The Films of Bong Joon-ho: Tokyo! (2008)

Tokyo! (2008) 

Directed by: Michel Gondry (Interior Design) and Leos Carax (Merde) and Joon-ho Bong (Shaking Tokyo). 

Written by: Michel Gondry based on the graphic novel by Gabrielle Bell (Interior Design) and Leos Carax (Merde) and Joon-ho Bong (Shaking Tokyo).

Starring: Ayako Fujitani (Hiroko - Interior Design), Ryo Kase (Akira - Interior Design), Ayumi Itô (Akemi - Interior Design), Nao Ohmori (Hiroshi - Interior Design), Satoshi Tsumabuki (Takeshi - Interior Design), Motomi Makiguchi (Clochard - Interior Design), Denis Lavant (Merde – Merde), Jean-François Balmer (Maître Voland – Merde), Renji Ishibashi (L'avocat général - Merde), Toshiyuki Kitami (Le procureur - Merde), Kyûsaku Shimada (Le directeur de prison - Merde), Azusa Takehana (Le présentatrice TV - Merde), Yû Aoi (La livreuse de pizza - Shaking Tokyo), Teruyuki Kagawa (L'homme - Shaking Tokyo), Naoto Takenaka (Le patron de la pizzeria - Shaking Tokyo).

 

It is somewhat odd that an omnibus movie called Tokyo, which features a trio of short films set in and about the Japanese city, contain no films by a Japanese filmmaker – opting instead for two Frenchman and a Korean director. And yet, for the most part this strange decision works – as the trio of films are all about the alienating effect the city can have – making everyone feel like an outsider, like they don’t belong there. The filmmakers in question are Michel Gondry, Leos Carax and Joon-ho Bong, and while none of the segments come close to being among their best work, they are all interesting in their own way.

 

Gondry’s segment is called Interior Design, and is about a young Japanese couple who are struggling to find an apartment in the expensive, overcrowded city, and have been crashing at a friend’s place. Akira (Ryo Kase) is an aspiring filmmaker (which gives Gondry a chance to do what he apparently loves most – make a parody of low budget art films in all their pretentious glory). His girlfriend Hiroko (Ayako Fujitani) is supportive of his career and ambitions, and they seem happy enough. But the apartment search drags on – and she begins to feel more and more useless and aimless, realizing that she doesn’t have many ambitions of her own. Eventually this emotional toll turns physical – and she literally starts changing in a way that allows Gondry many chances to be funny and whimsical, in a story that may have been better served with a more serious touch.

 

Carax’s segment entitled Merde is about the title character (played by Denis Lavant, in a great performance, that is kind of a dry run for part of the pairs brilliant collaboration Holy Motors a few years later). Merde is a milky eyed monster, emerging from the sewers of Tokyo to terrify residents. In the single best scene in the entire movie, he emerges and take a long walk down the crowded street (all in one unbroken shot) as he terrorizes everyone – stealing cigarettes, sandwiches, popping balloons, hitting babies, etc. Eventually, he’ll go even farther that that – and will be captured, and out on trial. He doesn’t speak a language anyone can understand – other than a bizarre French lawyer (Jean-François Balmer), who looks like a not too-distant relative. An extended courtroom scene follows – and drags the film to a halt, although you have to admire the persistence of putting it on the screen.

 

The overall best sequence is by Joon-ho Bong entitled Shaking Tokyo. It stars Teruyuki Kagawa as a hikikomori – that he is explains is someone who has retreated from society, and never ventures from their home anymore. He survives on money from his dad, and lives a regimented life – and has for 10 years – on routine, and no human contact. That is, until he makes eye contact with the pizza delivery girl one day – and then an earth quake that knocks her unconscious hits, and he has to care for her for a short period of time. Japan was a forerunner for this type of lonely, isolated young man – cutting himself off from the outside world, and wanting no human contact – but the rest of the world may well have caught up in the last decade. Of the three, it at least offers some hope – and also seems to be the one most grounded in reality.

 

The three films fit together in an odd way. They are all clearly made by outsiders from Tokyo, and they are about feeling like outsiders in Tokyo. Carax even goes so far that the two leads in his segment aren’t even Japanese at all. When I first saw this film – a decade ago – I didn’t much care for Carax’s segment. Perhaps I didn’t get it, or perhaps I was just annoyed by it. This time, I half liked it – everything leading up to the courtroom is excellent – but that courtroom scene still drags. I’m also a little less enamored with the whimsy of Gondry’s segment – and again, perhaps that’s because if the last decade has shown us anything about Gondry its that he really needs a harsher voice – like Charlie Kaufman (who he wrote his best film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind with) or else his films become so lightweight they simply blow away. And I like Bong’s segment a little more – it really does seem the saddest, that someone would disappear so completely into themselves. And the finale, while hopeful, also shows how it isn’t an isolated issue.

