Black Report (黒の報告書, Yasuzo Masumura, 1963)

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When an overworked prosecutor is handed a murder case, his colleagues tell him he’s lucked out. Election fraud and bribery are dead ends, one says. They hire fancy lawyers, public prosecutors don’t stand a chance. But with a murder, it ought to be fairly straightforward to get a conviction. They are however fateful words, as Kido (Ken Utsui) finds himself squaring off against a ruthless opponent willing to subvert the law in all ways possible in order to get his client off the hook, 

Part of Daiei’s “Black” series, Yasuzo Masumura’s Black Report (黒の報告書, Kuro no Hokokusho) is another in a line of films from the 1960s expressing a lack of confidence in a justice system that is increasingly compromised by social inequality. Kido has 200 cases on his docket. They’ve received seven new ones just this morning, and he’s under pressure to get through them quickly. His boss has told him that a successful conclusion of the murder case will get him a promotion and a transfer to Tokyo. They’ve recently failed to secure convictions in two previous cases, which means the boss’ reputation is on the line and they urgently need to correct the record. Make no mistake, these are the good guys from the film’s perspective, but it’s also true that there’s 99.9% conviction rate in Japan. Losing cases is something that isn’t meant to happen and an embarrassment for law enforcement. 

As his colleague said, however, there is an inequality when it comes to accessing justice given that wealthy people can afford to hire fancy lawyers, while poorer ones can’t and are at a disadvantage. After pinpointing their suspect, Kido is dismayed to find himself up against corrupt lawyer Yamamuro (Eitaro Ozawa) who is willing to use every dirty trick in the book, even buying off witnesses to lie on the stand. Meanwhile, one of Kido’s central arguments relies on leveraging a conventional view of morality in claiming that the suspect, Hitomi (Shigeru Koyama), committed the crime in part because he was having an affair with victim’s wife, Miyuki (Mieko Kondo). The dead man, Kakimoto, had been a womaniser himself, while Miyuki was his second wife and a former bar hostess. In the judgemental atmosphere of the times she is perceived as a woman of low moral character. 

But as Kido’s friend points out, proving things like affairs isn’t particularly easy and even if Miyuki and Hitomi are morally flawed people, that doesn’t make them murderers. Kido is essentially trying them for the wrong “crime” while leveraging salacious gossip and hearsay to bolster his case. His other main argument is that Hitomi killed Kakimoto in order to be able to keep money he had placed with him to earn high interest through illegal loans. Kakimoto had embezzled the money from his company and at some point needed to replace it. This again signals the corrupting influence of money in the post-war society as men like Hitomi take advantage of of people’s desperation through issuing high interest loans, while others like Kakimoto game the system in order to satisfy their greed. Kakimoto does after all seem to have been given to excess with his womanising lifestyle.

Miyuki seems to have taken against Kakimoto’s secretary Ayako (Junko Kano), believing she and Kakimoto were having an affair. Though Ayako declares herself outraged and says that she intends to avenge Kakimoto’s death, even she is eventually corrupted by the possibility of inheriting money from his will along with hush money from Miyuki. Similarly, Kakimoto’s resentful son seems to have come into money recently, having his bought the building where his theatre troupe rehearses. Pretty much everyone else seems to have loathed Kakimoto, so there’s little sympathy for his death and tremendous interest in what’s going to happen to his riches.

It never really occurs to Kido that his case could fall apart if everyone suddenly changed their story on the stand, which is what proceeds to happen. Yet, Kido maintains his faith in the justice system, certain the judges will find their way to the truth without fully considering the fact he’s built an incomplete case and left openings for Yamamuro to undermine it through bribing and intimidating witnesses. Kido seems to think he’ll win just because he’s on the side of righteousness, but the world doesn’t work like that. The film ends on a note of anxiety in which it appears the guilty parties are going to get off scot-free while Kido is exiled from the city, transferred to the provinces in Aomori rather to Tokyo with his career in ruins. Nevertheless, his faith in the justice system to right itself remains absolute as he declares himself ready to trust people again having been reassured by his prosecutor friend and police mentor that they will ensure justice is served so that he can once again return to a world less morally corrupt.

Trailer (English subtitles)

In Between Loves (求愛夜驚魂, Allan Fung Yi-Ching, 1989)

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Zany rom-com meets serial killer thriller in Allan Fung Yi-Ching’s decidedly odd horror comedy, In Between Loves (求愛夜驚魂). Though the title may hint at romantic melodrama, the film is filled with unexpectedly edgy humour and references to the real life “Jars Killer” case that also inspired the film Dr. Lamb in which a taxi driver murdered several of his female passengers and kept their body parts in Tupperware boxes at his home where he lived with his apparently oblivious family members.

Lung (Alfred Cheung Kin-Ting) is the head of a small band of late night taxi drivers who entertain each other with various party tricks over the radio, Lung’s being the ability to tell Christmas cracker-style jokes. They seem to have a long-standing vendetta against another gang of taxi drivers who challenge them to drinking contests and other tests of strength. Lung, meanwhile, has a fixation with beautiful TV reporter Jenny (Maggie Cheung Man-yuk) who once said something nice to him getting out of his cab, and makes a point of watching the news whenever she’s on. His taxi driver friends mostly seem to support his crush and are keen to help him in his romantic quest which is why they all agree to pass on tips about newsworthy goings on that Lung can send to Jenny in the hope of making himself useful to her.

