Steel & Lead (鉄と鉛, Kazuhiro Kiuchi, 1997)

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A policeman turned detective gets an unexpected shot at redemption after being sentenced to death by a yakuza boss Kazuhiro Kiuchi’s stylish action thriller, Steel & Lead (鉄と鉛, Tetsu to Namari). A manga artist best known for creating the Be-Bop High School series, Kiuchi also made his mark on V-Cinema with genre hits Carlos and Joker. Steel & Lead has a true hardboiled sensibility and is set in a Japan which seems to be echoing New York with steam pouring into streets and taking place in a rundown urban environment.

The unnamed detective (Tsunehiko Watase) is apparently the only one in town. He falls foul of the boss of the Hamaken gang, Hamanishi (Sei Hiraizumi), after his son is murdered by a jealous lover that the detective unwittingly helped find him having taken what she said at face value, believing that she was his pregnant wife fed up with his philandering. The dead man’s actual wife was shocked by his death that she miscarried. Her son spent only 22 hours and three minutes on this earth, which is exactly the amount of time that Hamanishi gives the detective to get his affairs in order, threatening to kill his estranged 17-year old daughter if he tries to run.

The 17-year-old daughter whom the detective hasn’t seen in years is never seen and mentioned only briefly, but hints at the detective’s fall from grace after having left the police force. His estrangement from her might be why he decides to help a schoolgirl, Miyuki (Ayana Sakai), who comes to him with a request to find her missing brother, Yoichi (Terunori Miyazaki). Yoichi has a drugs conviction and suddenly disappeared a month ago while their mother is seriously ill and awaiting an operation. The detective originally turns her down, explaining that Miyuki’s brother has almost certainly fallen back into drugs and that finding him would be both expensive and potentially dangerous. Nevertheless, having accepted that he will die by Hamanishi’s hand the following day, the detective decides that his last act on earth will be to help the girl. During the course of the case, he also becomes to determined to rescue a kidnapped little boy and thereby restore his paternity vicariously despite having apparently failed to build a relationship with his biological daughter. 

Meanwhile, he begins to bond with the yakuza sent to keep an eye on him, Yano (Masataka Naruse), who is slowly won over by his righteousness and bravery in the face of death as he accepts his fate while growing determined to save the children. The detective’s investigation operates as a kind of chain reaction as he interviews various people who end up giving him the name of the next person to talk to in order to find Yoichi, finally leading him to a crazed drug dealer and user Kanemitsu (Yuji Kishimoto). Effectively dragged into this dark world of drugs and nihilism as borne out by Kanemitsu’s ad hoc decision to kidnap Takashi when his father can’t or won’t pay up immediately, the detective attempts to impose some kind of order but generally finds himself on the back foot. An attempt to chase Kanemitsu down by car simply ends with them effectively swapping vehicles as Kanemitsu manages to escape with his ride and the boy inside.

Just as Hamanishi’s grandson was killed by means of a kind of chain reaction, everything happens to the detective in sequence as he ricochets from one lead to the next. The film makes good use of Tsunehiko Watase’s cinematic history in casting him as a stoical detective who quietly accepts that he will die and resolves to sacrifice himself to save his daughter as well as the two surrogate children Miyuki and Takashi. Kiuchi excels at creating a noirish atmosphere, setting most of the film night and capturing its emptiness lit only by car headlights and neon. A stylish use of slow motion also lends the action a balletic quality otherwise at odds with the ugliness represented by Kanemitsu’s amoral nihilism. Despite his promises, Kanemitsu is quick to decide the boy must die anyway because he’s seen his face and knows his name because it’s written all over his hideout. The detective’s descent into hell is neatly timed to arrive at an eventual dawn in which he returns to a recognisably more ordered world in which innocent children like Takashi and Miyuki are safe from the darkness that surrounds them.

Trailer (no subtitles)

The Ghost Cat of Otama Pond (怪猫 お玉が池, Yoshihiro Ishikawa, 1960)

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Ghost cat films can often be about the ways in which the unresolved past continues to echo in the modern era. The curse is not lifted by vanquishing the evil spirit, but only by coming to an accommodation with and making recompense for wrongdoing in the distant past. This is especially the case when the film involves bookending sequences set in the modern day as in Yoshihiro Ishikawa’s Ghost Cat of Otama Pond (怪猫 お玉が池, Kaibyo Otama-ga-ike) in which a young couple accidentally become trapped within the orbit of a vengeful spirit after stopping off on their journey to get their parents’ approval for their marriage.

To that extent, the fact that they keep walking in circles and always end up back at the lake might hint at their mutual sense of anxiety about their decision to marry. “What will marriage be like if you’re like this now?” Tadahiko (Shozaburo Date) asks in exasperation, accusing Keiko (Noriko Kitazawa) of being “difficult” as she blames him for the decision to come to the lake in the first place and insists she’s too tired to continue walking. Their relationship is further strained by the lingering possibility that the parents may object to the marriage and that arriving late for their visit might not help their chances.

