Bergsonian Critique

“Tokyo!”, the omnibus triptych film that is independently envisioned by three distinctive filmmakers can be hardly described as a valentine to the populated Japanese megalopolis. Unlike other collaborated and commemorative anthologies such as “Paris, je t’aime” and “New York, I Love You”, “Tokyo!” is all about the stillness of urbanism. Its allegorical storytelling cunningly stymies anyone’s grasp of the Japanese culture, casting more enigmas than usually expected or conceived. Despite the prevalence of Japanese actors in the film, none of the directors and writers is actually Japanese. While it would be more practical to take this three-course meal at face value and not deem it as an accurate depiction of contemporary Japan, its experimental narrative and occasionally esoteric presentation warrant at least a solicitous assessment.

• The Self-Discovery in Interior Design

Michel Gondry’s directorial description of his auteurism in music video (Radiohead’s Knives out), advertisement (Earthlink’s Privacy commercial) and filmmaking (The Science of Sleep) speaks for itself. It is known to be illusory, claustrophobic, and somewhat perspicacious. His milieus and usage of probes in particular shun conventional methodology of sets construction, fueling them with whimsical and lifelike characterizations. Thus, both the persistently confined, cluttered spaces and the metaphysical transformation that occurs at the end of his piece, dubbed as Interior Design, aren’t effectively surprising. However, the resultant that initiated the visual metaphor is certainly unexpected.

The few minutes after introducing his coupled characters, Hiroko (Ayako Fujitani) and Akira (Ryo Kase), Gondry quickly points out the leader of this mutually caring relationship. Hiroko is the one who makes the arrangement to temporarily crash at their best friend’s studio apartment until they find a suitable housing in the city. She’s also seen carrying a notebook scribbled with apartment listings and budget managements, matters that rarely seem to be a trepidation to her blithe boyfriend, even when his rented car gets towed away. Yet, such liabilities don’t necessarily perturb Hiroko; she enjoys her useful and appreciated role in her relationship while vehemently supporting the dubious filmmaking career of the aspiring Akira.

However, several events proliferate in the course of the film that consequentially cast Hiroko aside from her usual responsibilities: her failure to land a job in gift-wrapping at a local store while her blasé boyfriend effortlessly manages to do so, her accidental eavesdrop to the remarks of her agitated host, Akemi, singling her out as the injudicious one in the relationship, her unproductive apartment hunting skills, and finally her innate struggles to cope after the successful screening of Akira’s independent film. Cumulatively, all these events cripple Hiroko, gradually setting off her figurative transformation as a piece of furniture.

Brilliantly, however, Gondry manages to elevate the terrifying nature of the incarnation by pairing her up with a person who actually needs her comforting assistance; a lonesome musician stumbles upon her when he returned to his apartment later that night and decides to include her to the rest of his furnishings. Yet, even when Hiroko manages to control her human-chair transformation, she willingly resolves to conform to her duty as a piece of furniture as we hear her narrates the content of a letter designated to Akira.

Upon reviewing the schemes of things, this actually constitutes a happy ending. After all, as an admiring viewer notes to Hiroko after Akira’s foggy screening, the difficulties of being constantly overshadowed and obscured when coupled with a creative person are proven to be strenuous. This is a revelation that Hiroko attests to wholeheartedly in the wake of the numerous trials and tribulations of her brief little escapade in Tokyo. Indeed, for one to self-discover his/her potentials and merits in the big city isn’t something that comes off easy. Hiroko’s delight from her Kafkaesque metamorphosis is evident that to be as useful as a comforting piece of furniture is sufficient enough to elicit a sense of self-worth.

• The Revulsion of Merde

Leos Carax’s segment, Merde (a French word loosely translated as “shit”) is the most eerie and controversial in the triptych (though perhaps not as equally controversial as his 1999’s Pola X). Even though the French director keeps his storytelling within the premises of Tokyo, the periphery of Japanese protagonists indicates that we are supposed to look elsewhere. Carax’s Tokyo is horizontal and straightforward, with long scene shots in corridors, and street blocks, and dingy tunnels, and interchangeable exchanges of dialogues, all of them happen to be pervasively consistence. Yet, Merde’s foreign oddity proves to be as impressively fascinating as our interest in Japan itself.

Merde is also the deprecating name give to the disheveled urban creature (Denis Lavant) that emerges from the sewers of the city, wrecking all kinds of random havoc to the hapless denizens he stumbles upon his brief, literally wild strolls. His peculiar demeanor (red-haired, tip-pointed goatee, green cashmere jacket and pants, and sharp fingernails) and preposterous manners (stealing cigarettes from spectators, freighting old women, and lasciviously licking schoolgirls) are devoid of anything comprehensible. Our fascination, however, meshes with disgust and revulsion once the half-human aimlessly slaughters a great number of innocent pedestrians with the mine grenades he found in the sewers, thereby creating a massive public paranoia and media frenzy that escalates to an international level.

