Liberation Entertainment
Directed by Michel Gondry, Leos Carax and Joon-ho Bong
My rating: 2.5 stars out of 4
IMDb
(Blu-ray, Liberation Entertainment)
Omnibus of three films by some of the more adventurous directors in world cinema, all set in Tokyo. In Michel Gondry's "Interior Design", a young couple stay in the one-room apartment of a friend while they try to find jobs and get their own apartment. The girlfriend becomes disillusioned with her filmmaker boyfriend and leaves him. There is only one catch: she turns into a chair, literally. One scene that will really stick with me is when the poor girl tries to walk down the street with her feet changing to wooden chair legs. In Leos Carax's "Merde", a half-human, half-monster comes up from the Tokyo sewers. At first he is bothersome but not dangerous, but later he brings along hand grenades which results in a massacre. Put on trial, his equally heinous father is his lawyer. There are some subtexts about terrorism and xenophobia in Japan, but they are tough to see through all the histrionics, split screens and other distractions added by the director. In the last, and best, segment, Joon-ho Bong's "Shaking Tokyo", a "hikikomori", or recluse who has shunned all human contact, comes out of his shell when the pizza delivery girl catches his eye during an earthquake. All three stories are interesting, if not entirely successful, depictions of the lives, fears and desires of people living in the modern Tokyo urban jungle.
