Rating: ★★★

Tokyo! is an Anthology that was made with primarily French but a mixture of French and Japanese financing and shot in Tokyo. It brings together three top filmmakers – French directors Michel Gondry and Leos Carax and South Korea’s Bong Joon Ho.

The first segment Interior Design comes from French director Michel Gondry, known for his quirky music video work before broaching filmmaking with the likes of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), The Science of Sleep (2006), Be Kind Rewind (2008), The Green Hornet (2011) and Mood Indigo (2013). This is the only of the episodes adapted from another work, the title story in the collection Cecil and Jordan in New York (2008) by British-American cartoonist Gabrielle Bell.

The first half of the episode comes with a reasonable realism, following Ryo Kase and Ayako Fujitani as they arrive in Tokyo and go to stay with a friend, where Ryo tries to screen his art film, where they get a job together and he succeeds but she proves useless. They move into an apartment together, during which Ayako feels slighted by Ryo’s remark about her lack of ambition. The second half takes a turn for the surreal in the scenes where we see Ayako looking at her chest in the mirror to find an empty shell with wooden slats, before she is walking along the streets and her legs turn into wooden chair legs.

The episode arrives with a charming surrealism where Ayako Fujitani discovers another whole life and her purpose as a chair. This comes with appealingly nonchalant images of the chair parked in an alleyway, at a bus stop and then transforming back into the nude Ayako when nobody is looking. Or of she in another man’s apartment, making it her home, cleaning up and sneaking up behind his shoulder to read when he is not looking. (Lead actress Ayako Fujitani incidentally is the daughter of action star Steven Seagal).

The jewel of the anthology is the second episode Merde. This comes from French director Leos Carax, behind acclaimed works like Mauvais Sang (1986), Les Amants de Pont-Neuf (1991), Pola X (1999) and the subsequent Holy Motors (2012) and Annette (2021). Merde incidentally is the French word for ‘shit’.

In the role of Mr Merde, Denis Lavant premieres the character of the strange Troglodyte that became the basis of Carax’s next film Holy Motors. It is a bizarre seeing the stunted, malformed Mr Merde stumbling through the streets snatching cigarettes and crutches, taking money and trying to eat it, or letting off firecrackers. This segues into a courtroom session where Mr Merde is placed on trial and gives oddly sympathetic responses in his own language (all through a translator who speaks in French which is then translated to Japanese for the court, while we sit watching in subtitles). The end of the film promises Mr Merde in the USA and Mr Merde Goes to New York.

The final episode Shaking Tokyo comes from South Korean director Bong Joon Ho, known for works like Memories of Murder (2003), The Host (2006), Snowpiercer (2013) and the Academy Award-winning success of Parasite (2019).

This is one of the few films made about the Japanese phenomenon of hikikomori wherein individuals withdraw from all social interaction and stay in their homes, often in their rooms. Bong Joon Ho creates an undeniably fascinating portrait as he charts the methodical and exacting life that Teruyuki Kagawa maintains in his apartment. All before things are thrown on their head by a chance encounter with pizza delivery girl Yu Aoi, necessitating that Teruyuki venture outside of his apartment for this first time in years. This is the least fantastical of the episodes, although there are some minor touches – a seeming hikikomori plague striking everybody across the city, earth tremors when the two characters meet. It works well but it is only at a denouement, which you feel should have been stronger, that Bong Joon Ho falters.

Trailer here