Once a Thief (縱橫四海, John Woo, 1991)

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A trio of orphans raised to be international art thieves rebel against their mentor when a job goes wrong in John Woo’s throwback to his early comedies, Once a Thief (縱橫四海). A breezy, Lupin III-esque adventure, the film on one level seems to be satirising the vacuity of extreme wealth as the rich spend huge amounts of money to buy stolen paintings they can’t show to anyone while painting our heroes as anti-capitalist rebels for whom the money is but a secondary concern.

They are, after all, having quite a lot of fun with their complicated heists. Though the robberies are finely tuned affairs, we also see that the team are not infallible and often riding on bravado such as Rice Pudding (Chow Yun-fat) failing to land smoothly in the getaway car and being left trailing behind alone. The trio take it in good humour and have a real sense of camaraderie in which they’re forever playing tricks on each other. Not even the intrusion of romantic rivalry can disrupt their friendship as it becomes clear that both Jim (Leslie Cheung) and Rice Pudding are in love with Red Bean (Cherie Chung), with Rice Pudding originally having the upper hand.

There is something quite funny about the fact that the other two are called “Rice Pudding” and “Red Bean” but “Jim” is just “Jim”. Despite the romantic rivalry, there’s also a sense of homoerotic tension that exists between the two men, with Jim cheekily flirting with a portrait artist while boasting of the gang’s success. The European setting adds a sense of sophistication and international glamour that recalls classic Hollywood cinema, while hinting a new globalised society. The gang are wanted by “Interpol”, and the Zenigata-like figure of a Hong Kong policeman (Paul Chu) who acts as a kind of alternate father figure watching over the trio since they were children and trying to get them to give up their life crime.

The man who raised them, Boss Chow (Kenneth Tsang), meanwhile, was cruel and mainly sees them as tools to be used to enrich himself. When Rice Pudding loses the use of his legs and uses a wheelchair to get around, he is more or less disowned as no longer useful, only to be rescued by their Godfather. Rice Pudding, however, is surprisingly adept and able to perform some killer dance moves in his chair not to mention fighting bad guys in much the same way he did before. But despite the cartoonish fun, there is an unexpectedly violent aspect to the gang’s final heist as Jim strangles guards and Rice Pudding throws plastic explosives at their heads which he then detonates remotely. 

Read Bean, meanwhile, is largely relegated to making travel arrangements and hanging around at airports to waiting to find out if her friends have survived or not. She also acts as a kind of interpreter, speaking French to facilitate their deals which suggests Chow trained them in specific ways, though she does not always translate accurately, trying to put the guys off accepting a risky job from a wealthy Frenchman because she wants to get out of their life of crime and settle down even while Rice Pudding and Jim still seem to be addicted to the thrill of the chase. Their mission sees them sneak into a chateau and steal a painting from a hidden cellar they can only access through a secret door while avoiding booby traps like electrified floors and laser fields they cheekily dance the limbo through. 

For them, it was never really about the artwork nor the money, but the sense of achievement in stealing without being caught while running rings around law enforcement. This sense of rebellion which extends in a way towards the capitalist system in which the super wealthy squabble over trinkets while elderly women starve, is eventually turned back on Chow whom they end up defying in order to break free of his control. Chow got greedy, double-crossing just about everyone in order to make his stolen painting more valuable when he sells it and then steals it back again. Filled with zany humour and expertly crafted action sequences, the film never takes itself all that seriously while revealing in the roguish antics of the three gentlemen thieves living their best lives rebelling against a world ruled by wealth and privilege through ingenious crime.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Mutation (사랑의 탄생, Shin Su-won, 2025) [Fantasia 2026)

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Two people largely excluded from mainstream society bond over a shared sense of loss and loneliness in Shin Su-won’s lighthearted road trip movie, The Mutation (사랑의 탄생). Though the English-language title may sound a little harsh, hinting at some kind of science fiction dystopia, the film is in other ways as the Korean title “The Birth of Love,” implies about self-acceptance and mutual solidarity among those that society has continues to other and reject.

