TOKYO UBER BLUES (Taku Aoyagi 2021)

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R]TAKU AOYAGI IN TOKYO UBER BLUES

TAKU AOYAGI: TOKYO UBER BLUES (2021)

Uber blues during the lockdown in Tokyo makes for a display of young filmmaker virtuosity

This film may remind some of Take Out, co-directed by Shih-Ching Tsou and Sean Baker twenty years ago, about an undocumented Chinese immigrant working as a deliveryman for a Chinese take-out shop in New York City. But this isn't the tale of such a desperate have-not. The filmmaker-director-star, whose GoPro and iPhone self-filming is one of the most remarkable features, is a 26-, soon-to-be-27-year-old film school graduate in rural Japan. He has over $40,000 in student loans to pay off, his aged grandma needs support, and the Covid lockdown has nixed his job as one-time chauffeur for men too drunk to drive home. He decides to go to Tokyo - cycling the 119.5 km. from home in Kofu City - to start earning money as an UberEats drone and sets off there April 21, 2020.

And that's it. But it's enough. Though things get a bit monotonous after a while, this is also a vivid commentary on urban isolation and ennui, a filmmaking tourde force, and a film that goes from dry social commentary to moments of Bressonian poetry. Desperation makes this young filmmaker, who is almost completely honest about himself, cast himself rather like a Samuel Beckett character, though this is not so much an Endgame as the potential beginning of a promising career as a very independent filmmaker.

At first Taku is hosted by people he knows. That ends twice, and he doesn't explain the details. He does chronicle his birthday attempt to hire a call girl - he says he feels lonely - which does not work because he turns out not to have enough money for both the room and the girl, and has to settle for the room. What will his grandma, whonm he honors by wearing her personally sown mask, think of this? But he lies to her on the phone later, saying he is doing well and making money, when in fact for a while he is homeless. At least sleeping on the stteet in Tokyo is't as dangerous as in other countries. He also meets school friends, also out of work, who he goes to the unemplyment office with. And a female classmate, who seems to admire him, meets with him on the street and gives him some stuff to help him on his way.

Taku isn't particularly good at being an UberEats delivery boy, though he gets better when several more experienced ones, with foreign accents, give him tips about where to show up for work. He is in any case very energetic. Indeed making this film while being a delivery drone shows that. At first I was distracted by thinking constantly how laborious it must have been not just go on strenuous bike rides to deliver food, but to be simultaneously also setting up shots to film himself every step of the way. This element of self-consciousness undercuts the Bressonian grimness of most of the action. So does Taku's constant onscreen titles which are sometimes humorous, sometimes coolly factual when they give hours worked (up to 14 and 16 sometimes, often 9), deliveries made, and dollar amount earned.

He also gets involved in a contest, when he earns more than a certain amount in any three-day period he wins a bonus. After a while he succeeds at this.

Nonetheless Taku is getting nowhere. He was naive to think he might make money with UberEats. But achieving solvency becomes all the more impossible because the work is so exhausting and lonely he repeatedly gives way to the temptation to take time off. He goes to a cheap hotel and stays there for days making no money. Later he learns of a program for the needy where cheap food and lodging are available. He avails himself of this and again stops working. Why is it located on the edge of town? Because, we learn, all the poor ad homeless people were moved out there for the Tokyo Olympics.

Taku is basically alone, but when he runs into people he always records the encounters. On a park bench he runs into a rather dashing small-time movie actor who describes his not very lucrative life. Another time he meets an old lady sitting in a town square who has lived in Tokyo since before World War II. She describes the War as very stupid and explains that Tokyo was razed to the ground then. Taku remarks later that it has been razed to the ground again now.

He is referring to the stifling of much of the city's life by the Covid-19 lockdown, which he also records, including Prime Minister Abe's declarations, because everything is closed. Taku recites a litany of all the things that are closed or not in operation. But he records how some things are, like his relative who administers personal workouts via Zoom; and he notes that people in high rises order Uber food a lot, giving him and his drone colleagues plenty to do. He also notes the various classes of lockdown people, those unaffected, those who benefit, and those who are badly affected. It's also mentioned how the ever-growing number of hikikomori, Japanese recluses, has been boosted and reclusiveness even shifted to the general population by the lockdown, as it was in other parts of the world.

While Tokyo Uber Blues may appeal only to a few due to its repetitive material and introverted viewpoint, it is many things. It's a memorable display of do-it-yourself filmmaking; a portrait of a young loser trying to turn his life around. It can also be seen as an unusual pursuit of physical fitness: some of the bike rides are hard workouts and Taku is obviously, despite his periods of inertia, in pretty good shape. This is also, overall, a portrait of Tokyo under Covid lockdown. Often the night images are rather poetic; briefly very much so. In one passage Taku films Tokyo by night, empty, while chanting words associated with the whole strange Covid period: thus he rises from the mundane to the poetic. Only a young person could have done this job (even though he's sometimes lazy at it). Sarah G. Vincent, in a review, points out how the film imagery and editing, i.e., the use of Screen-casting of texts with memes, the use of split screens and intercut videos to present information, as well as the fluency of the GoPro camera mounting and shooting with iPhone camera, all show this to be very clearly younger generation filmmaking. Will he branch out and become a Japanese Sean Baker?

Tokyo Uber Blues, 東京自転車節 (Tôkyô jitensha-bushi), "Tokyo Bicycle Festival"), 93 mins., debuted Jul. 10, 2021 at Watch Docs Film Festival in Poland. A version edited down to 50 mins. showed on the PBS "POV" series Oct. 21, 2024. Taku Aoyagi was born in Yamanashi Prefecture in 1993. He studied at the Japan Institute of the Moving Image. In 2018, he premiered his 47-minute graduation film The Road He Walks: A Story of He0Kun (2017 / NC ’18) internationally at Nippon Connection. Tokyo Uber Blues (2022 / NC ’23) is his first feature-length documentary.