Jenny, meanwhile, is sort of grateful for the tips because she feels undervalued at the station where she works. She clearly wants to be a crusading reporter exposing things like political corruption and injustice, but as her boss tells her, the people of Hong Kong prefer soap operas to news and in any case, they don’t have the budget for serious investigative reporting. There is a mild criticism here of the mass media landscape which is increasingly compromised by its commercial concerns in world in which the line between factual reporting and entertainment is beginning to blur. The press are desperate for salacious content to keep viewers hooked, feeding on human misery and almost willing it into being.

Thus it’s not a stretch when it first appears that Lung has gone off the deep end after being insulted by Jenny’s terrible elitist boyfriend John (Lawrence Ng Kai-Wah) and actually become a serial killer just so that Jenny can have something exciting to report on followed by a scoop on his confession. It turns out that Lung is not the real killer and only wanted to give Jenny a real confession wrapped up in a false one, but this still bears out the depths of his problematic, one-sided romantic obsession with a public figure. In some ways, Lung is presented as an underdog whose pure-hearted love just hasn’t been properly noticed, yet. He picks up another man with flowers for Jenny who is more obviously deranged, but is irritated rather than noticing that he is really no different. He is also irritated to see John pick Jenny up, but, at the same time, perhaps thinks it’s fair enough if she has a boyfriend already.

The problem is that John might actually be the worst person in a film about a cannibalistic serial killer without needing to actually kill anyone. He is possessive of Jenny and has an unpleasant, elitist world view in which he is violent towards Lung and point-blank tells him that a lowly taxi driver who didn’t even finish high school has no business dating an educated, upper-middle-class woman like Jenny. Though this originally presented as an unpleasant point of view and a symbol of the kind of classist oppression faced by men like Lung, the film eventually embraces it with Lung coming to the conclusion that John is right, he’s not good enough for Jenny and ought to date someone from his own social class such as fellow taxi driver Ti (Sandra Ng Kwan-yue). As such, it adopts a rather conservative attitude that supports class divisions and negates the idea of social mobility in insisting that love across the class divide not only will not work but is in some way improper.

Lung may realise both that his infatuation is not “love” but “worship” and that his behaviour has been dangerously obsessive bordering on madness, but this is not the reason that he finally decides to give Jenny up so much as a sense of inferiority in returning to his own working-class world. Meanwhile, the film treats Ti as something of a joke, firstly mocking her for being a tomboyish woman in a man’s occupation, then half-hinting that she maybe transgender. Despite its offbeat humour, the film goes to a fairly grisly place in its final stretches, transitioning into slasher territory as Lung and Jenny are stalked by the real killer upset by Lung’s attempts to claim responsibility for their crimes. Order may have been restored, but this Hong Kong remains a fairly bleak place overshadowed by violence and anxiety in which romantic fantasy may be the only means of escape.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Double Fixation (意亂情迷, Yonfan, 1987)

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“The secret behind the secret is too mysterious for me to explain,” according to some kind of priest in Yonfan’s stylish tribute to the Hitchcockian thriller, Double Fixation (意亂情迷). The film does perhaps take the concept of the MacGuffin a little too far in its glowing blue orb which it makes no attempt to explain with no hint as to why the bad guys are so determined to get it back that they’ll even go to great lengths to retrieve a set of photos taken of it by a hapless photographer.

Jacky (Jacky Cheung Hok-Yau) is, to that extent, a classic “wrong man” who gets mixed up in a surreal conspiracy after being strong-armed into taking pictures of the orb by a wealthy businessman who wanted to give them to the priest so he could unlock its secrets. When Jacky goes to hand them over, he discovers the businessman has been murdered and laments his lost pay cheque, but, at the same time, is far more interested in some pictures he took of a stunning woman in red rather the mysterious blue orb. Jacky soon becomes the main suspect in a murder and is forced on the run, only to be rescued by the mysterious woman, Cherie (Cherie Chung Cho-Hung). Though Jacky falls for her, he can’t be sure she can be trusted. After Cherie disappears from his life, Jacky encounters another woman in San Francisco who looks just like her, but says her name is Jackie and claims to have no memory of him.

A riff on Vertigo, the film plays with identity and obsession as Jacky, abruptly cleared of suspicion as if the crime he was accused of committing may not have happened at all, continues to question his relationships with both Cherie and Jacky. Where Cherie had been a melancholy sophisticate living in a lonely mansion, Jackie is a down to earth aspiring actress whose fashion sense seems far more in the moment. She even seems to have Kim Novak’s hairstyle from the second half of Hitchcock’s movie. As Jacky gets closer to her, he’s honest about the fact that he can’t forget Cherie and the feelings he has for Jackie may be different in nature. Of course, this pains Jackie who can’t find a way to get through to Jacky who is still obsessed with a woman who may not have actually existed.