The Korean title is quoted in each of the lives of the protagonists, Se-oh (Han Hyun-min), a man with dark skin who was born to two Korean parents, and Sora (Lee Zoo-young), a gay woman whose former partner took her own life after being pressured into a heteronormative marriage by her conservative mother. Se-oh has been rejected by his family as his father refuses to accept him as his son despite his mother’s assurance that she has remained faithful him. He tries asking an old friend of his mother’s for answers, but she tells him that what matters is only that he was born from love. Sora, meanwhile, discovers a letter written by her late partner Min-ji as a omechild that she titled “the birth of love” and recorded her growing feelings for a female classmate along with the fear that her parents would find out.

Sora’s difference is not visibly obvious in the way that Se-oh’s is, but she still finds that she is excluded from mainstream society. She says that she makes tables because they’re something to be shared rather than used selfishly, but it seems that few people are willing to come to hers despite her instructions to Se-oh that if he got a bigger table for his apartment people would soon come to sit around it. It does however signal her own openness and desire for connection, even if that desire is often rejected or goes unmet. After agreeing to accompany Se-oh on his trip, she too has somewhere she does not have the courage to go alone. On returning to the town where Min-ji lived, she discovers her mother being hassled in the market by a group of religious people who appear to be aware of exactly how her daughter died and why but berate her for not raising her “better”. Min-ji’s mother had thought that if she married, Min-ji would settle down and live a “normal” life, but in the end Min-ji could not live that way. Her mother is now filled with regrets wishing she had accepted her daughter for who she was despite what others may have said in their small and conservative town where the local pastor holds sway.

Min-ji’s mother did not tell Sora of her death for some time nor did she invite her to the funeral, hoping that no one would find out. Se-oh wasn’t invited to his mother’s funeral either and his name is conspicuously absent from the list of official mourners at the funeral hall. He is continually treated as an outsider as strangers automatically address him in English. It never occurs to them to someone who looks like him may have been born and raised in Korea and know no other language, and as such they reject his Koreanness. This has also meant that he has struggled to find employment and has been restricted to doing a series of precarious casual labour jobs, the latest of which is ironically playing the white tiger at a local amusement park. People like me better when I wear a mask, he says, which perhaps something Sora can also understand.

But she also says that Min-ji was the only person she ever knew who didn’t wear one, implying that it may not be possible to survive in this society as an authentic person without some kind of boundary between oneself and others. Nevertheless, through their gentle road trip, the pair begin to come to terms with the past and also with themselves in gaining a level of self-acceptance that allows them to move forward, together or apart. Warm and gentle in spirit, the film makes the most of its idyllic country settings while focusing on the simple power of human connection in the face of a world that can often be harsh and unforgiving of those it perceives to be somehow other.

The Mutation screened as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

My Sassy Girl (엽기적인 그녀, Kwak Jae-yong, 2001)

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A smash hit and social phenomenon on its original release, My Sassy Girl (엽기적인 그녀, Yeopgijeogin geunyeo) is one of a small number of films from the early 2000s that like Japan’s Densha Otoko drew inspiration from the new media of online blogging and message boards. In a meta touch, the film includes these origins within the action as the hero, Gyeon-woo (Cha Tae-hyun), begins writing about his relationship with a strange and intimidating young woman (Jun Ji-hyun) on the internet only to see his work optioned for major feature film.

In some ways, these meta themes play into the central ideas of fate and time travel while giving the love story a sense of epic, romantic heft. It could be said that in the character of the unnamed woman, the film undercuts contemporary notions of gender roles and traditional femininity, but at the same time even in subverting them perhaps leans into a societal sense of misogyny. Gyeon-woo paints himself as a feminised man, raised for a time as a girl which is why he is mild-mannered, submissive, and lacks ambition in life. All qualities he associates with traditional femininity. He is attracted to the girl, but also disgusted by her unfeminine behaviour and most particularly by her public drunkenness. Her chewing of her own vomit on the train is apparently inspired by a real-life event and the reason for designating her the “bizarre and freakish” woman of the title. 