Their situation is mirrored in the circumstances that led to the creation of the ghost cat as related to Tadahiko by a local priest whom he consults after Keiko falls into a coma near the ruined house where they take shelter. Long ago, their ancestors Yochimaru (Shozaburo Date) and Kozasa (Noriko Kitazawa) were in love and wanted to marry, but their families were sworn enemies who strongly opposed the union. When Yachimaru was sent to serve in the capital swearing to call for Kozasa once he’d established himself, her villainous father Gensai (Yoichi Numata) moved against Yachimaru’s father Shinbei (Akira Nakamura) who had been attempting to protest the unreasonable taxes levied against local peasants who were on the verge of causing unrest. Consequently, they killed him and dumped his body in the pond. Shinbei’s beloved cat Tama drank some of his blood and became a ghost cat hellbent on avenging its master.

Tama is quite a popular name for a cat, but in this case it seems to be that it got its name from the lake where it was found which hints at a deeper origin story for this vengeful spirit. Unlike that in other similar films, it seems to have the power to manipulate people physically, at least to a degree, and also to pull them into an alternate reality as happens to Keiko during her coma when she is transported back to the Edo era before the house fell into ruins. It also seems to collect and unify various desires for vengeance though all against Gensai and his allies including the corrupt magistrate and entitled son Gorota (Hiroshi Shinguji). Though it originates with the death of Shinbei, the ghost cat later mainly takes the form of Kozasa after she drowns herself in the pond having been bewitched and seen the ghost of Yachimaru. 

In the end, this curse is only resolvable through the relationship between Keiko and Tadahiko. The ghost cat is vanquished by natural forces putting an end to the curse and releasing Keiko from her coma. After undergoing this experience, they are able to find their way back from the lake as Tadahiko resolves that they will still get married no matter what their parents say in direct contrast with Yachimaru and Kozasa who were constrained by samurai mores and unable to defy their families. In the modern era, they are free to live in the city and do as they please without needing to pay much attention to these outdated rituals, and so the ghost cat’s curse is no longer necessary as the rift is healed with their union just as if Yachimaru and Kozasa were finally united. Ishikawa conjures a suitably gothic, eerie atmosphere around the misty lake achieving ghost effects mainly through lighting in which they take on a familiar greenish hue. Away from the lake, however, it becomes more difficult to tell who is a ghost and who alive, while the ghost cat manipulates those that have wronged it into harming those they love and by extension themselves until finally laid to rest by a new generation resolving to leave the past behind.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Lady Sazen and the Drenched Swallow Sword (女左膳　濡れ燕片手斬り, Kimiyoshi Yasuda, 1969)

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A one-armed, one-eyed swordswoman finds herself fighting a war on two fronts after rescuing a young woman running away from mistreatment while herself pursued by a venal lord determined to get his hands on her ancestral blade in Kimiyoshi Yasuda’s jidaigeki adventure Lady Sazen and the Drenched Swallow Sword (女左膳　濡れ燕片手斬り, Onna Sazen: Nuretsubame Katate Giri). This wasn’t the first time the classic character of Tange Sazen had been re-envisioned as a woman, though it does appear to have been an attempt by Daiei to launch a Toei-style female-led period action series even if no further instalments were ever made.

Nicknamed “Lady Sazen”, Okin (Michiyo Yasuda) lives in a small shack with the former retainer, Gosuke (Yusaku Terashima), who raised her, and Yasu, a little boy they seem to have taken in. Gosuke provides for them by weaving baskets, while it remains true Okin occupies an awkward space in Edo-era society. Having lost an arm and bearing a large scar over one eye which is no longer functional, Okin likely could not marry even if she wanted to, nor are there any occupations which are open to her which is why the only way that she can make money is by participating in the male world of sword fighting and gambling, much to Gosuke’s disapproval. It’s also why she’s branded monstrous by her opponents simply for being a woman who is able to use a sword.

A mysterious wanderer remarks that it might have been better had she been born a man, a sentiment with which Okin agrees even as the man jokingly complains about her lack of femininity and subsequent inability to offer the customary hospitality to a guest. She also speaks roughly and drinks sake directly from a gourd. Nevertheless, she sympathises with Omitsu (Natsuko Oka) precisely because of the similarity in their life stories as two women wronged by the patriarchal samurai order. Omitsu was promised advancement through serving at the castle, but was then essentially trafficked by the Minister for Temples and Shrines who sent her to the corrupt priest at Hojoji temple where she was pressed into sex work. Having attempted to escape, she returns home to discover both her parents have been murdered after reusing to give up her location. Okin’s parents were similarly murdered by a greedy lord who demanded her father give up his sword and killed him when he refused.

There is a degree of homoerotic tension that arises between Omitsu and Okin as the pair settle in to a kind of domesticity, yet the film hints at a potential romance with sometime enemy Eizaburo (Kojiro Hongo) who has been sent by his lord who is obsessed with swords to get hold of Okin’s. Eizaburo later gives up on the idea after finding out her family history, but is also beholden to samurai mores especially when he learns his sister is to be sent to the corrupt priest as part of his lord’s plan to win favour and possible promotion from the high priest. As Okin now lives outside of samurai society, she cannot restore order within it, but is determined to use public pressure to flush the wrongdoers out by exposing the corruption through a series of pamphlets. The priest, however, is able to simply blame everything on his former co-conspirator thanks to the fact he has already installed his daughter as the shogun’s mistress. 

