tres cool: TOKYO! [AFI Preview]

I watched the trailer, and to be honest, I can't tell what this film is about. But it's a compendium of creativity from three great directors: Michel Gondry (SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND), Bong Joon Ho (THE HOST) and Leos Carax (MAUVAIS SANG). IMDB describes the film as "A cinematic triptych of three Tokyo-set stories." I guess that says it all. With these directors at the helm, though, it shouldn't be anything interesting.

A few words from AFI:

This triptych of shorts hover in a state of surrealism that might feel natural only in Tokyo, as auteurs Michel Gondry, Leos Carax and Bong Joon-ho transform elements of the mundane to tantalizing visual aphorisms. Gondry's INTERIOR DESIGN begins when a young man and woman move to Tokyo to pursue (his) dreams of filmmaking. Soon, they are lost in endless grids of towed cars and buildings that “refuse all contact with each other.” Feeling smothered by her boyfriend’s self-proclaimed genius, the heroine’s anxiety escalates until she undergoes an uncanny metamorphosis. In Carax’s MERDE, the delicately woven surface of consumer utopia is ruptured abruptly with the appearance of an otherworldly being from the sewers. His name is Merde. He does not speak our language. The jostling crowds and pervasive media are frenzied as the enfant terrible assaults everything in his path: eating cigarettes, flowers, tipping baby strollers and licking schoolgirls. His acts invoke furor, repulsion and hilarious religious ardor in the masses. Finally, he is incarcerated, but is this the end, or just the beginning? Bong Joon-ho's SHAKING TOKYO treats us to a look into the nest of a hokikomori- a man socially crippled by a spatial ailment that keeps him from leaving the stale security of his home. Then, when an earthquake strikes, Bong asks sadistically, what might happen if a hokikomori fell in love? These stories of individuals whose isolation is exacerbated by their fantastic debilitating urban spaces offer hallucinatory portraits of a city that are fleeting, terrifying and sublime.
-- Aliza Ma

link to teaser/trailer: http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid1214128517/bctid1541073040