Gyeon-woo also suffers physical violence at the hands of most of the women in film including his mother, further marking him out as weak and hard done by in comparison to these strong women while most of the men, such as his own father and that of the girl who is a habitual drinker, are ineffectual and go along with their wives for a quiet life. The girl continues to boss him around, ordering for him in cafes, making him wear her high heels while she takes his trainers when her feet hurt, and generally telling him what to do in the relationship. Gyeon-woo appears to have a slightly masochistic streak and despite describing his discomfort this rejection of traditional femininity, actually seems to like being bossed around and physically abused by the girl, even later seeking out similar women, though the film does also include a transphobic joke that is very of its time. 

Eventually, he begins to realise that the girl’s violence and demanding nature are awkward ways of expressing love while she works through issues of her own that exist to one side of him. There are reasons that all her screenplays are about a heroic woman travelling in time to save someone she loves while simultaneously convinced she is destined to meet someone from the future. Gyeon-woo, meanwhile, an engineering student, is more grounded and down to earth. He nurtures their love in another way, replanting a damaged tree solely so the girl won’t be sad if she returns to find that it has died. Fate deliberately keeps them apart as their paths repeatedly fail to cross with a series of near misses before a fateful encounter, implying that romantic timing is much about the readiness for love as anything else, or as someone puts it, building a bridge of chance. Only once the girl has begun to work through her feelings, and Gyeon-woo has accepted his filial responsibilities, can their love be fulfilled. 

This is perhaps most obvious in the episode in which they become involved in a military siege when a soldier takes them hostage in an amusement park after deserting because his girlfriend has left him for another man. While the soldier’s obsessive love turns dangerously destructive, the girl is able to talk him down by reminding him that if he really loved his former girlfriend he’d set her free and rejoice in her happiness. The film’s quirky atmosphere with its series of weird events in a strange way recall the world of Tomihiko Morimi with its cosmic coincidences and tiny ironies that are nevertheless underpinned by a genuine sense of poignancy and warmth, willing these two star-crossed lovers to finally find each other at the right time as past and future finally coalesce into a more perfect present. 

My Sassy Girl screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Eight Taels of Gold (八兩金, Mabel Cheung, 1989)

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A man is not a man without eight taels of gold, according to returning taxi driver slim arriving home after long years of absence only to discover that no one is there. They’ve all been moved on too, ironically pushed further back into the past by China’s rapid demand for progress. A continually displaced person, he begins to find love, but this too like all things is destined to flow away from him.

Slim (Sammo Hung Kam-Bo) fled the Cultural Revolution as a teenager without a word to his family vowing never to return. He has sent them only one letter since, he tells childhood friend “Odds-and-Ends” (Sylvia Chang Ai-Chia) because he didn’t want to lie and the truth would only have upset them. While in the village, he straddles an awkward line presenting these two visions of his life in New York, the one aspirational as symbolised by the “eight taels of gold” that mark him out as a successful man, and the other the painful reality that his life has been hard and lonely and that he has far less to show for it than he would like. 

Yet paradoxically, it’s this “reality” that begins to share with Odds-and-Ends who initial excitement about a new life abroad is tempered by her growing attraction to Slim and fear of marriage to a man she barely knows in a place where she knows no one. To her America represents modernity, sophistication, and consumerist comfort. But Slim has been there already and he knows that her life will most likely be confined to Chinatown where she will wash dishes in her husband’s restaurant and live in a poky flat for the rest of her life. The gifts Slim takes back with him as evidence of his wealth are largely emblems of American capitalism like Nike trainers along with trinkets such as Statue of Liberty cigarette lighters (that ironically have “made in China” stamped on the bottom) and oversize paper replicas of American dollars. Due to various incidents along the way he seems to shed his supply as he goes as if moving closer to the old China by dropping the trappings of his new life in the land of consumerism. Nevertheless, even his gold and the watch he gives to his father were borrowed to bolster an illusionary sense of success.

