Tokyo is a city of transitions in three short films. A young woman who finds her life useless experiences a metamorphosis. A disheveled Caucasian emerges from a manhole to face arrest, trial, and execution; he calls himself "Merde" and speaks a language only his look-alike attorney understands. Is he human? A recluse experiences human contact when a pizza-delivery girl faints at his door during an earthquake. He conquers fear to seek her out. A chair, a corpse, a hermit: sources of urban connection?
Cast: Yû Aoi, YosiYosi Arakawa, Jean-François Balmer, Julie Dreyfus, Ayako Fujitani, Ayumi Ito, Teruyuki Kagawa, Denis Lavant, Yutaka Matsushige, Nao Omori, Satoshi Tsumabuki, Hiroshi Yamamoto
Directed by Michel Gondry ("Interior Design"), Joon-ho Bong ("Shaking Tokyo"), Leos Carax ("Merde")
Script by Michel Gondry ("Interior Design"), Joon-ho Bong ("Shaking Tokyo"), Leos Carax ("Merde")
Producer: Anne Pernod-Sawada, Masa Sawada, Michiko Yoshitake
Set in 1933, the plot picks up where Dogville (previous film by Lars von Trier) ended, with Grace and her father (Willem Dafoe replacing James Caan) heading south. Reaching Alabama, they discover slavery still thrives at the Manderlay cotton plantation. Appalled, Grace decides to stay on, free the black residents and teach them about democracy. But replacing the old system isn't so simple, and Grace's good intentions eventually reap hellish consequences.
Cast: Bryce Dallas Howard, Isaach De Bankolé, Danny Glover, Willem Dafoe, Jeremy Davies, Lauren Bacall, Chloe Sevigny
Directed by Lars von Trier
English language with latvian and russian subtitles.
Story takes place in the 1880’s in England when many upper class women are being sent to the doctor because they are depressed. To ease these patients’ stress, doctor has developed a form of therapy that involves the careful manual stimula¬tion of a certain female body part. All these women needed is to have an orgasm and it was doctor's duty to satisfy rich women whose husbands couldn’t.“Intimate massage” cure was shockingly effective and when doctor's Mortimer (Hugh Dancy) forwardthinking friend Edmund (Rupert Everett) unveiled the plans for his new electric-powered feather duster, Mortimer came up with a compelling idea… The result?
Well, it was the beginning of the revolution for women.
"Palm d’Or" award nomination at Cannes Film Festival.
In the opening scenes, Maria is en route to collect an award on behalf of a good friend, Wilhelm Melchior. Melchior is the writer of a play named Maloja Snake, which was then made into a film starring Maria.
Maria is joined on this journey by her personal assistant and confident Val. The relationship between these two women is the focus throughout, and it’s expertly established for us in these opening sequences.
Dialogue between the pair overlaps, is interrupted by calls and sometime even hangs in the air as the topics up for discussion change and segue. There is an incredibly natural feel to their interchanges that comes from a great script performed by two fine actresses.
An upcoming exhibition celebrating photographer Isabelle Reed three years after her untimely death, brings her eldest son Jonah back to the family house - forcing him to spend more time with his father Gene and withdrawn younger brother Conrad than he has in years. With the three of them under the same roof, Gene tries desperately to connect with his two sons, but they struggle to reconcile their feelings about the woman they remember so differently.