Tokyo!

In contemporary film making, the short film has come to symbolize a bookending of sorts for the career of a successful director. The short film is the cheapest and most consumable form of creative output that an aspiring director can produce—an opportunity for young filmmakers to play to their strengths and capture the imagination of the gatekeepers between themselves and their first feature-length films. It’s also the medium to which auteurs have the luxury to return after a career of successful feature films—an opportunity, perhaps, to experiment with scripts and styles that wouldn’t necessarily sustain a feature or that better suit a shorter narrative arc. In the auteur’s case, however, the rules of the young entrepreneur still apply; short films, in themselves, are not commercially viable.

The chance for exposure, then, comes in much the same form that it does for the short story: a collection. In 2006, a series of 21 short films set in Paris—many of which were directed by high profile industry figures like Wes Craven and the Coen brothers—called “Paris, je t’aime,” was released to much fanfare, and a follow-up project called “New York, I Love You”—featuring a film by Zach Braff among others—is scheduled for limited release in April. Clearly inspired by this anthological approach, directors Michel Gondry (“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”), Leos Carax (“Lovers on the Bridge”) and Bong Joon-Ho (“The Host”) have written and directed “Tokyo!”: a collection of three short films all set in the namesake Japanese city, whose common thread is the relentless push of human extremes against the edges of reality.

For Gondry, that extreme is melancholy. Hiroko (Ayako Fujitani), the principle character of “Interior Design,” is the beleaguered girlfriend of an aspiring filmmaker, Akira (Ryo Kase), set with the task of finding a place for the couple to live. As Akira’s movie, an absurdly low-budget existential horror called “The Garden of Degradation,” gains attention and Hiroko’s role in the relationship becomes more and more marginalized, she begins to transform into—and finally becomes—a wooden chair. Able to transition between a human body and a chair at will, Hiroko smuggles herself into a young bachelor’s home, where, as she declares to Akira in a letter, she will finally be “useful.” Gondry excels at bringing his signature magic to the story. In particular, the film within the film, and especially Hiroko’s slow transformation into a chair, are rendered with the puppeteer’s elbow-grease so common in Gondry films. And while in the past dialogue has rarely been Gondry’s strong suit, here the chemistry between the young couple—and between the couple and the city itself—combines humor and emotion in charming turns.

Monstrosity in its most grotesque is Carax’s fascination in “Merde,” and its form is not quite human. The title character is a sewer-roving satyr-beast who terrorizes the streets of Tokyo in broad daylight—first by simply disturbing the peace, then by killing dozens with a stockpile of antique hand grenades from the Second World War. Arrested, Merde (Denis Lavant) is put on trial, defended by a French lawyer who shares his disfigurements and his inimitable language. Opening with a totally hilarious, totally confounding tracking shot of the creature wordlessly moving along a Tokyo sidewalk, stealing money and flowers to devour, the film only improves. Merde (French for “shit”) is the putrescence of the past that Japan—the creature lives in a den filled with artifacts from the infamous Imperial forces in Nanking—and the world at large wishes to forget. Carax makes another interesting choice in depicting the trial, itself an invocation of post-war war crimes tribunals, in multi-paneled shots that scrutinize every angle of the scene. A mixture of absurdist fairytale and historical criticism, “Merde,” the second film in “Tokyo!” is by far the most visually and substantively rich.

This might be what makes Bong’s “Shaking Tokyo” seem like such a disappointment. His extreme—solitude—is the most obvious and the least satisfying. The unnamed hikikomori (Teruyuki Kagawa)—the shut-in—whose phobia of the outside world has kept him in a neatly-arranged, dimly-lit home for 11 years, is forced out into the world when he falls in love with a mysterious pizza-delivery girl whose emotions are controlled by buttons tattooed on her body. Once outside his home (precious little time of the film’s already brief length), Bong manages a few lively shots of the city—emptied of people in the wake of the last earthquake, as the hikikomori runs through the streets—but the majority of the film is devoted to the rather insubstantial relationship between an agoraphobe and an android. Bong’s protagonists fail to draw the viewer into the city the way the wandering characters of Gondry can. They fall short of the enigma or allegory of “Merde,” and his story lacks Carax’s ambition and verve. While not altogether unpleasant, it’s an underwhelming ending to a promising set of films.

—Staff writer Ryan J. Meehan can be reached at rmeehan@fas.harvard.edu.