Jacky eventually comes to the conclusion that it doesn’t really matter who the mysterious woman is as long as she remains “herself” as a means of integrating his love for both Jackie and Cherie who are different but also the same. Yonfan also hints at Jacky’s own duality in often framing him with his reflection, while in a sense his gaze is doubled and refracted by his use of the camera. The film’s Chinese title may be that of Hitchcock’s Spellbound, echoing Jacky’s obsession and doubts about Cherie’s loyalties, but the English title too is reflective suggesting both Jacky’s fixation on a double of his lost love, and the fixation the villains seem to have with retrieving the photos for no clear reason. 

As such, the film has a rather surreal mentality what its unexplained magical orbs, weird priests, and a random comedy character in the form of a strange-looking, effeminate man who carries around a teddy bear and turns up at Jacky’s studio wanting to become a male model but later seems to be connected to the bad guys. Jacky has a naive sense of optimism, sure that all this will be sorted out quickly because he’s an innocent man and never quite taking the situation he’s in very seriously even as he’s chased by a pair of “CID officers” who don’t seem to be obeying police ethics. Yonfan then largely sidesteps the darkness at the centre of the story and dramatises it more as one of improbable adventure and romantic confusion in which Jacky struggles with his conflicted feelings for two women who might be one and the same. The film is just as enthralled by Cherie Chung as its protagonist appears to be as her ghostly presence seems to haunt every frame with her motivations constantly unclear until the very last second. 

Trailer (no subtitles)

Nishi Ginza Station (西銀座駅前, Shohei Imamura, 1958)

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New directors at Nikkatsu were often expected to cut their teeth in the relatively safe realm of B-movie pop star vehicles. Usually running under an hour or so, the films were essentially feature-length advertisements for the artist’s latest song, which therefore had to feature prominently and be heard several times before the credits rolled. As one might expect, this was not a subject that especially interested Shohei Imamura when he was assigned a Frank Nagai movie as his second film, and he did, in fact, try to get out of it by insisting that he had no ear for music. These films were, however, to an extent considered fairly disposable, and as long as they featured the song, the studio didn’t much care what else a director decided to do with them. 

That said, the studio was no particularly happy with Imamura’s version as he gives the song pretty short shrift. Much of time, the film the film follows a henpecked husband’s attempts to reassert his masculinity while his domineering wife takes the kids on holiday. Narrated by Nagai who becomes a kind of MC letting us in on this improbable Ginza story, the film both subverts and eventually embraces contemporary notions of gender roles and marital relations. Jutaro (Shinichi Yanagisawa) is a rather mild-mannered man who has been in a sense emasculated in that he technically “works” at his wife’s pharmacy, though apparently doesn’t really do anything there and his role is mainly to sit quietly where his Riko (Hisano Yamaoka) can keep an eye on him. As he lacks a career, Jutaro is not really fulfilling the criteria of contemporary masculinity and has no real identity when a man’s purpose in life is generally subsumed by his occupation. Neither, on the other hand, has he moved into the domestic sphere as he seems almost afraid of his boisterous children who remain his wife’s responsibility.

Irony, what Riko most fears is that Jutaro’s masculinity will reassert itself. A forthright woman, she micromanages most of his life including instructing the pharmacy staff to ensure he takes the medicine she’s prescribed for him and to call her if he refuses. It’s this that amuses Yuriko (Kyoko Hori) who works at the stationery store opposite and has, in fact, been bribed by Riko to spy on Jutaro and make sure he doesn’t stray during her time away. Jutaro’s friend Asada (Kotoe Hatsui), a vet who ironically mostly performs castrations, is also desperate to escape his domestic responsibilities by getting rid of his wife for a few days, only she only agreed to go on holiday if Riko went with her. Unlike Jutaro, Asada rebels against the constraints of marriage and fatherhood in a more general way by frequenting hostess bars behind his wife’s back. Jutaro, meanwhile, has a tendency to retreat into fantasy remembering his wartime youth and his time on tropical island with an idealised indigenous girlfriend for some reason named “Sally”. 

The laid-back tropical island may in some respects represent of the antithesis of the high-pressured capitalism of the economic miracle that Riko in a way represents as a savvy, no-nonsense businesswoman, though in other ways, Jutaro’s problem is that he is not actually subject to these pressures because he lives in a kind liminal space engaging in neither the domestic or professional spheres. Nevertheless, it reflects a desire for freedom from the enforced conformity of Japanese society,. Asada, however, sees Jutaro’s fantasising as a dangerous displacement activity, suggesting that his frustrations may eventually provoke some kind of crisis. He tells him that he is emotionally constipated and needs to relieve the pressure by having an extramarital affair.

