Tokyo!/Tokyo Sonata

[April 1st, 2009]

Tokyo!
These three short films merge to form an omnibus whizzing through Shibuya, its tour guides too distracted by personal predilections to point out the sights. Filmmaker Michel Gondry is still entranced by the cult of the infantile artist and his arts-and-crafts time, though he balances his contribution, “Interior Design,” with the Cronenberg-esque story of the lead character’s frantic girlfriend, who tries to keep them solvent—this could be Wendy and Lucy, if Wendy had given birth to a yarn-draped rabbit. Bong Joon-ho (The Host) serves up Shaking Tokyo, the tale of a hikikomori—an actual Japanese phenomenon, a young man who becomes a semi-permanent shut-in on his parents’ dime—but the characterization is unmoored by highly symbolic earthquakes. The whole project is still worth seeing, however, for the work of the most obscure director: Leos Carax, a French provocateur who hasn’t been heard from for a decade. His offering, “Merde,” is a gleeful hate letter to an entire metropolis, starring Denis Lavant as “The Creature from the Sewers,” a homicidal spastic gnome who looks like a cross between an undead leprechaun and Will Oldham. Loping through Tokyo’s shopping districts, munching chrysanthemums and tossing grenades, the critter is a poke in the eye to Japan’s social structure. Also, it likes to lick schoolgirls on the arm, which is probably already an established porn genre over there. AARON MESH. Cinema 21. Friday-Thursday, April 3-9.

Tokyo Sonata
Teruyuki Kagawa, having shown up on Portland screens lately in the excellent Sway and the wretched Sukiyaki Western Django, returns yet again with a timely turn as a downsized salaryman. He maintains a fiction of employment, à la Laurent Cantet’s Time Out, and at first director Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Pulse, Cure) does little to set his narrative apart aside from adding dabs of the flat, quiet unease that mark his horror films. But as the moorings slip further in our antihero’s world, so does the film’s sense of constraint, slowly giving way to a delirium of despair that seems to take over all of Tokyo’s inhabitants, until finally, as if indeed resolving a musical piece, Kurosawa draws things calmly together to rest on a portrait of life both beautiful and ragged. ANDY DAVIS. Living Room Theaters.