Mood, timing, context? This movie hit me just right. Or, rather, these movies–as this is another anthology loosely arranged around a city, emphasis on “loosely.”** Each is a fable, tone and approach very much tied to the sensibilities of each director (Michel Gondry, Leos Carax, Bong Joon-Ho). Gondry follows a young couple fresh to the city, struggling to adapt–until one finds an intriguing, bittersweet way to conform to the city’s design. Carax is easiest to summarize and the the looniest, loosest, and least coherent of the fables: a (white, red-bearded, crazed) man emerges from the sewers and raises havoc. Bong focalizes around a young hikikomori, a form of agoraphobic retreat, who finds himself enraptured by a pizza deliverywoman. I just loved them all, with a caveat: scratch the surface and they aren’t perhaps rich or deep in complex subtext. Gondry and Bong seem primarily concerned with loneliness, period, and Carax… well, it’s an exceedingly strange vision, but despite Godzilla roaring occasionally in the soundtrack and extended bits of communication in the film’s own concocted crazy-sewer-man language and an explicit tension drawn out between racism toward and in Japanese culture this constant play of seemingly-meaningful signifiers do not really hew to a clear thesis.
Carax’s film is in some ways the most interesting and/because least successful: it has images that startle and amuse and astound, but it also veers into tedious formal play in an extended courtroom sequence which flirts with DEEP MEANING, ‘though that meaning rather beautifully never becomes clear, remains persistently absurdly impenetrable. Carax may be a pretentious twat, but his film is so outsized and loopy in its attention to emotions and images–this amazing long tracking shot as crazy-sewer-man saunters down a city street, grabbing cigarettes and flowers from passersby, his bright green crushed-velvet suit barely buttoned over his ghastly white torso, his head tilted, one hand over his heart, a mutated flaneur–that I was willing to go along with and forgive just about any of the film’s foolish ideas. You never knew when one would fall flat or inflate and rocket skyward, but you always knew another strange idea was on its way.
But Gondry and Bong, benefiting greatly from the lovely, affecting performances of their respective leads (Ayako Fujitani and Teruyuki Kagawa), ground their wispy fantasies in a humanism that enriches the aesthetic flair.
Highly recommended.
**I suppose the city is a subtext to each short, ‘though more in terms of a kind of cultural attitude or Tokyo-scape paradigm which inflects, infects, affects the respective characters. But if you push too hard, you come up against the imprecision or thinness of context-setting. (And in the extras, director Leos Carax notes that he knows nothing about Tokyo, and really doesn’t like it as a city. It also struck me that Carax must have spent months studying tapes in order to perfect his performance as a “French film director” in this interview.)
I found it interesting that the Carax film pointed a critical finger at Japanese xenophobia as well as provocatively/subversively making visible controversial issues in contemporary Japanese culture (in particular, the reference to the “Heroes of Nanking” which is graffitied on the walls of the European monster’s subterranean lair). I’m quite curious how the Japanese responded to this particular chapter in the anthology. The other two entries were less successful for me. Gondry’s isn’t half as clever as it thinks it is, and Bong’s is a slight narrative which brushes past the sociological complexities of Japan’s hikikomori culture in its quest to tell a simple love story.