TIFF Dispatch #2: “Love & Mercy”, “Eden”, and “Tokyo Tribe”

Love & Mercy, Bill Pohlad’s biopic about musical genius Brian Wilson is an empathetic but trite examination of the Beach Boy’s life, structured like a temporal see-saw occupying two specific periods. There’s the mid 1960s, when Wilson (Paul Dano) brainstorms what eventually became Pet Sounds, and the mid 1990s, when Wilson (John Cusack) strikes friendship and romance with car salesperson/former model Melinda (Elizabeth Banks) and, with her help, manages to break free from the manipulative legal control of his psychologist Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti). The flashback-flashforward binary is a convenient narrative solution in outlining a simplistic but beloved glimpse into Wilson’s complicated life. Though Love & Mercy initially seems to reify the cliché notion that musicians (or any artist who’s experienced the emotional rollercoaster ride of fame) have nothing to look forward to following their golden era, suffering a bleak has-been existence, it avoids such contrivances by focusing on the Landy personal drama and Wilson’s sad acceptance of his micromanaged life. But the film also smartly avoids being a We Need to Talk About Mental Illness Film, only fetching the key moments that affected Wilson’s mental health when necessary–like when he starts to hear sounds and voices following recreational drug experimentation.

Unfortunately, Love & Mercy fails to add anything new to the typical tortured genius narrative and falls prey to the kinds of banal chestnuts already satirized in films like Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. For example, in one inadvertently hilarious scene the younger Wilson earnestly describes to Mike Love (Jake Abel) how dogs sense vibrations from people, right as the film cues up a montage of the band recording “Good Vibrations” with the song playing emphatically in the background. Love & Mercy impulsively ropes in Beach Boys’ music like a security blanket, making it impossible not to notice the clash between the perfect aural art on display versus the less-than-masterful filmmaking. The result is a disorienting and disappointing experience that finds one thinking a bit too obsessively about how little Dano and Cusack look alike.

Mia Hansen-Løve’s Eden also ropes in popular music as a means to identify different emotional phases in the protagonist’s life while also historicizing electronic music. It’s not quite Daft Punk’s Greatest Hits: The Movie, but at times, like the Beach Boys’ music in Love & Mercy, the duo’s recognizable hits do overshadow the film (which is itself quite understated and dry). Eden, based on Hansen-Løve’s brother, is about a DJ named Paul (Félix de Givry) whose ambition and creative energy as he immerses himself in the French house music bubble of the late 90s sadly amounts to little more than a hefty debt and cocaine addiction by the 2000s. Though the narrative focus in Eden is not on Daft Punk’s contributions, the two do make hilarious cameos throughout. Given that no one knows what they look like, the actors playing them could very well be Daft Punk and no one would ever know.

While their brief appearances are fun, the focus in Eden, like Hansen-Love’s previous films, is on the fluidity of one’s self-identity and romance–how one can erode the other, or lead to new life experiences–in a naturalistic and occasionally evocative fashion. Encompassing Paul’s life over the course of two decades, he finds love in new partners (including Greta Gerwig and Golshifteh Farahani) but keeps returning to his one and only, Louise (Pauline Etienne). Though the film defines Paul’s life by his relationships, Eden fails to muster the kind of emotional intensity its story dictates.

Tokyo Tribe also courses music through its veins like a drug, but in even larger doses than Love & Mercy and Eden combined. Where Love & Mercy features the musical, timeless genius of yesteryear and Eden showcases Daft Punk’s back catalogue, Tokyo Tribe’s J-rap dialogue, accounting for at least 80% of the script, is raw and spontaneous, symbiotically dancing with Sion Sono’s non-stop-titillating, maximalist visual storytelling. Based on the manga series, Tokyo Tribe playfully introduces a series of drug gangs–each with its own dress code, vibe, personality and ethos–like a Japanese The Warriors. War breaks out when the most conceited and crazy drug family tries to take out everyone else, resulting in one glorious bloodbath after another. With every rapper-cum-gang-leader decked out in the finest J-pop glitz and swagger and every corner, room and club pimped out into a hyper-surreal Kubrickesque fantasy of gangsta culture, Tokyo Tribe is another highly entertaining Sono epic. And just like another Sono epic, everything is enchanting until the pace drops by a few nanoseconds and the flaws reveal themselves, including a balmy ending in which the final boss strangely vanishes from the script, as if he never existed. But if you can overlook these kinds of trivialities, Tokyo Tribe is a perfect festival film, a feverish rhapsody that tempers the seriousness of other TIFF films with its astronomic silliness and pitch-perfect urban poetry.