The unseen Lady Osode wields power in a different way, even if on the surface it looks like she too is being trafficked by her father. Refreshingly enough, Okin’s abilities as a one-armed swordswoman are totally respected. Though she may sometimes fight alongside men or they may provide assistance to her by buying time for her to escape, they never try to take over or get in her way. Rather, they treat her as an equal who is not in need of their protection. Though Eizaburo vows to give up the sword and abandon his samurai status, this is something that Okin can ever do because her duty lies in protecting her familial legacy in the form of the blade inherited from her father. She may be to a degree feminised in assuming a maternal position over Yasu, but maintains her independence in once again taking to the road in search of new adventures.

Tokai no Kaii 7-ji 03-bun (都会の怪異７時０３分, Sotoji Kimura, 1935)

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Though less well remembered now, Sotoji Kimura was a fairly prominent director at PCL in the 1930s having made Japan’s first musical Tipsy Life in 1933. A left-wing filmmaker who had been associated with keiko eiga and proletarian cinema, he nevertheless also later made imperial propaganda films and eventually decamped to Manei in Manchuria, remaining in China until 1953. Though he returned to filmmaking after his return to Japan, he never regained the same kind of success he’d experienced before the war.

Tokai no Kaii 7-ji 03-bun (Lit, “Urban Mystery: 7:03) seems like it may have been an outlier in his earlier career which doesn’t appear to have leaned much towards genre cinema. Though in some quarters billed as a horror film, likely because of the inclusion of the word “怪異” which implies some kind of strangeness or connection with the supernatural, it’s more of a noirish morality tale with an otherworldly edge as a compromised man attempting to reform himself after a living a dissolute life makes a series of poor choices after being given a copy of the following evening’s newspaper. A title card at the beginning states that the film is adapted from the final story written by Itsuma Maki penned especially for PCL. Itsuma Maki was a pen name used by Kotaro Hasegawa specifically for his true life mystery stories and his picture that is featured. Hasegawa had passed away from asthma at the young age of 35 a few months before the film’s release.

The story itself is said to be inspired by British writer Holloway Horn’s The Old Man, though all it seems to take from it is the morally compromised protagonist and the newspaper from the future. Miyamoto is in a bind because his girlfriend is pregnant and even with both of them working they’re struggling to make ends meet as is it. He calls his friend Tarama, who is a reporter, for financial help. It’s at this point that we learn both that Miyamoto used to live a fairly debauched life in the bars and clubs of Ginza and may also have had issues with gambling. He has, though, attempted to give all that up after meeting Noriko (Sachiko Chiba), a kimono-wearing respectable young woman who works in a shop selling Western fashions. They do not appear to be legally married, though Miyamoto refers to her as his wife, possibly because their financial situation does not allow it seeing as Noriko may have to give up her job if she married. Miyamoto is currently working for some kind of shady company that sells financial information and is in the middle of a dodgy deal with a government minister who suggests the nation is on the brink of financial collapse, but that they also have to at least appear financially responsible in a strange echo of Miyamoto’s situation.

Miyamoto has already tried asking his boss for financial assistance, but the boss is incredibly judgemental and unsympathetic. He calls Miyamoto irresponsible and suggests he’s embarrassed himself just by asking his employer for this kind of favour. To add insult to injury, he also tells him he should pay for the personal call he just made to Tarama on the office phone. When he’s approached by a strange old man on the street who seems to know his name, Miyamoto is rude at first and flat out tells him he doesn’t have money to buy the newspaper he’s selling. But the old man badgers him into taking one, claiming that it’s the edition from the following evening. The old man walks away smiling, remarking that Miyamoto is the only person on earth on who knows what’s going to happen tomorrow. Comparing the paper those of other passengers on the way home, Miyamoto confirms that it does seem to be from the following day, though when he disembarks he’s followed by hysterical laughter from the other passengers having repeatedly tried to confirm the day’s date along with obvious facts such as Friday 27th following Thursday 26th.

In any case, some of the newspaper headlines, including an earthquake and a fire breaking out at the bar where he was due to meet Tarama the following evening, come true further convincing him the content is accurate. An obvious solution presents itself in using the racing report to place a bet and win financial security for his new family, but Miyamoto doesn’t have the stake money. He only needs 20 yen, but even after waking a pawnbroker in the middle of the night, he can’t get more than eight. It’s at this point he becomes increasingly greedy and desperate, deciding to take advantage of a report of a late night robbery, staking the place out and robbing the thief as he makes his escape only to end up killing a seemingly innocent man who had even less in his wallet than he did.

That the man had no money perhaps further bears out the straitened nature of the contemporary economy, though it seems clear enough that most of Miyamoto’s issues are the result of his personal failings. Perhaps the best thing to do would have been to throw the newspaper away. His attempt to use it to cheat at gambling might be understandable, but his decision to rob a man who had committed theft as if that were somehow more morally justifiable than committing the crime himself directly is not really defensible. On realising he may have killed the man, he simply shrugs and says he was “scum” anyway, as he steals his disappointingly empty wallet. His repeated attempts to get rid of it, which all fail as the universe mysteriously returns it to him, may symbolise his desire to discard his crime, but in the end he cannot escape his fate just as he failed to overcome his nature when presented with the newspaper. Kimura conjures an atmosphere of increasing dread as Miyamoto becomes ever more sweaty and paranoid amid the foggy streets of Tokyo before beginning to realise that he may have got his priorities all wrong and should perhaps have paid more attention to what the newspaper had to say before accepting its dubious bargains.

