Tokyo!

Two years ago, the 18 short films that made up Paris , je t'aime delivered a few pleasures and an overall sense of disappointment. "It's not a movie, it's a playlist," I grumbled. Now, another city-centric anthology film tries to package shorts by art house darlings into an enjoyable whole -- and almost succeeds. Unlike Paris , je t'aime's YouTube-ready ten minute shorts, Tokyo! gives Leos Carax, Bong Joon-ho, and Michel Gondry ample time to tell their surreal stories about the city. The result is uneven but worthwhile.

My favorite was Gondry's "Interior Design," the sweetly strange tale of a young couple (Fujitani Ayako and Ito Ayumi) who have just arrived in Tokyo. Crammed into a friend's tiny apartment, they cope with a towed car, crappy jobs, and horrid real estate, along with their own disintegrating relationship. It's a wryly funny tribute to the difficulties of urban living, lifted into the realm of the lyrical by a surprising third-act transformation that is as bizarre as it is fitting.

Leos Carax (Pola X, The Lovers on the Bridge) is a much more abrasive filmmaker than both Gondry and Bong, and I'm sure it is by design that his film separates the two others, which tend toward the cute. There isn't much that's cute about "Merde," which isn't just the scatological title of Carax's film but also the name of its main character. Played by Carax favorite Denis Lavant, Merde is a disgusting, trollish creature who emerges from the sewers of Tokyo to terrorize its inhabitants with infernal grunts and hand grenades. When the flower-eating weirdo is finally apprehended, he appears in a courtroom scene that is difficult to endure because Merde only speaks in his own invented language and his fingernails are in desperate need of trimming.

I'm a big fan of Bong Joon-ho's genre-bending films The Host and Memories of Murder, but I'll admit that I found his short, "Shaking Tokyo," confounding. The story of a "Hikikomori" shut-in who leaves the house when he falls in love with a pizza delivery girl may be stuffed with a few desperate ideas too many: after a lovely beginning, robots patrol the streets, button tattoos control people, and earthquakes shake an entire city full of shut-ins. But even if the short film attempts more than a twenty-minute run time can accomplish, "Shaking Tokyo" is certainly -- and I know this is a dreaded word -- interesting.

And ultimately, that's the key to Tokyo! The anthology format provides Bong, Carax, and Gondry with an opportunity to take chances, and they boldly explore ideas they might not otherwise pursue. No one I've talked to about the film ranked the three episodes the same way, but everybody found something to like. After an especially unsatisfying Oscar season and the prospect of ever more warmed-over remakes and formula films, Tokyo! is a refreshing palate cleanser.