Though diffident, Jutaro eventually agrees and begins pursuing Yuriko but still continues to drift off to memories of the tropical island. In a way, he ends up venturing inside his fantasy after apparently becoming stranded while taking Yuriko on a boat trip and convincing himself he is no longer in Japan but has rediscovered a paradise of masculine freedom. Even so, he experiences a rather rude awakening that shatters his illusions and returns him to his original position as a man without a purpose or sense of identity. Riko maybe touched, reappraising her husband’s affection for his family, but remains in a dominant position. Jutaro can only bid his fantasy goodbye as the shutters of the pharmacy slam down over it. Nagai pops up in random roles throughout, such as a station master, shop owner, and in various other roles around town including the man in the moon and appearing as a mysterious figure carved into a cave, offering ironic comment on Jutaro’s antics and singing his signature song. The vision of Ginza Imamura presents maybe slightly at odds with that of the signature tune, though it does bear out something of the contradictions of Japanese society at a time of rising economic prosperity.

The Insect Woman (にっぽん昆虫記, Shohei Imamura, 1963)

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“What other way is there?” a young woman says to her mother, little understanding that what she so casually tells her quietly crushes her mother’s view of herself as if her long years of suffering had all been for nothing while exposing her justification that everything she had done was to save her daughter from her own fate as not strictly true. The opening scenes of Shohei Imamura’s The Insect Woman (にっぽん昆虫記, Nippon Konchuki) follow a bug stubbornly traversing rough terrain, slipping, pushing onward, overcoming obstacles, yet not really getting anywhere.

The bug’s journey is echoed in Tome’s (Sachiko Hidari) return to the village at the end of the film, now an ageing woman struggling with mountain roads after long years spent in the city and finally snapping her geta leaving her barefoot on rocky ground. Like that of the bug, Tome’s life seems to be a flat circle in which history repeats itself inexorably. The film opens in 1918 as Tome is born out of wedlock to a promiscuous woman who has entered a common law union with a man who appears to have learning difficulties. Chuji (Kazuo Kitamura) may or may not be her biological father, but has an attachment to Tome. As a child, she had asked him whether they are “married” seeing as they sleep together, and he had said that they were. There is definitely more than humouring a little girl’s silly question in his reply, while he flies into jealous rages when there is talk of marrying off the older Tome to the local landlord’s son. 

Just as her mother had, Tome also has a child out of wedlock, though the father can only be Shuzo, the man her family intended her to marry in part in settlement of a longstanding debt. Tome’s early life is defined by the lingering feudalism of the rural society in which her family are serfs beholden to the whims of the landlord. The older women in the village call her away from her factory job which she says she is doing for the war effort to help on the landlord’s farm. Though she is assured she is only required to do farm work, she is raped by Shuzo who urges her to submit to him and serve her country in another way by letting him have his way with her as he will soon be going off to die for the emperor. Tome then becomes his woman, but not actually his legal wife while this justification wears a little thin when it is revealed that Shuzo has another woman and child already and thus will likely not marry her. When she becomes pregnant and Chuji beats Shuzo up, Tome is sent back to her family to have the baby. It turns out to be a girl and the older women have a brief conversation about whether to let it die as female babies are worthless and resources are scarce. This seems to run contrary to rural wisdom seen in other films such as Imamura’s later The Ballad of Narayama in which, grim as it is, male children are often exposed as girls at least can be sold, though possibly not any longer in the new democratic society.

Nevertheless, Tome insists on keeping her baby though feels out of place among her family and returns to the factory where he she has an affair with the married foreman who gets her into trade unionism and then complains that she’s too militant about the labour movement when he gets promoted to assistant manager. Tome bristles at his hypocrisy, but later abandons her ideals herself and becomes an exploiter of women after moving to the city. After visiting a shady cult to overcome her sense of guilt after a child she was looking after who reminded her of her own faraway daughter died in accident, Tome meets a devotee who complains that all of the contemporary society’s ills are caused by a lack of religious rigour, yet is actually running a brothel staffed by “amateur” sex workers to which she forcibly recruits Tome by locking her in a room with a customer. 

Just as Tome schemes by dobbing her new boss in to the police so she can start up her own business using the women as call girls posing as one half of a regular couple to avoid police detection, so she is later betrayed by her own prodigy. Tome’s travel from her rural hometown to Tokyo mimics the nation’s transition from an agrarian to an urban society mired in post-war corruption as seen in the cynical and exploitive conditions at the brothel in which the madam takes almost all the money for herself, deducting large amounts for things like kimonos and room and board, while the “amateur” sex workers prepare blood vials to convince the customers they are virgins. Tome always states that her goal is to earn enough money so that she, Chuji, and her daughter Nobuko who have been shunned by the family, could live together but though she becomes quite wealthy and sends large amounts of money home she makes no real attempt to bring them with her or to go back to the village. 