 

None of them are as good as the director’s best work, and I do kind of wish that someone had presented a more positive view of the city – perhaps an insider. What the films ultimately ends up convincing you of it that you shouldn’t move to Tokyo – it’s just a group of sad, lonely people, monsters who come from the sewers, and chairs.

Movie Review: Holy Motors

Holy Motors
Directed by: Leos Carax.
Written by: Leos Carax.
Starring: Denis Lavant (M. Oscar / Le banquier / La mendiante / L'OS de Motion-Capture / M. Merde / Le père / L'accordéoniste / Le tueur / Le tué / Le mourant / L'homme au foyer), Edith Scob (Céline), Eva Mendes (Kay M), Kylie Minogue (Eva Grace (Jean)), Elise Lhomeau (Léa (Elise)), Jeanne Disson (Angèle), Michel Piccoli (L'homme à la tache de vin), Leos Carax (Le dormeur / Voix Limousine), Nastya Golubeva Carax (La petite fille), Reda Oumouzoune (L'acrobate Mo-Cap), Zlata (La cyber-femme), Geoffrey Carey (Le photographe / Voix Limousine), Annabelle Dexter-Jones (L'assistante photographe), Elise Caron (Corinne Yam).

What is one to make of Leos Carax’s Holy Motors? Does the film have any meaning whatsoever, or is it simply a series of surreal episodes that are not meant to add up to a coherent whole? There is a narrative through line to the film – but Carax makes no real attempt to try and explain what it all means. We see Carax himself at the start of the film, waking up, wandering around his small apartment, before opening a door with his finger – which has been replaced by a key, although one of the stranger looking keys I have ever seen. The door he unlocks reveals a movie theater – full of faceless people, staring motionless at a screen, with a very early silent film on it. Then we flash to Monsieur Oscar (Denis Lavant), as he wanders done his long driveway, says goodbye to his children, and enters a limo, driven by Celine (Edith Scob). She informs him he has appointments all day. At this point, Oscar appears to be a banker of some sort, conducting business on his cell phone, but during the course of the day, his “appointments” will require him to be just about everything you can imagine – and this banker he appears to be, will make another appearance later in the film, but while Oscar is someone else. It won’t be the only time it appears like Oscar is more than one person at a time.

During the course of the film, Oscar will transform himself – in the backseat of his limo, which is cluttered with all sorts of stuff – into multiple different characters. He plays an old woman begging for change, a man working at first solo, and then with someone else, in a motion capture studio, a subterranean psycho named Merde who kidnaps a beautiful model (Eva Mendes), who essentially allows him to transform her into what he wants, a disappointed father driving his teenage daughter home from a party, an accordionist leading a musical parade, a murderer, the murderer’s victim, a man who runs into a woman from his past, and finally the husband and father of a very strange family. I suppose in between these episodes – when he’s in the limo with Celine – he is himself, but it’s certainly debatable if he even knows who that is any more.

Who is Mr. Oscar? It’s clear he’s some sort of actor, but whoever is hiring him for these appointments is never identified – I suppose in some cases, it could be the people he interacts with – all of whom know him, and he seems to know as well, although clearly, he is not the same person all the time – and there are those tricky situations where Oscar is two people at once, which always leads to one killing the other, or both killing the other, although Oscar always seems to be able to get up and walk away. Is Oscar acting for an audience? Are there cameras always just out of sight recording him? Who is Michael Piccoli supposed to be? He seems like some sort of boss of Oscar’s, and he isn’t exactly happy with him.

It’s probably better not to ask these questions, because the movie is not at all interested in answering them. Perhaps the whole movie is just an excuse for Carax to cram in as many different genres as he can into one movie – horror movie, crime drama, domestic drama, musical, thriller, comedy. Carax has not made a feature in more than a decade, so perhaps that is the only answer – Carax is making the movie to amuse himself. The movie is about movies – and acting – and about dreams, but beyond that, whatever you make of the movie, is up to you.

