Tokyo!

Film · Tokyo Stories: Japan in the Global Imagination

Saturday, December 7, 2 PM

A distinguished trio of non-Japanese filmmakers converge to offer wildly varying and accomplished short films that take inspiration from, and are shot entirely within, Tokyo. French director Michel Gondry leads with Interior Design, a characteristically whimsical fable about existential anxiety and corporeal metamorphosis in an aimless young woman who moves to Tokyo with her amateur filmmaker boyfriend; in Merde, French director Leos Carax introduces his own unique “Godzilla” in the form of a mysterious sewer-dwelling man who devours cash and chrysanthemums while terrorizing Tokyo’s streets (and later reappears in the director’s 2012 film Holy Motors); and, finally, Cannes Palme d’Or-winning Korean director Bong Joon-ho imagines a surreal romance between a hikikomori (shut-in) who falls in love with a pizza delivery girl in Shaking Tokyo.

2008, France/Japan/South Korea/Germany, 110 min., 35mm, in Japanese and French with English subtitles. Directed by Michel Gondry, Leos Carax, Bong Joon-ho. With Ayako Fujitani, Ryo Kase, Denis Lavant, Teruyuki Kagawa, Yu Aoi.

“The pedigree of the participants… underlines the city’s place at the crossroads of global hipsterism. But the film also serves as a reminder that some of Tokyo’s most memorable chroniclers have been visitors, looking in from the outside.”

—The New York Times

Part of Tokyo Stories: Japan in the Global Imagination

Tickets: $14/$11 seniors, students & persons with disabilities/$10 members

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