A grown-up Nobuko (Jitsuko Yoshimura) later comes to her and asks for money because some of the local youngsters are trying to start a collective farm in the wake of land reforms that redistributed landlords’ lands and ended serfdom. Tome is distressed to know that Nobuko has dropped out of school though Tome has been sending her money for the fees, realising that Nobuko will not escape the village through education nor through marrying a nice professional husband and moving to the city. In fact, Nobuko follows in the footsteps of her mother and grandmother by conceiving a child of uncertain lineage out of wedlock after being coaxed into a sexual relationship with her mother’s former lover, Karasawa (Seizaburo Kawazu), a once-prominent businessman who has fallen on hard times. He agrees to lend her the money for the farm on the condition that she make herself sexually available to him twice a week. He eventually asks her to stay and run a shop he owns instead. Nobuko agrees, but actually runs off with the money for the farm and returns to her boyfriend Yoshiji. Like Chuji, he also questions the paternity of her child, but seems to have accepted the fact it may not be his while agreeing to raise it. Tome, meanwhile, returns to the village on Karasawa’s behalf planning to tell Yoshiji about Nobuko’s life in the city in an attempt to force her to return to him.

In blowing Karasawa off and taking the money to invest in the farm, Nobuko may have broken the cycle in another way in shaking off male authority and rejecting the consumerism of the urban society, though her farm is also envisioned as a money-making business that will make them rich rather than purely self-sufficient. Another passenger on the train Tome is travelling on remarks that the rice tastes better because they have had good harvests, bearing out Nobuko’s optimism for the future. Yet in other ways, Tome is merely a passive everywoman largely oblivious to the history happening all around her. She misses the emperor’s speech announcing the end of the war while sick from malnutrition and canoodling with her lover. A former union organiser she ironically gets caught up in the Matsukawa train derailment that was blamed on the Communist Party and Japan National Railway Union which the authorities desperately wanted to crush. As an older woman, she runs into the 1960 Anpo protests, but is irritated because they disrupt her cab journey costing her time and money. She may have been corrupted by the urban, amoral capitalism of the post-war society, but is neither good nor bad, just herself and someone doing what they can to survive. 

Imamura had said that he wanted to challenge the image of suffering womanhood seen in golden age cinema. Self-sacrificing heroines such as those in Naruse’s Floating Clouds or Mizoguchi’s Life of Oharu don’t really exist, he explained. His heroines were strong and outlived men, just like Tome who tries to carve out a kind of independence for herself, but eventually finds it taken from her by other women trying to do the same. Imamura had been prevented from making another film for three years after going over budget on Pigs and Battleships, but returns with a bold new stylistic experiment using freeze fames and ironic composition to depict the “messiness” of Tome’s life in all of its moral ambiguities, victories, and defeats.

BFI London Film Festival Confirms Complete Programme for 2026

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The BFI London Film Festival returns to cinemas across the city 7th to 18th October. East Asian highlights include the latest from Hirokazu Koreeda, Lee Chang-dong, and Ryusuke Hamaguchi as well as big budget blockbuster Godzilla Minus Zero.

China

  • Atlantic Rhapsody – Surreal drama in which a man sets out to find his estranged father.
  • A Girl Unknown – Drama following a young woman taken away from her mother and sent to the country as a child.

Hong Kong

Japan

  • All of a Sudden – Latest from Ryusuke Hamaguchi following a French woman running a nursing home and a Japanese theatre director who has cancer.
  • Godzilla Minus Zero – Sequel to Takashi Yamazaki’s 2023 Godzilla movie.
  • Look Back – Latest from Hirokazu Koreeda following the friendship of two women.
  • Sumo: Spirit Weighs Nothing – Documentary about sumo wrestling.

Myanmar

Philippines

  • Filipiñana – Drama following a young woman working at a Manila golf club.
  • Moonglow – A conflicted policewoman is placed in charge of investigating a crime that she herself committed in Isabel Sandoval’s moody noir. Review.

South Korea

  • Easter – Documentary following a trans burlesque star.
  • Possible Love – Latest from Lee Chang-dong exploring a clash between a filmmaker making a documentary about workers who’ve been made redundant and her subjects.

Thailand

  • 9 Temples to Heaven – A grandmother embarks on a nine-temple pilgrimage with her children and grandchildren.
  • Inherit – Psychological horror in which a wealthy family is infiltrated by a suspiciously youthful grandmother.

Vietnam

  • Hearing – A sound technician notices sonic tensions in the world around him.

The BFI London Film Festival takes place at various venues across the city from 7th to 18th October 2024. Full details for all the films as well as screening times and ticketing information are available via the official website. You can also keep up to date with all the latest news via the festival’s Facebook page, Instagram, and YouTube channels.

Immortal Story (海上花, Yonfan, 1986)

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A young woman dreams of romance after meeting a Japanese boy in Macau, but finds that fate has other plans in Yonfan’s romantic melodrama, Immortal Story (海上花). Employing a non-linear narrative, the film opens in the early 1970s and shifts back 10 years as Ling (Sylvia Chang Ai-Chia) meets Nakamura (Tsurumi Shingo) who is in town for a few days while his school baseball team has a fixture in Hong Kong. Though the pair are smitten with each other, Ling never sends the letters she promised to write him, realising that she is corresponding with a romantic fantasy rather than a real person, while Nakamura apparently continues to think of her after returning to Japan.