Meanwhile, the village itself has changed and he finds himself displaced once again. His parents have taken his heavily pregnant sister Siu Mei back to their own home village in an attempt to circumvent the One Child Policy. She has one child already, but it’s a girl and Slim’s father thinks she ought to have a boy, exposing the ways in which these new policies interfere with traditionally held cultural beliefs that nevertheless refuse to die. Slim’s father’s desire for a grandson coupled with the One Child Policy quite literally endanger his daughter’s life. It turns out the baby is breech, but they’re reluctant to take her to a proper hospital in case the authorities find out they’ve cheated the regulations to have an unauthorised second child. Instead they have to make do with a bossy midwife who refuses to wash her hands and crassly asks if they want to save the baby or mother without making any effort at all to try saving both.

It’s Odds-and-Ends who finally saves the day by pitching in to help, acting as if she knows what she’s doing but in reality battling a fear of blood and total inexperience with childbirth and pregnancy. This in some ways signals her readiness to deal with the unknown, but also the misogyny inherent in the society in which Siu Mei’s life is a secondary consideration, essentially disposable in the quest to produce a male heir. Odds-and-Ends is to some extent a sacrificial victim too. Though she begins to dread the return of her fiancé, she is powerless to resist marriage despite her growing affection for Slim. When they go to a dance together, Odds-and Ends dances in this strange style, like a country girl aspiring to an unseen urbanity, but is shouted at by the guard who tells her to keep her hands below her head. We don’t have your American freedoms here, she tells Slim, little knowing that they don’t necessarily have them in America, either. 

To that extent, Odds-and-Ends comes to represent a fleeting, elusive vision of China that eventually slips through Slim’s fingers in part because he is too diffident to claim it. Despite herself, she becomes “Jenny” bound away to a foreign land while Slim can only watch as she disappears over the horizon. He seems to travel back further into the past, discovering one of the legendary dragon boats that bears out the legend that once this place was all under water. In the end, he has given away all his eight taels the last of them to Odds-and-Ends who is left with worthless riches in place of love. In the end, Slim is left all alone caught between one place and another and perhaps realising that he no longer has a homeland to return to.

Trailer (no subtitles)

I Blew Out the Candles Before Making a Wish (我未許願先吹蠟燭, Chao Koi Wang & Hu Chin-Yen, 2025)

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“Money can’t solve everything,” according to Jojo’s teacher, but life without it is certainly very difficult in Chao Koi-Wang and Hu Chin-Yen’s heartwarming drama I Blew Out the Candles Before Making a Wish. The film’s title perhaps bears out the sense of disappointment and futility among those trapped on the margins of contemporary Macanese society where life is one great crap shoot and the only way out of their straitened circumstances is to win big at one of the area’s famous casinos. 

But as recently released ex-offender Hua points out, there are wins and losses in gambling and more often than not they lost. Jojo is living with her elderly grandmother following her parents’ divorce and father’s disappearance after fleeing to avoid loan sharks who now pester them for their money. Jojo’s father told her he was scammed by his business partner, but her grandmother suggests it was down to a gambling problem. It’s ironic then that Jojo’s proposed solution is to use an insanely large number of “dead chips”, those that can’t be cashed in but can be used to place bets, to get rich quick and pay off her father’s debts so he can come and the family can live in a comfortable environment. The only snag is that, thankfully, they don’t yet let small children enter casinos.

While it’s clear that everyone seems to be feeling a sense of desperation, there are also those who help others such as the landlord that lets Jojo’s grandmother rent a makeshift rooftop apartment cheaply while even the evil loan shark turns out to have a compassionate side. Nevertheless, Jojo’s attempts to lean on adults for help largely fail, beginning with her hypocritical teacher who criticises gambling but agrees to help her then pockets the money for himself telling her he lost it all. He’s later seen looking in an estate agent’s window with his girlfriend, implying he wanted the money to buy a flat because, realistically speaking, there’s no way he could do that on a teacher’s salary and without the means to own property things like marriage and a domestic life also become more difficult. 

