MOVIE REVIEW : Carrie Hamilton Takes Tokyo in a Tale of Cultures

Loping through downtown Tokyo with her seven-league stride, her shades on her nose, her white-blond hair tucked up under a leopard pillbox, Carrie Hamilton stalks through “Tokyo Pop” (selected theaters) straight into our hearts.

She plays Wendy Reed, an aspiring rock ‘n’ roller soured on the New York music scene and “tired of singing backup for creeps” who decides--with no more preparation than a post card from a friend in Tokyo--to launch her career from Japan, not SoHo.

“Tokyo Pop” is a shrewd, amiable cross-cultural romance full of talent at every level, including Hamilton’s co-star Yutaka Tadokoro, leader of the band Red Warriors, who plays Hiro Yamaguchi, an American-obsessed rock ‘n’ roller. But when you leave the movie, all that stays clearly in focus is Hamilton. Even silhouetted against a Niagara of neon, she sucks in all the scene’s energy--inadvertently and probably even unconsciously. It’s useless to try to concentrate on anyone else when Hamilton is up there, radiating away.

The film is on the lean side in matters of story and depth of characters. Its strengths are its pure, ingratiating sweetness, its insider’s view of cross-cultural romance and its eye-popping picture of a thoroughly Westernized Tokyo that has rushed to embrace every worst idea America ever exported--and added a few of its own: sing-along caraoke videos and love hotels, which are a little like the Madonna Inn on a franchise scale.

The cross-cultural part is something director Fran Rubel Kuzui, co-writer of the film with Lynn Grossman, knows a bit about. She is a New Yorker married to a Japanese film distributor and now producer. As the exotic, bubbly gaijin (foreigner) catches the attention of struggling musician Hiro and attraction works unsteadily up to romance, Kuzui encapsulates their differences neatly: reserve versus extroversion; propriety versus impulsiveness.

Kuzui also crosses us up on some of our cliched expectations--Wendy is breathless about her first view of cherry blossoms, but, then, so is Hiro, since it’s his first time to see them too. (What Kuzui glosses over is the semi-sadness of sex-without-real attraction, as Wendy beds Hiro before she really knows why she wants to.)

You may not be startled by anything in “Tokyo Pop” (well, perhaps by the explicitness of those fake stained-glass murals at the love hotels), and even its East-West insights aren’t as complex as the ones in “The Great Wall.” But Carrie Hamilton (the daughter of Carol Burnett) bopping along Tokyo streets at approximately awning height, sunnily and completely herself, is reason enough to trek out of your way to “Tokyo Pop.”