Wind Breaker (WIND BREAKER／ウィンドブレイカー, Kentaro Hagiwara, 2025)

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Throughout the fairly long history of delinquent fighting movies, they were mainly taken at face value as contests of masculinity conducted between adolescent men that may not always have had much to them beyond the battle to reach the top. More recent entries in the genre have, however, begun to reinterrogate its themes along with the kind of masculinity to which these young men subscribe. This is undoubtedly the case in Kentaro Hagiwara’s Wind Breaker (WIND BREAKER／ウィンドブレイカー), adapted from the manga by Satoru Nii, which pits the individualistic desire for domination against that for a healthier and more accepting vision of group unity that exists for the purpose of protecting the community.

This kind of duality is embodied in the hero, Sakura (Koshi Mizukami), who has just arrived in town with the intention of becoming top dog at Furin High School. Sakura has two-tone hair neatly divided down the middle while sporting a golden eye on his white side. His unusual appearance has made him a social outcast rejected by those around him, and so he has decided that violence is one way he can be successful as no one cares what you look like while you’re fighting. Similarly, his dilemma is manifested visually through repeated dream sequences in which he’s walking a narrow tightrope while facing rejection on all sides. 

He will, however, be disappointed to have arrived in this town as the delinquents of Furin High have already rebranded and are no longer interested in fighting for fighting’s sake. Rather they act as a kind of local community militia patrolling the streets to stop rival yellow-jacketed gang Shishitoren from hassling the mostly elderly shopkeepers. Most of the action takes place in a narrow high street-style shopping area which both gives it the feel of a Wild West town and harks back to an older Japan which is in reality already disappearing. Seen from above in the opening crane shot, it appears to be a slightly run-down former slum area, but we can see that it has already been repurposed into a kind of hipster paradise given a friendly feel by the orange and teal colour scheme and modern painted signage. Rather than markets or shops offering basic services like dry cleaning and key cutting, these mainly seem to be artisanal cafes. Nevertheless, most of the proprietors appear to be elderly people whom the young men are dedicated to both protecting and assisting. In return, they have been somewhat adopted by them with the shopkeepers freely giving out food and produce as a thank you rather an as protection. 

This does not sit that well with Sakura who resists making friends and only agrees to join the group in the hope of finally fighting its leader Ume (Shuhei Uesugi), a young guy with grey hair who fulfils the role of the wise old man. He’s set up a garden on the school roof and somehow installed a giant tree up there. His wholesome desire for a kind of pastoralisation or a managed ecological take over the urban space stands in stark contrast to the of Shishitoren whose territory is a mess of discarded paper strewn with makeshift fabric banners that echo post-industrial apocalyptic decline. Similarly, Shishitoren subscribe to a quasi-fascist philosophy which values only strength with gang leader Choji (Koki Yamashita) actively beating up and kicking out guys who lose fights. 

Yet as Ume says, fighting is dialogue and these physical clashes are also ways for young men to work out emotional problems they may not even have identified. Choji may be fighting a kind of ennui in having reached the top and realised there’s no where else to go, while his conflicted subordinate realises his desire to support his friend was misplaced and rather than going along with him the right thing to do would have been to discourage his obsession with physical strength and loathing of “weakness”. Sakura too comes to realise that true weakness lies in the inability to trust and rely on others. Fighting only has merit when it’s in service of something other than oneself. Thus masculinity is defined as something rooted in family, community, and brotherhood rather than in aggression and violence, though the only real way to win is not to fight at all. Anchored by strong production design and well-crafted action sequences, the film has an air of sincerity in its earnest messaging that perhaps cuts across the grain of contemporary debate and offers a more positive view of the future marked by progress and positivity rather than darkness and violence.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Red Rose White Rose (紅玫瑰白玫瑰, Stanley Kwan Kam-Pang, 1994)

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“He is a decent, respectable man who draws a clear distinction between a lady and a whore,” according to one of the excerpts from Eileen Chang’s novel that pepper the screen in Stanley Kwan’s sumptuous melodrama set in the Shanghai of the 1930s, Red Rose White Rose (紅玫瑰白玫瑰). Zhen-Bao (Winston Chao Wen-hsuan) is though entirely delusional, a man who desires absolute control but has no mastery over himself and at times appears rather pompous, believing himself to have a kind of higher purpose though achieving little of note.

According to the narrator, this is an age in which most men have two women, though Zhen-Bao does indeed seem to draw a line between them as evidenced in the opening sequence comparing his time as a student in Paris and Edinburgh. We see him meet a Parisian sex worker, and then his “first love” in Scotland, Rose, whom the narrator describes as a simple and open girl that Zhen-Bao found “innocently attractive”. Nevertheless, Zhen-Bao abruptly dropped her when he left the city demonstrating his determination not to be romantically entangled or allow a woman to alter the course of his life.

This seeming dichotomy is reflected in Zhen-Bao’s two roses, though there may be some debate about who occupies which role. “Red Rose” Jiao-Rui (Joan Chen) is the wife of a friend with whom he eventually embarks on a passionate affair, while “White Rose” Yen Li (Veronica Yip Yuk Hing) is the simple and innocent girl he marries as an “ideal wife” to please his mother and fulfil his image of himself as a “decent, respectable man”. Despite insisting on his independence, Zhen-Bao is blind to the influence his mother wields over his life and perhaps also what it actually means to be “decent and respectable” on anything other than a superficial level. His colleagues find him to be old-fashioned, but admire him for his attitude to work and life. “No one is more attentive to his mother than he,” they add, praising his diligence and reliability before describing him as a “practical man” who does not believe in something as unscientific as reincarnation. Chang’s description of him as the archetypal Chinese man of his era may be ironic, but also echoes Zhen-bao’s conception of himself as an idealised figure of patriarchal authority.