Hua, who came to Macau from Taiwan for love, also believes his economic situation caused the breakdown of his marriage and is desperate to win his wife back. Fearful she’d leave him, he committed a scam to buy a flat she moved out of when he went to jail. He’s now renting it out to a collection of migrant workers like himself to cover the mortgage while working as a debt collector. Yet he too is touched by Jojo’s plight and agrees to help her, though even he is tempted by the idea of scamming her out of her all money. Perhaps he sympathises with her because they are both in effect waiting for someone who likely won’t return, he his wife and she her father. As such, they form a kind of familial bond with Hua trying to take care of Jojo and her grandmother while keeping half an eye on the prospect of paying off his mortgage. 

On the other hand, it says something about societal indifference that Jojo goes on living on her own while her grandmother’s in hospital and their electricity has been cut off because she’s not around to pay the bill. They need someone to sign a consent form so her grandmother can have surgery, but there don’t appear to be any other responsible adults in Jojo’s life. An attempt to ask her mother, who has remarried and has a new family, proves more traumatic than anything else. No one except the loan sharks appears to check in her at all. She is resourceful and proactive, but also still a child and largely unable to understand the long-term implications of her plan or that gambling is a dangerous habit that, as Hua says, can ruin lives.

In that way the film is subtly critical of Macau’s economic dependence on the casino industry and the wealthy inequality that comes along with it. Jojo is only a little bit worried about the owner of the chips coming back for them, while Hua suggests they have belonged to someone so rich they probably just forgot about it. Gambling is something rich people do he says, and after all you can only really do it responsibly by playing with money you can afford to lose which neither of them have. Still, they keep rolling the dice anyway, hoping that their numbers will come up. Grandma may try to caution them, revealing a mistake she made in her own youth born of fear and desperation, that greed will always come back to bit you, but there is at least a sense of tempered optimism in their mantra of “lose today, win tomorrow,” that keeps hope alive when all else seems bleak.

I Blew Out the Candles Before Making a Wish screens as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (Tradition Chinese / English subtitles)

Deep Quiet Room (深度安靜, Shen Ko-shang, 2025)

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Reeling after his wife’s unexpected suicide, a bereft husband begins to discover the destructive effects of unresolved trauma amid the oppressive patriarchal social system of Taiwanese society in Shen Ko-shang’s hard-hitting drama, Deep Quiet Room (深度安靜, shēndù ānjìng). The “deep quiet room” of the title is both literal in referring to that at the back of the couple’s flat they had designated as a nursery where pregnant wife Yu-ting cocoons herself, and to the psychological space into which her husband cannot enter.

Told from Yu-Ming’s (Joseph Chang) perspective, the film centres on his sense of confusion and inability to understand the psychological changes that his wife underwent following her pregnancy which led to her taking her own life. Through repeated flashbacks, it becomes clear that Yu-Ting (Ariel Lin) was suffering from depression and uncertain whether she wanted to give birth to this child. Though everything may have seemed normal on the surface, we can see that there is something not quite right in the way that Yu-Ting interacts with her parents while cryptic allusions are made to two other sisters who are for some reason no longer part of the family while Yu-Ting’s mother is otherwise an entirely silent and passive presence.

This silence and passivity may stand in for that of Taiwanese women, or least those of her generation, who find themselves powerless against male authority figures such as husbands and fathers. When Yu-Ting expresses anxiety that their baby may be a girl, Yu-Ming assumes that his overbearing mother has said something to her reflecting a cultural bias that favours sons over daughters. Yu-Ming appears to not to share it while the doctors at the hospital also stress that the sex is irrelevant as long as the child is healthy. But when Yu-Ting’s father (Chin Shih-chieh) states that girls are better, there is something uniquely chilling in his words that further deepens Yu-Ting’s dread and sense of responsibility in bringing a little girl into this kind of world.