Here, Carax restores a quasi-Japanese parody with Merde by embellishing him in a Godzilla-like figure, which stereotypically embodies both the xenophobia and the interest the Japanese reserves for anything foreign, hence the media’s pun “the creature of the sewers”. The segment’s interpretation can be extended as an unequivocal allusion to World War II atrocities by Japanese soldiers in China, and also as a criticism of Japan’s concealed historical recollections and past denials; an implication that suppressing those horrors buried for only so long before they explode in a volcanic rampage. Indeed, not too long in the film we see hordes of Japanese people marching the streets of Tokyo, praising and rooting for Merde’s terrorizing actions against their homeland.

The intensity of Merde briefly adjourns when Carax introduces another character without any feasible background, a French lawyer (Jean-François Balmer) who not only closely resembles the subterranean creature but also speaks and comprehends his gibberish patois. A trial commences thereafter, with the lawyer serving as the communicator of Merde in a most elaborate procedure (a query and response backs and fourths in Japanese, French, and Gibberish throughout), and answers begin to gush the scene with inane logic and crude accusations against the Japanese.

Merde’s reasoning on massacring the innocent was driven by madness and repugnance against the nation of Japan – supposedly whom “raped” his saint mother – and that his god intentionally placed him among the people he despises the most. Fueled with rage, the court convicts a death sentence on the insouciant mutant who does not exhibit any signs of remorse or fear.  Next, a sudden occurrence daunts the spectators of his execution when he mysterious vanishes in front of their eyes after he get hanged. The film closes with a furious growl akin to Godzilla and an American dollar bill flashes the screen, hinting Merde’s next target.

Carax, perhaps intentionally, leaves us with an open theme that’s propelled with speculations of the events, particularly Merde’s symbolic role. One might argue that Merde is nothing but a macabre tale of the second coming of Christ, invigorated with vengeance on the “Godless” whom ravished the creature’s mother (Mary?) with skepticism and denial (both or either of God and past crimes). Seemingly, this reproach could be attributed to America’s so-called “War on Terror” and its past exploitation of slavery which, according to Merde, also intimated with similar chauvinistic faults. Yet, whatever bold construal we muster, Carax succeeds on making us contemplate his vignette possibly more than any of the two other films.

• The Disorder of Shaking Tokyo

Bong Joon-ho’s closing piece “”Shaking Tokyo” doesn’t quite adhere to the mindsets of his fellow directors’ as the third is animated by a knowledge of the city rather than a fear of it. It concerns itself with the hikikomori, urban recluses who withdraw into walled-off indoor lives. It’s a genuine, sociologically Japanese issue that is refracted through one dejected fictional hikikomori (Teruyuki Kagawa) who hasn’t stepped outside his house in a decade. His routine is conceivably organized and obsessively compulsive, dictated by his telephone that connects him to the outside world through the services of home delivery. This final portion of the film is narrated by the hikikomori himself who recalls his procedural practices and, most importantly, the incident that disrupted his solidarity confinement.

One a particular Saturday, in which the hikikomori always orders a pizza from a local restaurant, he encounters a lovely young woman who succeeds in catching the glimpses of his features. Joon-ho then introduces his plot device, guised as a zoned earthquake, which causes the delivery girl to faint on his doorstop in the midst of the tremor. After her successful resuscitation by the hikikomori, the youthful girl inspects and praises his apartment arrangement and his meticulous organization of the pizza boxes he kept in his living room. After she leaves him to his incarceration, the hikikomori begins to desperately fall in love with her.

Yet, time passes and the shut-in discovers through another pizza delivery person that the improbable object of his affections has become a hikikomori in her own right. Taking a bold leap into the unknown, our no longer recluse crosses the threshold of his apartment and takes to the streets of Tokyo in search of his mystery girl, at last discovering his kindred spirit at the very moment another earthquake strikes.

Noticeably, Joon-ho’s brilliant juxtaposition of the hikikomori’s calm disorder and the one caused by the earthquake is an expression of the true -though quieter- monster that specifically threatens the Japanese in a form of urban agoraphobia. The seismic implications of “Shaking Tokyo” are mere invitations to appreciate life and to accept the disorders it inevitably permeates through its unexpected turns. This still might not be the ode that we are expecting for the metropolitan vivacity of Tokyo but it is candidly tender and delicate as the inhabitants themselves.