It’s this vision of properness along with his need for control that eventually leads Zhen-Bao to abandon Jiao-Rui after she falls in love with him and writes to her husband to ask for a divorce. Furious that she did this without consulting him or “considering [his] future”, Zhen-Bao strides out into traffic and is hit by a car. After this he is sort reborn as once again “decent and respectable”, resolving to break with Jiao-Rui on the grounds that their relationship was always improper because she was his friend’s wife and the scandal would destroy them both.

The world of Red Rose is one of opulent decadence, filled with colour and passion. The exposed brickwork of her apartment is broken by stretches patterned with rough shards of stone that echo the chaotic destructiveness of their affair. The world of White Rose, by contrast, is entirely sterile. Everything is white save for a pattern of pink roses the occasional cherub echoing the frieze on their wedding cake. This may be the world of absolute control that Zhen-bao was trying to create. For a while after the wedding he wears traditional Chinese dress and plays the part of a “decent, respectable” husband, yet his old habits soon resurface in his irresponsible womanising.

Meanwhile, he treats Yen Li with nothing but contempt. He regards her as stupid and avoids introducing her to his social circle lest she embarrass herself and show him up. Zhen-bao advises her to listen to the radio in order to educate herself and often flies into violent rages. When he sleeps with her, he merely uses her body as an object and does so only with the intention of conceiving a child, never considering her pleasure, consent, or even subjectivity. Despite the pressure to have a son, this seems to stop when the couple have a daughter whom Zhen-bao later enrols in boarding school seemingly out of spite.

Yen Li enters a depressive state in which she locks herself in the bathroom and refuses to come out, even taking her meals in there. Yet as she becomes used to her mistreatment by Zhen-bao, she is eventually able to overcome it to the extent that she no longer cares what he does or says. She has taken control of her world, embarking on a clandestine affair with her tailor and caring for her daughter, otherwise ignoring Zhen-bao’s existence. He vows to himself that he will once again start over as a “decent, respectable man” but seems to have come to the realisation that he is not and never will be while clinging to this delusional image of himself.

His failure is rammed home when he unexpectedly runs into Jiao-Rui on a street car. Despite his brother having said that he had seen her looking old and worn out with too much makeup, she still radiates beauty and allure. Zhen-bao behaves as if he’s encountered a saviour, but she has long since moved on. Jiao-Rui is happy and has found a steadier kind of relationship with her second husband, remarking that Zhen-bao taught her how, but also who, to love. Realising his desire to return to her will not be fulfilled, he lies that he is happy and talks about his career success rather than his marriage before breaking down in tears. As he ironically remarks to himself that it ought to be the woman crying in this sort of situation, Jiao-Rui appears a little embarrassed and abruptly disembarks this particular train. In the end, Zhen-Bao is reduced to an empty figure of patriarchal authority who appears almost as a ghost in his own home, continuing to delude himself that he is “a decent and respectable man” in the height of his impotence. 

Screened as part of Hong Kong Golden Age 1985-1997 at the Garden Cinema.

I Wish I Had a Wife (나도 아내가 있었으면 좋겠다, Park Heung-sik, 2001)

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A lonely bank clerk dreams of married bliss but ignores a promising match right under his nose in Park Heung-sik’s offbeat romcom, I Wish I Had a Wife (나도 아내가 있었으면 좋겠다, . As much about the loneliness and serendipity of city life at the turn of the century, the film takes its time in bringing its two leads together while subtly filling the air with a deep sense of melancholy uncertainty as each attempts to process their deep-seated childhood trauma.

Both Bong-soo (Sul Kyung-gu) and Won-ju (Jeon Do-yeon) are each in their way arrested in childhood have not yet really fully grown up despite being fictional adults with jobs and responsibilities. Bong-soo’s sometime girlfriend, with whom he first reconnects while she’s attending a funeral, remarks that he hasn’t really changed since they were at school though she has been married and divorced. Having lost his mother as a small child, at least part of Bong-soo’s desire to be married seems to have to with searching for a maternal connection and wanting to be taken care of. When the train he is on breaks down and he’s stuck in a tunnel in the dark for over an hour, it saddens him that unlike the other passengers he doesn’t have anyone to call. No one is immediately worried him, nor can he ease his own anxiety by hearing a familiar voice. Though his friend and roommate Hongtak (Seo Tae-hwa) says he could have called him, Bong-soo didn’t want to. He wanted this specific connection with a woman rather than the brotherly camaraderie he has with Hongtak. Nevertheless, he’s irritated when he realises that Hongtak, a confirmed bachelor, is going to get married before him.

