Tokyo! Visual Metaphors
Tokyo! is a movie composed of three stories developed by different directors, under the premise of locating the plot in the Japanese capital. The French Michel Gondry and Leo Carax, and the Korean Joon-ho Bong, gave live to this interesting production, creating a kind of visual tryptic of Tokyo city. Although they worked independently, all three stories can be catalogued under the fantastic or magic realism genre. The use of visual effects in all pieces is perfectly integrated, creating a shocking visual impact, but at the time, achieving credibility. Each piece becomes a metaphor of a concept, visually illustrated, which adds value and subtext to the plot and characters.
Michael Gondry’s story “Interior Designs”, narrates the story of a couple who has just arrived in Tokyo. He is a filmmaker following his dream. She has no special interest, and while staying in Tokyo realizes she has no aim in life. The key concept here is “ambition”, a word which is several times used in the dialogues. She is accused of having no ambitions while her beloved enthusiastically steps forward in achieving his own. She is left a side and feels empty and useless. She feels so unvalued and useless that her agony swallows her and suddenly she suffers an extraordinary change. She turns into a wooden chair.
Visually the transformation is amazing, her legs become wooden sticks and her tummy turns hollow, as she runs through Tokyo streets desperately, loosing her clothes and her human shape. Her transformation graphically represents her reaction to her inner conflict; no words, no dialogue, no explanations are needed anymore, and the visual components of the scenes are enough to show her psychological changing process. The chair is left standing on the sidewalk. She becomes aware that she can turn back into human shape, but she will not. Can she prefer to be a chair?
A writer takes the chair home. Now she has found her place, she is useful, warm, and has a function in life. She is the chair, and it symbolizes her character: steady, helpful and discreet, without ambitions or great expectations. Remaining a chair is as simple for her as being herself, unexposed to other judgments, alien to social pressures of achieving aims and ambitions.
Leo Carax’s piece, “La Merde” is much more surrealist. A strange creature comes out of a sewer in the middle of Tokyo and starts harassing the citizens. The creature and his origin are never described with words, but through his strong visual appearance and behavior: irregular body shape, weird beard, a white eye, rude, violent, sleeps naked at the sewers, eats flowers and speaks a estrange language made up of sounds and symbols. Can we identify in any manner with this live being just by observing him?
The concept here is the integration and the cultural confrontation taken to the extreme. All the rest of the story is reality based; only the creature seems to be unrealistic, and his appearance produces a total visual contrast with the rest of the people shown. Our senses are educated to accept what’s similar to what we know and reject what’s different, and this unconscious reaction is visually achieved.
The plot goes on, as the creature is arrested and taken to court where his declarations are totally insane. Actually the scenes that take place on the court become tedious, because the impact of the story relies on the visual recreation of the creature, as a personification of what goes against the established values of society. What are we judging here?
Joon-ho Bong completes the trio with “Shaking Tokyo”, where a young man who has lived for more than ten years closed up in his flat, meets a new pizza delivery girl, who will shake his life up. An earthquake strikes the city and the girl faints at his house, disturbing his controlled peace.
The concept is confronting our fears and emotions. The girl has various buttons tattooed, with indications such as love, sadness or coma. The way they are integrated on her body suggests they can be pressed. The viewer understands, these buttons represent her emotions. The young man finally gets courage to press the coma button and the girl awakens and leaves. But he will soon confront his agoraphobia to go out and seek her.
As he leaves his flat, the whole city is empty, giving a sensation of complete loneliness and impotence, representing his own emotions at the open space, through visual images. It is difficult to know if we are looking at the real world or at his perception of the same.
Not easily he finds the girl and presses her love button. The pressing of this button can be interpreted as a trigger which activates our emotions, such as a look, a word, a smell, a memory…
I find this symbolism expresses how our emotions are essentially simple and it is us, who make them complex in our approach to deal with them; like the young man who limited and influenced by his own fears, finds it hard to communicate and convey his feelings. Maybe emotions should be addressed naturally and directly, breaking our psychological barriers, to press those buttons.
It’s like all three directors where committed to add a particular value, through visual language, to common human conflicts; not pretending to create fantastic worlds or characters just for entertainment. As we’ve seen, in all the stories, different in plot, the visual effects are always character related (character’s transformation, character’s appearance and character’s feature) playing with the suggestions and subtext meanings of the imagery. Also, all of them have optioned to integrate the visual metaphors in real environments, taking them as an asset in synergy with the rest of the elements (dialogue, photography, structure…). They have done a very interesting and powerful use of the visual possibilities and tools, giving the film, as a whole, a particular personality, which combines visual arts with philosophy.
>Written by d/visible contributor Rebeca Arnal .
