THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – MUST SEE
The incongruity of the opening scene of Olivier Peyon’s new film is an omen. The signal for a shift, a sign that something is wrong. Facing the camera, a choir of young Japanese women takes up the chorus of a distant title, “Everything is going very well Madame la Marquise, all is going very well, all is going very well.” “ We are in the offices of a large French bank based in Tokyo, where these young women apply singing exercises to relieve stress and stay productive. The heart is there, the concentration too.
However, all is not going very well. Starting for Alexandra (Karin Viard), freshly disembarked, who must announce their dismissal to some of the headquarters employees. Her contract had not mentioned this thankless task and that was not how she had viewed her promotion. But the recent subprime crisis forces us to tighten the bolts. She has no choice and must comply with orders, at the risk of seeing herself fired.
The director takes the party to lead the story by secondary roads rather than by major axes.
Tokyo Shaking thus begins in a kind of joy in which the spirit of seriousness (the reality of a company subject to budgetary restrictions) and comedy (the character and the presentation of the characters) mingle with ease, without one taking truly the step on the other.
The rhythm of the staging is modeled on Alexandra’s (overloaded) schedule, an ambitious framework that the work has taken to the four corners of the world. Recently settled in Tokyo with her son and daughter, but without her husband – held back in Hong Kong for professional reasons – she has to take care of everything. She is running out of time, the moving boxes are still lying around in her apartment, and in a month she still hasn’t seen anything of the city, except the streets she uses every day to go to the bank. We won’t see any more.
Delicacy
Frantic days, uninterrupted race, the character of this expatriate Frenchwoman has long been forged in discipline and success. An event, however, will arise which will sculpt it differently. First an earthquake, then a tsunami on the coast which damages the Fukushima nuclear power plant. Everything threatens to explode. The joy is extinguished.
The film takes on a more dramatic color that the director keeps at a safe distance. By focusing on the characters rather than the spectacular, by favoring the closed doors rather than the external disturbances (these reaching us only through the television screens), he takes the party to lead the story by secondary roads rather than by major axes. The film’s worn-out plot – the heroine who reveals herself thanks to a catastrophe – finds in this step aside material for delicacy.
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