Won-ju similarly lost her father in childhood and is also to some extent looking for a reliable male presence which is something she detects in Bong-soo with his dull if stable position at the bank. Like him, she is likened to a child and often depicted on an equal level to those she teaches at the school opposite where Bong-soo works. She finds one of the little girls she teaches crying in the classroom because the other kids said she looks like her and turns it around saying she’s flattered to be compared to someone so pretty before pointing out that it’s probably because they have a similar hairstyle. Won-ju still wears hers in a youthful way that that adds to her air of unsophisticated innocence which stands in strong contrast to the earthy sexuality of Bong-soo’s childhood friend Tae-ran (Jin Hee-kyung).

Like a child, she tries to ask Bong-soo out through a cutesy manoeuvre by using a paying in slip as a confession letter, but he rejects her in an overly harsh way by typing his reply on a receipt and reprimanding her for not taking banking procedures seriously enough. Even so, like many similar films of their era their romance is facilitated by the new technology of video as each is seen to talk into security as a way of communicating with themselves or delivering a message they don’t really intend to be delivered. Bong-soo also does this through the video diaries he records for his future wife, though why he thinks she’s want to watch hours of his monologues is anyone’s guess. Nevertheless, it’s not until he sees Won-ju’s speech to the ATM security camera that he begins to take her seriously as a romantic prospect despite the video not picking up any sound. 

After his relationship with Tae-ran ends badly, Bong-soo gives up doing his magic tricks and becomes cold and cynical, swearing off romance and closing himself off from the serendipity of city life. He might have found Won-ju’s ditsyness irritating with her tendency to drop her change and generally get into some kind of amusing mishap, but later warms to it after seeing her from another angle through the CCTV footage at the bank. Even so, she is not unaware in the irony of Bong-soo’s desire for “a wife” while idly exclaiming she’d like one for herself while Bong-soo points out that what she’s describing is basically a slave which is how wives have been seen even if he insists it’s not that way anymore. Their view of romance is therefore more clear-eyed and realistic, and in its way magical as the edge their way out of monsoon into the relative serenity of the autumnal skies.

Full Moon in New York (人在紐約, Stanley Kwan Kam-Pang, 1989)

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“We’re all Chinese, why argue?” asks one exasperated woman in Stanley Kwan’s tale of displacement and reunification, Full Moon in New York (人在紐約). While the three heroines hailing from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Mainland China respectively may stand in for a pan-Chinese identity along with an attempt to preserve cultural identity in a third place, they also discover a sense of solidarity in being young women cast adrift in a sometimes hostile city and changing times.

As if to ram home the themes of reunion, the film opens with a wedding but one filled with awkwardness and contradictions. Chinese-American businessman Thomas makes a few off-colour jokes about his new bride, a woman he met while travelling to Shanghai, to the effect that it’s very funny he’s married a woman from the Mainland while praising the pastry chef who made their wedding cake for bothering to make the bride and groom like Chinese people. Zhao Hong (Siqin Gaowa) is confused and doesn’t get his jokes while struggling with the foreignness of an American-style wedding, uncertain as to how to cut the cake while Taiwanese guest Hsiung-Ping (Sylvia Chang) quips that she will teach her how to cut up men.

Hsiung-ping is an actress in the middle of a breakup with an obnoxious American boyfriend who has defaulted on the rent for their apartment which is owned by no-nonsense Hong Konger Jiau (Maggie Cheung). Jiau has fallen headlong into the capitalistic abyss of the 1980s in which she chases business success at all costs and is determined to make serious money. “I like taking risks,” she tells the boring the businessman she’s set up with while, despite having been in relationships only with women, apparently falling for his business savvy friend. She’s intermittently stalked by Stella, seemingly an ex that she struggles to move on from.

Though originally at odds with each other, the three women develop a sense of friendship and solidarity not least by being outsiders finding solace in their culture. After getting drunk at Jiau’s father’s Chinese restaurant, Hsiung-ping abruptly breaks into a rendition of a Taiwanese song, while Zhao Hong joins her with a folksong from northern China. Jiau looks on with confusion. She cannot think of what to sing as a woman from Hong Kong, signalling her difficulty in expressing her national identity, before settling on a Sally Yeh Cantopop track. She seems to be one of many choosing to seek their futures overseas with the Handover looming and the shadow of Tiananmen Square in the background. 

Hsiung-Ping, meanwhile, represents a second wave of migration as her father was a nationalist solider who went to Taiwan after the Chinese civil war. With the White Terror now over, men like him aren’t so welcome anymore, though as Hsiung-Ping points out who exactly has he been representing for all these years in America? “Once can save one’s country from abroad,” he answers as if singing the song of an exile and echoing each of the women’s attempts to preserve their culture, though what she comes to discover about him through his relationship with a Mainland Chinese woman who suffered in the Cultural Revolution disturbs her sense of righteousness and legacy.

The legacy of the Cultural Revolution is also what Zhao Hong is trying to escape, but finds herself frustrated by life in America while Thomas constantly brushes off her desire to bring her mother to live with them in New York. Thomas’ family are almost entirely Westernised while he seems to almost fetishise Zhao Hong’s Chineseness with quips about his Mainland wife. She tries to ask him about her mother and he changes the subject by remarking that what drew her to him was her black hair. When they visit his family for dinner, Thomas’ mother cooks a pot roast while his father asks him to dispose of an ancestral tablet that he can’t bring himself to throw away. To Thomas it’s just an antique that he jokes is probably worth something to the right kind of collector and would look “cool” in their apartment. Thomas’ Cantonese-speaking father asks if it’s true that ancestral tablets were forbidden during the Cultural Revolution and smashed, making this one yet another example of culture surviving in another place, but seems to be uninterested in the answer when Zhao Hong sadly recalls her mother carving her late father’s name into the back of a chair in defiance of the regulations.

