Tokyo!

Before I saw Tokyo! I had heard that the three short films that make it up had nothing in common other than the common location of Tokyo but I was pleasantly surprised to find that they complement each other quite well. Each film is about a character who is unable to adapt to the society of which he or she is a part and the alienation which results. Each film also has elements that are surreal or at least unreal. Further, each protagonist in the films uses a different coping mechanism to deal with his/her surroundings; the film illustrates the effects of these mechanisms.

Part 1: Interior Design (Michel Gondry) This film is about a young couple who moves to Tokyo so the man can pursue his dream of becoming a filmmaker. At the beginning of the film Hiroko (the girl) is happy with her own abilities: she's somewhat artistically inclined but she has no desire to art a career. Her boyfriend criticizes her lack of ambition and she is shaken out of her complacency. To prove that she is of some use to him, Hiroko decides to apply for a retail job. Unfortunately, she goes too far in attempting to prove her worth and tries something she isn't capable of and her boyfriend ends up getting the job he didn't even really want or need. So Hiroko's in a new city with a boyfriend who is too busy working on his film and his retail job to spend any time with her and to make matters worst she is unable to find an apartment for them. As time goes on the friend she is staying with becomes impatient to be rid of them both, even explaining to another person that Hiroko (and not the boyfriend) is the problem. Gondry does an amazing job of conveying Hiroko's feelings of self doubt and worthlessness; he really builds a lot of sympathy for her in a short amount of time. Eventually, Hiroko's feelings are literalized in a surrealistic fashion as she is transformed into a piece of furniture. Her coping mechanism is becoming something less than she could be and it works to a certain extent but it also means giving up everything she ever cared about and a good part of her humanity.

Part 2: Merde (Leos Carax) This film opens with the deformed sewer dweller who comes to be called Merde crawling out of a manhole and terrorizing pedestrians on a busy Tokyo street. His hatred for mankind plays itself out humorously in this early scene: he steals things like cigarettes, crutches, and flowers from these people and introduces an element of chaos into their lives before disappearing in yet another manhole. Later on he finds some kind of abandoned subterranean military station and discovers that there is a box of live grenades there. When he next emerges it's night time and he isn't so funny anymore: he kills dozens of innocent people with these explosives. Eventually he is tried for this and he reveals his hatred for mankind in general and the Japanese specifically. He further explains that his god has ordered him to punish them for raping his mother. Merde's coping mechanism is hatred for the society he can't find a place in and his subsequent violence guarantees that he never will find a place there. This film is the least effective of the three because Merde comes across as too bizarre and unknowable to inspire sympathy and of course his actions are the most reprehensible.

Part 3: Shaking Tokyo (Joon-ho Bong) Joon-ho Bong's contribution to this cinematic triptych is the story of a hikikomori, a uniquely Japanese type of hermit. This particular man hasn't left his house in ten or eleven years. He seems perfectly content to make art of the paper products (books, pizza boxes, toilet paper rolls) he uses: he explains that he doesn't like interacting with other people or sunlight. The former is clearly exhibited by his practice of never looking at the faces of the countless delivery people who make his lifestyle possible and the latter is made clear through the dilapidated exterior which creates a sharp counterpoint to his home's fastidious interior. One day after ten years he looks into the eyes of the pizza girl and the ground literally begins to shake: this literalization of a saying is repeated several times in the film as he eventually finds the courage to leave his apartment to see the girl again. The Tokyo of this film is the most surreal of the three, the streets are completely deserted and it seems that most people are just as alienated as our protagonist, at least until another earthquake drives them out. Bong's direction is excellent in this one as there is some really great camera work and an outstanding use of visual repetition in the beginning as well as long takes and jumpcuts near the end. This protagonist's coping mechanism is shutting himself off from the world; apparently it's the most effective of the three as his decade of hibernation ends with him emerging from his cocoon and seeking out a new relationship.

The film as a whole is stronger than the sum of its parts and the theme of alienation is made all the stronger by the fact that each of these filmmakers approaches Tokyo with the outsider perspective of a foreigner.

Salinui chueok (Memories of Murder)

Beginning in the fall of 1986 and continuing for the next four years South Korea was haunted by the nation's first recorded serial killer. Preying upon women in a remote rural community the killer was both vicious and meticulous, strangling his victims with their own undergarments and leaving nothing of any use to the police investigating the crimes. The killer was never caught.

I do not envy any director trying to make a true crime film, particularly not one so high profile and so recent that the crimes still live on in the public consciousness. Stray too far in one direction and you devolve into saccharine sentimentality, go the other direction and you risk crass exploitation. Director Bong Joon-Ho avoided both of these traps by charting an altogether different route: he has made a film that is not about the killer or the crimes or the victims but one that is purely about the police officers charged with the case and the devastating emotional toll it took on their lives. In charting his unusual route Bong has created a bleak masterpiece, one that took home a stack of film awards in its native land but which has been largely neglected on these shores until now.

The film begins with the first body discovered, a woman strangled with her own stockings, raped, tightly bound, and hidden in a drainage culvert. The detective in charge of the case is Park Du-Man (Song Kang-Ho) and it is immediately clear that he is out of his depth, that the entire local police force, in fact, are out of their depth. The crime scene is chaos, crowded by reporters and locals trampling over potentially vital evidence. Park himself is not what you'd call a systematic investigator, scoffing at the scientific approach and trusting in his supposedly unerring eye at picking out criminals just by looking at them. He relies on swagger and bravado and the brute force of his uneducated assisting officer Jo Yong-Gu.

Serving as a foil to Park and Jo is Seo Tae-Yun (Kim Sang-Kyung) a detective from Seoul who has volunteered to assist with the investigation. Seo is the polar opposite of Park - methodical and rational - and it takes mere moments for the two to clash, clashes that lead to the two of them overlooking some key pieces of evidence.

As the film progresses and the body count continues to rise you can feel a sense of desperation slowly settle over the department. Under educated, under manned and woefully under equipped the local force is simply not up to the task. As the realisation that they will not find the evidence they so badly need begins to set in Park and Jo resort to planting evidence to bring in suspects Park picks out with his 'keen eye', suspects they then set out to extract coached confessions from. The process inevitably leads to public humiliation. Soon even Seo begins to lose his faith in reason and just as things bottom out they finally catch a break and settle on a prime suspect, one who truly appears likely to be their man. But can they make it stick? What sets Memories of Murder apart from the crowd are the rich performances from its leads and the sure hand of Bong Joon-Ho. Bong knows exactly what he wants to do with this film and he steers the ship with a firm hand. He has a keen eye for imagery but he consistently avoids the cheap resolve, the quick hit, in favour of a slowly building mood and the film is all the stronger because of it. Song and Kim are both stellar in their roles, giving their characters much needed depth. You can feel their frustration and helplessness continually growing and when the final crushing blow is delivered you can feel their utter despair at being abandoned by a system that they have given their lives to. Bong isn't just asking how this could happen, how someone could be as evil as this killer, but how could a government allow this to happen? How could the police not be given the tools and manpower they so obviously needed to protect the people? The DVD release has been given the standard Palm treatment. The transfer is strong and presented in anamorphic widescreen. The film is presented with both the original Korean language track in 2.0 stereo and an English dub in both 2.0 and 5.1. The English subtitles are solid, clearly translated and easy to read. The disc also includes a reel of cast and crew interviews discussing their characters and the creation of the film as well as an extensive reel of deleted scenes.

Memories of Murder is a minor masterpiece, a film that moved Bong immediately onto Korea's A-list of directing talent. It is richly detailed, beautifully performed and disturbing in precisely the way that people need to be disturbed in from time to time. Don't miss it.

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