FILM
Here Is Tokyo!
/ Jason Jude Chan
03.06.09
2: Anger
Leos Carax’s transgressive, satirical segment “Merde” (“shit” in French) chronicles the sudden appearance of a racist, subterranean monster-man (Denis Lavant channeling his raving man-symbol from Jonathan Glazer’s seminal music video, “Rabbit in Your Headlights”) on Tokyo’s pedestrian-packed streets. After initially jostling citizens and stealing their cigarettes or crutches, the self-christened Merde soon escalates his anti-Japanese sentiment to indiscriminate mass murder (in previous Carax films this would be the protagonist’s descent into his amour fou), using a cache of hand grenades that he unearths alongside a rusted tank and a sign reading “Nanking 1937.” Coupled with Merde’s grotesque appearance (the media hones in on “his insane beard, his milky eye”), the discovery poses Carax’ thorny rhetorical question: what does Japan keep beneath its cleansed, twenty-first-century surface?
Maître Voland (Jean-François Balmer), a Parisian lawyer and a dead ringer for the Rasputin-like Merde, arrives to defend the new cultural phenomenon as he somehow speaks the same mumbo-jumbo language of squeals and guttural sounds. A trial ensues with the attendant media mayhem—Merde becomes an either-or symbol, both victim of and virus on the system, the regenerating newsfeeds forming what Carax calls his “smile of speed.” The director, in his first film since 1999’s Pola X, remains as heady and provocative as ever, but his new-baroque monster send-up—even with its great gallows humor and incendiary commentary on xenophobia and Japanese mass marketing—becomes somewhat exasperating. Like the more-is-less wisdom behind a fad like the Geico cavemen, the sentiment arises from the overuse of Merde’s point-making (read: judgment has already been passed on appearance) idiom—one can only handle so much of his harhar blather before it turns blasé.
Leos Carax’s transgressive, satirical segment “Merde” (“shit” in French) chronicles the sudden appearance of a racist, subterranean monster-man (Denis Lavant channeling his raving man-symbol from Jonathan Glazer’s seminal music video, “Rabbit in Your Headlights”) on Tokyo’s pedestrian-packed streets. After initially jostling citizens and stealing their cigarettes or crutches, the self-christened Merde soon escalates his anti-Japanese sentiment to indiscriminate mass murder (in previous Carax films this would be the protagonist’s descent into his amour fou), using a cache of hand grenades that he unearths alongside a rusted tank and a sign reading “Nanking 1937.” Coupled with Merde’s grotesque appearance (the media hones in on “his insane beard, his milky eye”), the discovery poses Carax’ thorny rhetorical question: what does Japan keep beneath its cleansed, twenty-first-century surface?
Maître Voland (Jean-François Balmer), a Parisian lawyer and a dead ringer for the Rasputin-like Merde, arrives to defend the new cultural phenomenon as he somehow speaks the same mumbo-jumbo language of squeals and guttural sounds. A trial ensues with the attendant media mayhem—Merde becomes an either-or symbol, both victim of and virus on the system, the regenerating newsfeeds forming what Carax calls his “smile of speed.” The director, in his first film since 1999’s Pola X, remains as heady and provocative as ever, but his new-baroque monster send-up—even with its great gallows humor and incendiary commentary on xenophobia and Japanese mass marketing—becomes somewhat exasperating. Like the more-is-less wisdom behind a fad like the Geico cavemen, the sentiment arises from the overuse of Merde’s point-making (read: judgment has already been passed on appearance) idiom—one can only handle so much of his harhar blather before it turns blasé.