Ten years later, Ling is discovered cradling Nakamura’s body in a hotel room in Macau and is presumed to have stabbed him with a fruit knife. The film then explores what led to this tragic ending through a series of flashbacks and witness testimonies through which it becomes apparent that both Ling and Nakamura have become somehow corrupted during their time apart. Even during her youth, however, it seems that Ling did not really believe in the reality of romantic salvation and was too afraid to pursue her relationship with Nakamura. After all, she could easily have sent the letters that she continued to write for the full 10 years, but preferred to maintain the fantasy rather than risk it shattering.

Instead, she drifted into an abusive relationship with a local boy who got her pregnant and then dumped her, after which she was rescued by bar owner/madam, Blanche (Yiu Wai). If Ling is caught in a romantic fantasy, then so in a way Blanche is too as it is clear that she is infatuated with Ling who will never return her affections. In fact, when Ling reveals that she plans to leave with Nakamura, she says that she feels indebted to Blanche but also that she has effectively repaid her kindness through the money she has made working for her as an escort. This is in a way Blanche’s tragedy, that in seeking to trap and possess Ling, she ends up ruining her while Ling feels only gratitude rather than affection. To escape the trauma of her life as a sex worker, she ends up turning to drugs from which neither Blanche nor Nakamura is able to save her.

What exactly happened to Nakamura in the intervening 10 years is never revealed, but it seems that he has ironically become involved with the drugs trade and is therefore partly responsible for Ling’s fate. He vows that he will get her off the drugs and take her back to Japan with him, but agrees to help her inject not only after they first reconnect but when they meet again in the hotel room before they’re supposed to leave. Blanche isn’t wrong when she accuses him of feeding on the blood of vulnerable people, though one could say she does the same in pressing them into sex work as she does with Ling. Unsurprisingly, Blanche is against Ling reuniting with Nakamura, but also asks why she allows men to hurt her, rather than accept the care and nurture Blanche is giving her if while, at the same time, harming her through her exploitation. 

The 1970s setting maybe crucial to making the timeline work as Nakamura states the reason he can speak Chinese is that he was born in China, though this “immortal story” feels like something that might have happened much earlier. There is a strong sense of nostalgia for a lost time of innocence and possibility, though Ling already seems to think that her future is out of reach even as a teen. When she reunites with Nakamura, it’s in a ruined building where she once used to live that is about to be torn down, hinting both that their romance has no real future and that it belongs to another time or may really never have existed at all outside of a mutual fantasy. In these early scenes, Ling is entirely dressed in a bright white, as she is in the hotel room, while as a tragic nightclub singer later she wears black like the ironically named Blanche. Their outfits often complement each other in a mix of black and white symbolising both the genuineness of their connection and the corruption stemming from Blanche’s line of work. In the end it maybe Blanche who is trapped within an impossible dream of romance, caught by the futility of her desire, while in a way freeing Ling from the torment of the shadow of an illusionary lover.

First Love (첫사랑, Lee Myung-se, 1993)

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Expectations were high for Lee Myung-Se’s third film, First Love (첫사랑, Cheot Sarang), given that My Love, My Bride had been a runaway success. First Love proved to be, however, one of the worst box office disasters in Korean cinema history, selling fewer than 6000 tickets in Seoul during the Lunar New Year holiday. The film was however well received by the industry with star Kim Hye-soo picking up best actress at that year’s Blue Dragon Awards. Lee had originally intended to cast Choi Jin-sil, the female lead of My Love, My Bride, who had even turned down a TV drama series to do the film, but she apparently didn’t take to the personality of the character after reading the script and withdrew. Casting former child star Kim Hye-soo was seen as a left-field choice, but paid off in spades as Kim perfectly embodies the innocence and heartbreak of first love in charming fashion.

In some respects, the film is structured in a similar way to Thornton Wilder’s Our Town which first-year university student Young-shin’s (Kim Hye-soo) theatre club is performing. As the Stage Manager explains in the play, the first act will deal with everyday life, the second with first love, and the third with something else he assumes the audience will be able to guess, in case of the play, death. The film, however, ends with something more like continuity as the street where Young-shin lives turns from summer into autumn, winter, and then comes full circle into spring as one of the poems that pepper the screen pops up to remind us that everything begins and ends with nothing, or in other words, life goes on.

Set in the 1970s, the film opens with Young-shin taking a trip to Seoul from her rural hometown where she is a student in order to recruit a director for their play. She is immediately disappointed by Kang Chang-Wook (Song Young-chang), reflecting that she was expecting someone much more literary and poetic who in contrast to the local men wouldn’t smoke and drink excessively. Chang-wook even has an off-putting habit of rubbing his hair to shake the dandruff out which suggests poor hygiene. Nevertheless, her initial aversion to him soon transitions into attraction and an all-consuming, obsessive love, though she is only 19 and he 32. 

Much of the film takes place within her romantic fantasy and flights of fancy in which she develops superpowers such as invisibility or telekinesis while pursuing Chang-wook, her bicycle seemingly moving on its own under the vibrant cherry blossoms. She frequently addresses the camera directly to explain aspects of her life, particularly how boring it is in this rural town where the height of excitement is sending her younger sister out on an illicit late night mandu run. This thrill of romance is also, in that sense, a way of passing the time, though it’s often difficult to see what she sees in Chang-wook who is often patronising and has a bad drinking habit. When the pair go on a kind of date to a historical temple, he drinks so much that they miss the last train and Young-shin has to take him to a hotel, booking into a rent by the hour type place without realising and having to lie about her age on the register. 