Zhao Hong’s fatherlessness is also a reflection of her sense of dislocation. As she points out, both Jiau and Hsiung-ping have their fathers with them in New York while she has no one other than Thomas. She looks on in consternation as he chats with a white male employee about arranging visits to Chinatown as a collection of mainly elderly Chinese women get on with the actual work of sorting fabric behind them. He finally tells her she should learn to be more American and likens missing her mother to a mental illness, explaining that American people don’t want to live with their parents all their lives, entirely missing the point that the issue is not cultural notions of filial piety that he has now, to some extent, abandoned, but that the close bond between Zhao Hong and her mother forged during the Cultural Revolution has been disrupted by this migration and must now be resolved through reunion. 

Nevertheless, Jiau swears that one can only prosper here by embracing the qi of New York, on the one hand opening all her windows at night as advised by her feng shui practitioner, while, on the other hand, her Hong Konger father runs a Hunnan-style restaurant that serves Peking Duck to cater to American tastes and expectations with the staff and treasured guests eating the heads in the back. Hsiung-Ping is rudely asked by a white male theatre director why a Chinese woman thinks she can play Lady Macbeth, and Jiau loses her temper when a man deliberately bumps into her in the street chasing after him and then hitting him with her shoe. In various ways, this new environment can be hostile towards them, asking them to discard the culture they have come to save or otherwise to bastardise it, but nevertheless the three women discover a sense of community and solidarity even amid their own conflicts and contradictions.

Screened as part of Hong Kong Golden Age 1985-1997 at the Garden Cinema.

The Strangling (絞殺, Kaneto Shindo, 1979)

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In some ways, the themes of Kaneto Shindo’s The Strangling (絞殺, Kosatsu) may have seemed a little outdated even on its original release in 1979, though it was in fact based on a recent event in which a boy from an elite high school was murdered by his father because he had become violent towards his parents and they feared he would eventually become a criminal, while it was also reported that that he was being sexually abused by his mother. The main controversy may be, however, that the father was given a significantly lighter sentence than might be expected with a crime of this magnitude, partly because his wife had strongly supported him in court.

The film’s title implies that a noose has already been placed around Tsutomu’s (Tsutomu Kariba) neck and it’s the society that is slowly strangling him. His family moved into this area because he succeeded in getting into a prestigious high school which, they hope, will enable him to win a place at Tokyo University and then be set for life. It is never really clear what Tsutomu wants, though it seems he’s growing resistant to the pressure that’s being placed on him. The 4:3 screen ratio seems to bear out this sense of claustrophobia as Tsutomu is regularly cautioned not to get left behind and if that you fall from the ladder before reaching the top, that’s it, you’re out of the game.

His father, Yasuzo (Ko Nishimura), echoes this survival of the fittest mentality in remarking it doesn’t matter how much pesticide they drop, it just makes the flies who survive stronger. If his generation isn’t strong enough, it’ll perish. When a girl in Tsutomu’s class, Hatsuko, takes her own life after killing her abusive stepfather, the other students are asked for their opinions, but they don’t really have any. She was a rival, not a friend, many of them say. They’re all in competition for places at top universities, and now there’s one less person standing in their way. Several of the students call the girl stupid, one remarking that she should simply have tried to manipulate her stepfather instead to turn the situation to her advantage. “We can’t help students who can’t hack it,” the teacher callously explains.

In any case, with all this studying, the kids haven’t had any time to develop social skills or emotional bonds with other people which might be one reason that Tsutomu has become alienated from his parents. The unnaturally loud sound of their walking on en masse to school takes on an ominous quality. Tsutomu becomes interested in a girl, but tries to rape her, and is then confused when she starts avoiding him. The film seems to forget that this happened as the girl, Hatsuko, calls Tsutomu after murdering her stepfather and asks him to have purifying sex with her in the snow before she takes her own life. Hatsuko’s death seems to deepen Tsutomu’s resentment towards the older generation, though he’s incapable of seeing that perhaps he isn’t much different given that he also tried to force himself on Hatsuko. 

He sees his father as the same as hers in that he accuses him of raping his mother, attacking the idea of patriarchal marriage in part because there’s was arranged and not a love match. Meanwhile, he feels Yasuzo to be a hypocrite and is ashamed of him because he continues to live on the inherited wealth of his father. Unlike the other parents, Yasuzo owns a small cafe which would not ordinarily permit living in this kind of home in this kind of area nor support their comfortable upper-middle-class lifestyle. This class-based resentment perhaps also makes Tsutomu feel generally out of place, while also convincing him that his father is a small and petty man which might not be entirely unfair. 

He has a boy working in his cafe who has failed the entrance exam for Tokyo University several times and has now decided to go wherever he gets in on the next round. For Yasuzo, maybe he’s just a fly who didn’t make it. When he catches him stealing from the till, he extends him no compassion and doesn’t stop to ask why he did or if there’s any way he could help. He doesn’t offer him the opportunity to pay the money back and is offended when the boy pleads with him not to tell his teachers or the police because he doesn’t want his mother, whom he’s been sending money home to, to know what he’s become. Rather, Yasuzo makes a point of humiliating him by making the boy kneel and apologise before his female waitress ends up quitting too in solidarity with the belittled worker.

