
But Tokyo! is an odd duck, in that those previous movies were made by locals, interpreting their city for the world.
Tokyo! by contrast is three short films about Tokyo, not a one by a Japanese filmmaker (I guess there aren't any).
Instead, it's two French directors, Michel Gondry and Leos Carax, and a Korean, Bong Joon-ho. It really seems almost gauche, to have a filmic commentary on a city entirely put forward by non-residents although it would have had a perverse resonance if that approach were taken with Toronto Stories, enthralled as Canadians are with how others see them.
I'm guessing at least one of them would have traded on easy stereotype, as Carax does in Merde -- the middle film of the three. There, a homeless gaijin (white devil) crawls out of the sewers, knocking people over to Godzilla soundtrack music and disappearing again. Merde ("sh--" in French) begins almost as a comedy sketch (at which level it works best), with earnest TV reports about "the Monster" terrorizing Tokyo.
That is, until Merde (Denis Levant) is caught, and he turns out to be a ranting vagrant, speaking a language that only an eccentric French lawyer (Jean-Francois Balmur) seems to understand. Merde soon becomes a thuddingly unsubtle parable about Japanese xenophobia, with calls for the Monster's death increasing with every demented slur he utters in court against the Japanese.
The most deft touch belongs to Gondry (Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind), whose Interior Design is both surrealist (at one point, someone who feels useless literally becomes furniture) and obeys internal logic. It follows a wannabe filmmaker and his girlfriend to Tokyo, where they crash at the one-room apartment of a young woman friend. There are clashes of personality, deep-seated internal struggles and some humour, all evocatively told against a funky urban landscape.
The one I most looked forward to, Bong Joon Ho's Shaking Tokyo (from the maker of The Host) at least tries to dip into contemporary Japanese culture with a portrayal of the "hikimori," young, urban people who become hermits in their apartments, eating delivery food exclusively (here, we cal them "bloggers").
The central, unnamed character (Teruyuki Kagawa) has been a shut-in for a decade, and only begins to soften toward the outside world when he develops feelings for an awkward pizza delivery girl (Yu Aoi). The twist: She is in the process of becoming a hikimori herself. However, neither portrait is particularly deep, and Bong does not seem to have invested as much of himself in the telling as he does in Korean stories.
In the end, however, Tokyo! suffers from a lack of credibility. Not surprisingly, two Frenchmen and a Korean do little to expand one's understanding of things Japanese.
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