Like books, movies too can take on the short story format. But nobody's going to pay $10 for just one. What's a producer to do? Get a theme, get three notable directors and tell them to go to it, which is just what directors Michel Gondry, Leos Carax and Bon Joon-Ho did with the triptych "Tokyo!"
There's nothing better than thinking about the images, messages and sounds of a movie long after the projector light fades to black. "Tokyo!" achieves just that. It begins with Gondry's "Interior Design" about a young couple moving into a gritty neighborhood of Japan's famously jam-packed city where the young man is trying to make a mark with a new film - a terrible mess, so cheesy that it's actually good. His girlfriend, meanwhile, can't figure out a role for herself in life or otherwise. She's property, an accessory, furniture, so to speak.
And as their funds dwindle, their car gets towed and their friend, whom the couple is staying with, runs out of patience, the under-appreciated girlfriend, played so well by Ayako Fujitani, takes a surrealistic flight visually presented in a way that Gondry became known for in his 2004 dreamlike "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind."
The Tokyo thread continues into a bustling downtown where workers chase expansive sidewalks and storefronts are pristine and glamorous. But from out of the depths, the sewers more specifically, comes a creature that sends the city into a panic.
Director Leos Carax has fun in "Merde" in which the main character Merde, superbly played by Denis Lavant, is a leprechaun-like hermit living in the sewers and only surfaces to raise havoc among the innocent. The Godzilla parallels run amok and Carax even adds the big lizard's notorious roar between scenes. After Merde discovers in the shadowy sewer a box of World War II hand grenades, denizens of Tokyo become sitting ducks.
Like Gondry, Carax builds surrealism and introspection through the complexity of the story's characters, forcing you to make your own judgment about reality and morality - particularly at its climactic ending.
The third and final installment of "Tokyo!" is "Shaking Tokyo" from Korean director Bong Joon-Ho who won international acclaim with monster movie, "The Host." Like Gondry and Carax before him, Joon-Ho's characters are oddities not quite fitting in with the world.
Teruyuki Kagawa is a hikikimori or shut in who has found a strange solace in his decade-long life inside an ivy-wrapped home that he has decorated on the inside with perfectly stacked pizza boxes, towers of books and pyramids of bottled water. He has taken the concept of simplicity to its fullest until the latest pizza delivery person (Yu Aoi) catches his eye just as an earthquake begins to shake the city and everything within it. The young woman delivering pizza faints and falls into his meticulous domicile. Not having made meaningful contact with anyone in 10 years, the shut in isn't sure what to make of this. But something clicks in him, something he can't shut off. Joon-Ho, like Ang Lee, a master at creating visually stunning films, adds his own touch here, particularly when the shut in and the pizza girl reconnect during yet another earthquake.
Each tale in the triptych is open ended, just like life itself - and that, perhaps, is where the surrealism ends.
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