It seems to be this incident that makes clear to Tsutomu that his father uses violence and status to control those around him, but his relationship with his mother is problematic too in that he partly blames her for allowing herself to be dominated by his father while her latent incestuous desire for him sees her mollycoddling her son by sucking on his finger when he cuts himself though he is nearly a grown man. Eventually he tries to rape her too, which is equal parts an attempt to overcome his father and misplaced sexual desire.

Throughout it all, the parents are surrounded by a greek chorus of noisy neighbours who are also all firmly on the father’s side. The implication seems to be that they think they did the right thing in ending their son’s life because he’d already veered off the path and was not going to become a respectable member of society. Though an attempt to take Tsutomu to a doctor only ends up with a diagnosis of “adolescence” which he says can be cured through “good parenting”, the judge seems to have some sympathy for the father with the implication that he’s cleaned up his own mess in being unable to raise his son to be a model citizen. The films seems uncertain whether it agrees with him, but is otherwise convinced that the whole society has gone to pot. When Tsutomu smashes up his father’s pointlessly expensive Buddhist altar, it’s like he takes a bat to the patriarchal order, but in the end achieves very little of anything at all as his rebellion appears to generate only more pain and suffering until the system finally snuffs it out. 

Goodbye, Hello (あなたと私の合言葉 さようなら、今日は, Kon Ichikawa, 1959)

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A pair of young women reassess their views on marriage when one breaks off a long-term engagement and the other unexpectedly falls for her spurned fiancé in Kon Ichikawa’s witty comedy, Goodbye, Hello (あなたと私の合言葉 さようなら、今日は, Anata to Watashi no Aikotoba: Sayonara, Konnichiwa). Exploring a change of social mores in the late 1950s as the economy improved and it became easier for women to lead more independent lives, the film ends with a sense of liberation as the heroine’s desire to reject marriage in favour of self-fulfilment is validated by her departure for America to study abroad at her company’s expense.

On the other hand, it’s a lack of direct communication that causes most of the issues as everyone seems to want someone else to explain their feelings to a third person rather than frankly stating their desires. Kazuko (Ayako Wakao), a woman with an engineering degree working for Nissan Motors, is subject to an arranged marriage set up by her father and his friend that she will marry his son, Hanjiro, who has since moved to Osaka. She wants to break it off, she says because her father can’t look after himself, and asks her old university friend Umeko (Machiko Kyo), who also lives in Osaka, to explain it to him plainly because she is someone who is good at that sort of thing.

Umeko shares Kazuko’s rather low opinion of marriage. She thinks that all men are idiots and marriage is only for dim women who can’t by on their own. For some reason, however, she is quite smitten with Hanjiro and immediately changes her mind. However, her adoptive brother who was brought in to inherit her family’s sushi business, has always assumed she’d eventually marry him, which is why she’s consistently turned down even promising proposals from various suitors despite growing close to aging out of the marriage market. Meanwhile, Kazuko’s air stewardess Michiko has a crush on their over helpful neighbour, Tecchan, though he is actually interested in Kazuko and just assumes she will also be interested in him if he can finally find a steady job after graduating from university.

The men are both more conservative and more romantic. They make a lot of assumptions about women’s feelings and intentions, the chief among being that will ultimately want to become wives and mothers, but they also reject arranged marriages and say they want to marry for love. Of course, they may also be a way of resisting commitment and rebelling against their parents’ control, but they also seem to be interested in romantic fulfilment in a way that is unimportant to some of the women. At its most cynical, the film seems to say that in the end, anyone will do and marriage isn’t much different from a job application in which both parties weigh up the advantages and disadvantages of each candidate and make a rational decision of which offers the best terms. Some fear that Kazuko is held back because her widowed father is incapable of looking after himself in a society which inadvertently infantilises men, but their solution is not that he should learn how to cook and do laundry, rather that he should simply marry again. Hanjiro similarly remarks that he could overcome the barriers to Kazuko’s marriage if he had money by hiring a housekeeper for her father while he still lives with his widowed mother who presumably takes care of him.

But in the end, Kazuko is just using her father as an excuse because what she really wants is to continue with her career. The company have offered her the opportunity of studying abroad in America, but she is afraid to accept it because of the social expectations placed on her. A repeated motif sees Umeko tell her to take off her glasses so that she sees the world less clearly and is almost seduced by conventionality. Her father pressures her to marry, but at the same time does not actually want her to, because he does need someone to take of him and is emotionally unready to let go of his children.

But Kazuko also feels as if she needs her father’s blessing to go abroad and just as she was unable to break off her engagement in person or through a letter, is unable to ask for it until her father volunteers it for himself having realised he may be holding her back in another way. Nevertheless, his solution is that Michiko and Tecchan should move into the attic, even if it’s Tecchan who will presumably be handling the domestic chores such as cooking and laundry. Umeko too seems to have found a third way, marrying a salaryman to become a salaryman’s wife, but still planning to open a branch of her family’s restaurant in a Tokyo department store. Each of the women gets what they want and the men are sort of forced to go along with it, but somehow everyone seems to have ended up in the right place with Kazuko’s decision to reject marriage entirely validated as she seeks new horizons in the wider world.