Omnibus films are typically uneven endeavors, comprised as they are of assorted works usually linked by only one common thread. And true to form, Tokyo!, a compilation of three short films by renowned directors Michel Gondry, Leos Carax and Bong Joon-Ho, isn’t an entirely consistent affair. Yet lurking within these Tokyo-set narratives does lie a shared pulsating thread of isolation. In this surprisingly rich anthology, it’s not merely location that proves the primary connective tissue, but a sense of individuals – on a personal and collective scale – struggling to cope with detachment from themselves, their fellow citizens, and their surroundings. Manifesting itself in ways fanciful, austere, unsettling, absurd and magic-realist, this lonely condition may be treated in tonally dissimilar ways by this trio of diverse tales, yet a strain of solitude, and of literal and figurative aimlessness, nonetheless helps this triptych’s vignettes coalesce into an affectingly atmospheric portrait of the city and its inhabitants.
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