But while she is experiencing her first love, so are others. Her childhood friend Moon-su (Jo Min-ki) is clearly in love with her, trying to declare his feelings by giving her a copy of Tugenev’s First Love, though this proves too obscure a clue for Young-shin who is still wrapped up in her own romantic drama. The deliberately artificial set design, mostly taking place on a studio set, evokes a strong sense of nostalgia for an idealised youth. Young-shin and her friend fancy Gregory Peck and Jean-Paul Belmondo, while there are posters for South Pacific in the background, echoing the ways in which Young-shin has also turned her life into a romantic melodrama. The saturated colour scheme also echoes the Technicolor past, golden light pouring in through the studio windows as Young-shin ponders her romantic dilemma. Only once are we reminded of the less cosy side of the ‘70s as the sirens blast to mark the start of the curfew, trapping Young-shin in the motel room with a passed-out Chang-wook waiting for the first train. Young-shin’s story may be tinged with melancholia as her romantic illusions are smashed by an unexpected discovery, but she still holds on to the memories of this magical time while knowing that there are other loves to still to come as time marches on.

Trailer (no subtitles)

My Love, My Bride (나의 사랑 나의 신부, Lee Myung-se, 1990)

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Following his anarchic debut Gagman, Lee Myung-se’s My Love, My Bride (나의 사랑 나의 신부, Naui sarang, naui sinbu), might seem like a more subdued affair recalling the technicolor rom-coms of 1960s Hollywood, yet makes use of innovative stylistic techniques to explore the lives of a newlywed couple in a newly democratising Korea. Like many similarly themed films, it is keen to poke fun at the protagonist’s chauvinistic perspective and self-involvement, but cannot completely condemn them either in expecting at least a degree of audience identification with this Korean everyman.

The film opens boldly with Young-min (Park Joong-hoon) directly addressing the camera to introduce himself and explain that this is the most important day of his life as he plans to propose to university girlfriend Mi-young (Choi Jin-sil). She, however, has got the wrong end of the stick and is convinced that he’s going to dump her. This set of mismatched expectations and miscommunication sets the tone for much of their early marriage as they struggle to settle into the rhythms of co-habitation and gendered expectations of married life.

Mi-young has given up work on her marriage, though Young-min often stays late at the office and expects Mi-young to take care of all the domestic responsibilities. When Mi-young tells him that she’s going to stay overnight after visiting her mother, his first question is what he’s supposed to do about his dinner. Mi-young has already prepared it and left it in the fridge for him to warm up later, specifically instructing him not to stay out too late drinking. Young-min, however, takes this as an opportunity to rebel against the constraints of his newly married life and fill the temporary feminine absence by pursuing a colleague, Seung-hee (Kim Bo-yeon).

Seung-hee is in many ways portrayed as the polar opposite of country girl Mi-young whom Young-min occasionally mocks and looks down on for what he sees as her lack of sophistication and poor cultural knowledge. Seung-hee is a poet who dresses in smart suits exuding confidence and power that suggest she will not be subservient to men but assert her power over them. She shows Mi-young up first when everyone at the office suddenly invites themselves over to Young-min’s apartment for a “house warming”, expecting Mi-young to conjure up a dinner party to show off her domestic skills at moment’s notice. Seung-hee is a fine singer and offers a poignant rendition of Love Me Tender, prompting Young-min’s boss to insist Mi-young entertain them with a song. She obliges with a popular love song, but her singing voice is much more ordinary and her inability to hit the high notes provokes horrified faces from Young-min’s colleagues who continue to make fun of the pair because Mi-young had spelled out “I love you” in peas in the lunchbox she made for Young-min. The older men, meanwhile, all go to lunch together reflecting that they can hardly expect the same from their own wives after so many years of marriage.

Young-min is also constantly asking himself what love is and wondering if his married life will continue to be happy. Split into a series of chapters, the film focuses a number of episodes in which the couple must confront various issues from a fairly traumatic honeymoon and wedding night to Young-min’s wandering eye and irrational jealousy. Though he tells Seung-hee that marriage should be about love rather than ownership, on spotting Mi-young in a cafe with another man he jumps to the immediate conclusion that she must have met with an old lover who is trying to win her back. In fact, it was her old boss whom she ran into by chance while waiting for Young-min, and the reason that she’s crying is that he informed her one of their former colleagues has passed away. Young-min makes no attempt to talk to Mi-young about any of this, but starts giving her the cold shoulder for no reason endangering their growing bond as newlyweds. Mi-young, meanwhile, looks back on first love after receiving a letter from an old boyfriend who moved to Canada. He is no longer the handsome young man she once knew but portly middle-aged father of two. 