There are a few things that are clear however. The first is that no actor has been asked to do more for a film this year than Denis Lavant is asked to do with Holy Motors. He bounces around from scene to scene, from character to character, and does a magnificent job in every role he is thrown into, for however long he is thrown into it. It helps to that Levant is surrounded by great actors in most of his scenes – Scob, who finds nothing odd about everything that happens, Mendes, who was cast for her physical beauty, but allows herself to be used in an interesting way, Piccoli, so mysterious in his brief scene. Best of all, surprisingly enough, is singer Kylie Minogue who shows up as a long lost something (lover? wife? colleague?) of Oscar’s, and the two share a melancholy chat, before she launches into a beautiful, old style musical number/lament, that is perhaps the best moment of the entire film.

 
I’m not sure that this review will convince anyone reading it that they should go out and see Holy Motors – but they really should. Movies like this, which were once more common place, are now a rarity. Carax is a director whose name I have known for years, but whose films I had never seen (except for his short film as part of the Omnibus Tokyo, which features Lavant as the Merde character, and which surprisingly, I didn’t much care for). Holy Motors is perhaps the most singular film of the year. It may mean absolutely nothing – or it could profound – but whatever it is, I was drawn into its weirdness – and didn’t want it to end.

DVD Views: Tokyo!

Tokyo! ***
Interior Design *** ½
Directed By: Michel Gondry.
Written By: Michel Gondry based on the graphic novel by Gabrielle Bell.
Starring: Ayako Fujitani (Hiroko), Ayumi Ito (Akemi), Ryo Kase (Akira), Nao Omori), Satoshi Tsumabuki (Takeshi).

Merde **
Directed By: Leos Carax.
Written By: Leos Carax.
Starring: Jean-François Balmer (Maître Voland), Denis Lavant (Merde).

Shaking Tokyo ***
Directed By: Joon-ho Bong.Written By: Joon-ho Bong.
Starring: Teruyuki Kagawa (Hikikomori), Yû Aoi (Pizza-Delivery Girl), Naoto Takenaka (Pizza-Delivery Man).

Movies like Tokyo always seem to be in theory they turn out in practical terms. This is a film that brings together three of the most daring filmmakers working today - French filmmakers Michel Gondry and Leos Carax along with Korean director Joon-ho Bong - and asks them to tell three different stories set in Tokyo. All three filmmakers deliver unique movies, but only one of them - Michel Gondry - delivers a truly exceptional film. The other two are more uneven. Yet, I do think that overall the film is worth watching, I have seen all three filmmakers do better work.

The first film is Gondry’s. It is about a young couple who move to Tokyo so that he can pursue his dream of becoming a filmmaker. They do not have a lot of money, and cannot find a decent apartment, so they are stuck in the tiny apartment of a friend, who grows more and more frustrated with them, particularly Hiroko, who unlike her boyfriend, seems to have no ambition at all. She cannot even get a lousy part time job as a gift wrapper. She starts to feel useless, until one day something strange happens to her, and she starts to feel useful again. What that is, I cannot say, but let me say that fans of Gondry’s weirdness will not be disappointed. Gondry, who I think has struggled a little since he had to start writing his own screenplays, has not made a film this good since Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The film has a great visual look, and as always the visual effects in his films are low budget, but great.

Leos Carax’s film, Merde, is the strangest and most ambitious, but the least successful. A strange man emerges from the sewers of Tokyo and torments the citizens. At first it’s little more than stealing cigarettes, and doing other harmless things. But when he comes across some hand grenades, things get more violent. Put on trial, they discover that he speaks some kind of archaic language that no one else understands. A French lawyer, who says he understands him, comes to defend him. The movie starts out interesting, and contains a wonderful tracking shot at the beginning, but as the movie progresses, it becomes tedious. Merde, the crazy sewer man, speaks his own strange language, that the French lawyer then has to translate into French, then has it translated in Japanese. Everything that is said takes forever to get out for us to understand. While it is an interesting idea, especially when Merde starts going off on his racist rants, it doesn’t quite together.

Joon-ho Bong does something quite interesting in his film. While Gondry and Carax use the vast expanse of Tokyo to full advantage, Bong’s film is about a hikikomori, essentially a shut in. He has no contact with the outside world, except for the food delivery men who come by. One day, a beautiful girl delivers his pizza, and they two connect. She has some of the same obsessions as he does, but when an earthquake hits, she gets scared, and decides to stay in her apartment, forcing him to go out in the world for the first time in years. While this film certainly cannot compete with Bong’s great films - Memories of Murder and The Host - it is an interesting film.

And that kind of sums up Tokyo as a complete movie as well. Like New York Stories or any number of other projects that have done something similar, the results are a little disappointing, as we know the directors are capable of better work, and the constraints of the project show at points. But all three of these films - even Carax’s which I didn’t much care for - are more interesting than most films I see. This may not be a great film, but it is an entertaining one.