'Tokyo!': 3 Isn't the Magic Number

Japan's Capital Is the Nominal Connection, But Disparate Shorts Do Not Make a Whole

The three short films that make up the feature-length triptych "Tokyo!" add up to a puzzle. Like some particularly thorny conceptual art, it's not clear what these odd, often surreal and sometimes touching cinematic short stories have to do with one another. You find yourself torn between finding connections and making them.

The city of Tokyo, with its 12 million people and its inexhaustible bazaar of the bizarre, is of course the obvious link among the films. The first chapter, "Interior Design," directed by Michel Gondry, begins with the arrival of a young and hungry couple into the world of crowded streets, cramped apartments, heartless landlords and bad-paying entry-level jobs. The comic yet nightmarish second installment, "Merde," directed by Leos Carax, takes us under the streets, where a repellant and psychopathic man with a creepy red beard takes refuge when he's not terrorizing the pristine social world above. Directed by Bong Joon-ho, the final installment, "Shaking Tokyo," shows us a society of recluses, in retreat from the stress and strain of urban life.

It is all a strange mix of the emotional and the topical. Anyone who has ever arrived in a big city with nothing more than ambition will feel the old butterflies in the stomach as Tokyo picks its winners and losers in "Interior Design." Directed by the same sure hand that brought us "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," this is the most poignant and touching of the trio. Carax's contribution is a whiplash ride between the deadly serious and the ridiculous. His mysterious monster (savagely played by Denis Lavant) cuts through the propriety and formality of Japanese life with excruciatingly bad manners, but when he turns violent, you sense the city's lingering anxieties about the Aum Shinrikyo cult, which conducted a deadly 1995 sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway. And "Shaking Tokyo" tackles a troubling phenomenon within Japanese society -- the hikikomori, perhaps best translated as recluses, who for various reasons withdraw from society -- but it's done with a refreshingly light touch, and perhaps a touch of hope.

If there are thematic connections, they are thin and abstract: All three films deal with things hidden, or disappearing, or suppressed. The monster who haunts the middle chapter may represent something unresolved in Japan's relationship to its World War II history, or perhaps the persistence of xenophobia or even the possibility of terrorism, under the veneer of the well-manicured city. In "Interior Design," a woman who slowly loses her ambition and eventually her identity, may suggest the depersonalizing power of the city, or perhaps just the oppressive weight of a bad relationship. The earthquakes that punctuate the reclusive world of shut-ins in "Shaking Tokyo" may say something about the power of the city to unnerve and terrify us, or maybe just the opposite, the city's thrilling power to rock our world.

The Web site for the film suggests that this is an exercise in "psychogeography," though the actual city of Tokyo doesn't seem very present in the psychological studies. There's no visual romanticization of the city, no slow, loving urban sunsets, no crowds of beautiful people, no effort to suggest the sexy, edgy, captivating drama of the streets. But there's no real indictment, no muckraking, no accusation hurled at the cruel concrete jungle either. Tokyo, if anything, becomes more of a mystery after "Tokyo!" than it was before.

That's the strength and curse of the film. It is all done at a poetic remove and maybe these films actually mean something. If you can't find real connections among its disparate parts, you can always make them up yourself. But if that kind of film frustrates you, think twice before booking a ticket to "Tokyo!"

Tokyo! (110 minutes at Landmark's E Street theater) is not rated and contains mild violence. In Japanese with subtitles.