To escape the boredom of her married life she takes a trip to a random rural town where she buys cigarettes, has her photo taken, and is offered an unexpected job opportunity after wandering into a cafe that is clearly a front for a delivery coffee service. Though Young-min is often quick to pride himself for his emotional intelligence as a writer, he’s often inconsiderate of Mi-young. When he wins the New Writer’s Award, he insults Mi-young’s outfit moments before they leave implying that she looks cheap and common and that people will expect a writer’s wife to look sophisticated. At the party, she’s sat sadly on her own ignored by everyone including Young-min, while he expects to trot her out for interviews as his loyal and supporting wife. Even when, she’s taken ill, his mind flashes to the scenario of her death on which his main thoughts are that he’s too busy for all this right now, and though it might be nice to live alone, who’s going to take care of his laundry?

Nevertheless, Mi-young’s temporary absence does make him realise that he misses her in ways other than the practical and seems to paper over the other cracks their relationship so that they can put all the petty disagreements to one side and love and accept each other. Lee uses a series of humorous devices including onscreen graphics and speech bubbles to reflect the protagonists’ thought processes, while the fantastic production design gives their world a sense of cosy unreality. Meanwhile, he uses the changing of the seasons to reflect the changing dynamics of couple, embracing romantic imagery such as the moon rising and snow falling as Young-min and Mi-young fall into a more settled rhythm and an older Young-min reflects that he is still in the process of finding out what love is, but is grateful for the happy life he’s been able to make for himself as a husband and father.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Harbour Toast: Victory Is in Our Grasp (港の乾杯　勝利をわが手に, Seijun Suzuki, 1956)

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A former sailor’s dreams of returning to the sea are disrupted by his brother’s brush with romance and crime in Seijun Suzuki’s directorial debut Harbour Toast: Victory Is in Our Grasp (港の乾杯　勝利をわが手に, Minato no Lanpai: Shori wo Waga Te ni). Co-scripted by Toshio Nakagawa and Kirio Urayama, the film explores themes of post-war orphanhood, loneliness, and the corrupting influence of desire while hinting at the style Suzuki would later make his own in its brief moments of surrealism and romanticism. 

Shinkichi (Ko Mishima) had to give up sailing after taking the rap for a maritime accident, but still dreams of returning to the sea which is his only real him. Meanwhile, his younger brother, Jiro (Shinsuke Maki), is an up-and-coming jockey. A mysterious woman (Sumiko Minami) often appears at the track and bets big, supposedly waving a red handkerchief when she wins though no one can remember her horses ever coming. There is indeed a kind of ghostliness to Asako, as if she were a kind of mermaid of lingering spirit sent to beckon men to their doom. She is a little more etherial than your average femme fatale, and is apparently drawn to Jiro by his apparent loneliness. 

This loneliness is also something that worries Shinkichi, explaining that their parents passed away young while Shinkichi has spent most of his life at sea. Jiro too seems a little resentful of his brother, accusing him of selfishness and suggesting that he never really cared for him or he wouldn’t have run away to be a sailor. This is a little unfair and Shinkichi appears to take good care of Jiro, offering to do his laundry and having already not only laid out a futon but put a hot water bottle in there too before Jiro even got home. Even so, this sense orphanhood and isolation are also what draws Jiro towards Asako as if also to death. Though everyone at their local bar is expecting him to get together with kimono-wearing barmaid Sanae who appears to have a crush on him, Jiro isn’t interested. He describes her interest in him as a burden, and resents the interference of the customers at the bar. In some ways, he desires to remain alone, but in others is seduced by Atsuko’s bewitching sense of sophistication as she invites him to upscale bars and into a world he had not yet known.

Yet Atsuko is also under the thumb of petty gangster Misawa (Shinsuke Ashida) who has set him up as a target for the purpose of fixing bets. Misawa promises to give Asako up if Jiro throws the race, leaving him with a dilemma in which he must choose between integrity and his racing dreams, and romantic fulfilment. For her part, Asako seems to have fallen for Jiro for real and tells him to stand up to Misawa by winning the race, though in the end his decision is sort of made for him leaving Jiro open to further threats and intimidation by Misawa. In the end, it’s Shinkichi’s self-sacrificing nature that comes to the fore as he gives up his own dreams of returning to the sea in order to rescue Jiro and prevent his future from being corrupted by Misawa, though unlike other similar films Asako is framed more as a secondary victim and allowed the possibility of redemption by starting a new life with Jiro. Instead, Shinkichi takes on the burden of their crimes and symbolically frees the younger generation from them. 

Suzuki leans into the same sense of ghostliness as in the later Inn of the Floating Weeds while using artistic devices such as the haze which surrounds Asako in Jiro’s imagination, or the super imposition of Misawa and Asako as Jiro faces his dilemma on the track. As spinning shot echoes Jiro’s dizziness in falling in love, while the bar scenes feature the kind of joyful camaraderie familiar from similar moments in Suzuki’s later career. Though he is not yet working with production designer Takeo Kimura, the film nevertheless bear out Suzuki’s aesthetics and not least in the use of a white rose as symbol of Jiro’s pure-hearted love for Asako, later literally chewed up and spat out by Misawa whose nihilistic cynicism is perhaps the greatest threat the the post-war future.