Tokyo! - 80
Tokyo Sonata - 85
Tokyo!
Release Date: March 6
Directors/Writers: Michel Gondry,
Leos Carax, Bong Joon-Ho
Cinematographers: Masami Inomoto,
Caroline Champetier, Jun Fukomoto
Starring: Ayako Fujitani, Ryo
Kase, Denis Lavant, Teruyuki Kagawa
Studio/Run Time: Liberation
Entertainment, 112 mins.
Tokyo Sonata
Release Date: March 13
Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Writers: Max Mannix, Kiyoshi Kurosawa,
Sachiko Tanaka
Cinematographer: Akiko Ashiza
Starring: Teruyuki Kagawa, Kyoko
Koizumi, Yu Koyanagi
Studio/Run Time: Regent Releasing, 119
mins.
Tokyo! and Tokyo Sonata, two films by
four directors containing six narratives, propose the Japanese
megalopolis as a site for major weirdness. A girl turns into a chair.
A man drives a car from the beach into the ocean. A zombie in a green
suit climbs from the sewers and wreaks havoc.
Tokyo!
is comprised of three short pieces directed by Michel Gondry, Leos Carax, and Bong Joon-Ho respectively—two Frenchmen and a South Korean. All offer semi-magical outsiders’ perceptions of the city. After
Be Kind Rewind
, his questionable foray into broad comedy, Gondry displays his semi-familiar misogyny in his “Interior Design” segment. But one character’s Ovid-like transformation into a chair, literally supporting a man, is a logical articulation of the bizarre sexual tension explored in
Science of Sleep
.