TOKYO! Special Screenings

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.” Suffocated by her boyfriend’s self-proclaimed genius, the heroine’s anxiety escalates until she undergoes on uncanny metamorphosis. In Carax’s MERDE, the delicately woven surface of consumer utopia is ruptured abruptly with the appearance of on otherworldly creature from the sewers. The enfant terrible assaults everything in his path, eating cigarettes and flowers, tipping baby strollers and licking schoolgirls, acts that invoke furor, repulsion and hilarious religious ardor in the masses. Finally, he is incarcerated, but this is not the end . 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 But, Boon asks, somewhat sadistically, what might happen if a hokikomori fell in love? Taken together, these stories-each introducing individuals whose isolation is exacerbated by their fantastic, debilitating urban spaces-offer a portrait of a city that is simultaneously terrifying and sublime.