The father cannot be questioned and his home is filled with silence. This is the deep quiet room in which the film seems to suggest all Taiwanese women are to one degree or another trapped inside. Yu-Ming necessarily exists on the other side of it and is to some extent unaware of its existence. He is frustrated that his wife shuts him out and desperately wants to her to share with him what it is that makes her so unhappy and prevents her from embracing the kind of domestic happiness that he is seeking to create. When Yu-Ting unexpectedly snaps that she hates herself for being unable to abandon her father, Yu-Ming seems bemused and replies that it’s a daughter’s filial duty to care for him. His own decision, which seems odd to others, to continue caring for Yu-Ting’s father, who has dementia and therefore can no longer answer for whatever he may have done in the past, is another symptom of his desire to maintain this ideal of a traditional family. 

What he discovers therefore implodes Yu-Ming’s conception of the values that he assumed underpinned his society and his own role within them. His eventual decision to abandon Yu-Ting’s father is symbolic of an ultimate desire to reject and escape from this patriarchal superstructure of which he has also been a part. Yu-Ting’s two sisters chose other paths to escaping their trauma, the oldest spending most of her adult life in a psychiatric institution, and the younger fleeing abroad severing all ties with her family. She has married a man who is not Taiwanese and is living a happy family life overseas. Informed of her mother and sister’s deaths, she simply replies “R.I.P” and that it’s no longer any concern of hers. She has sealed her childhood off in its own deep quiet room and now refuses to open the door, suggesting that the only path to survival lies in exiting this system entirely and never looking back.

As such Shen paints a fairly bleak view of the contemporary society as mired in outdated patriarchal social codes while women like Yu-Ting are left with no recourse. She cannot share this part of herself even with those close to her, not even with her sisters who suffered the same way she did but have each withdrawn themselves into different kinds of isolation, and must therefore carry the burden alone. There is however a glimmer of light in the otherwise grim conclusion that suggests a desire at least to exorcise this trauma by abandoning the patriarchal order and building something new in its place.

Deep Quiet Room screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Last Night in Taipei (明日的過客, Kuo Cheng-chui, 2025)

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Three old friends who haven’t seen each other in years are forced to confront the reality of their lives after a chance encounter in Kuo Cheng-chui’s Last Night in Taipei (明日的過客, míngrì dì guòkè). Less an odyssey through the midnight city, the film is really more about finding accommodation with a sense of middle-aged regret and letting go of what might have been, though it does not necessarily seem that any of them are really happier after dealing with their unresolved feelings.

Blanche’s marriage has begun to turn cold owing to her husband’s deference to his mother who is upset that they have yet to conceive a child and continually dropping off Chinese medicine to help them along. After arguing with her husband Ben when a date night is abruptly cancelled she decides to stay in the city alone where she immediately runs into an ex, Jake, who is on a trip home from Paris where he as lived for the last few years. To begin with, it isn’t quite clear whether Blanche has actually met him at all or is just fantasising about what her life would be like if she’d stayed with him rather than ending up Ben whose chief advantage seems to be his wealth.

But Jake is similarly feeling lost in that he feels out of place in both Paris and Taipei and is perceived as a foreigner in both places. Meanwhile, he’s harbouring unresolved feelings about the end of his relationship with Blanche. While wandering though the city, the pair walk into a bar where their old friend Axin is currently working. His current girlfriend, Mao Mao, later joins them, but their relationship is not all it seems as Mao Mao essentially hired Axin to play the part of her boyfriend for 99 days to make an ex jealous and is now having difficulty dealing with the end of the arrangement.

The trio met when they were all aspiring actors, and they have to one extent or another each failed to fulfil their dreams. Only Axin is seriously persevering with performing, but he to is coming to the conclusion that he has failed as an actor and it’s time for him to leave Taipei. Blanche, too, regrets not having had the opportunity to play a proper role and is feeling unsatisfied with her married life. She wonders if this is all there really is and her entire life is already decided. Perhaps she only stays with Ben because it’s become convenient while the risks of leaving outweigh the benefits. Jake too always felt as if Taiwan was a liminal space, not somewhere he’d stay indefinitely, so he never put down roots. He reflects how much the city has changed, almost if it did so deliberately to give them memories as these spaces seem to retreat from them back into the past. 

The frequent references to missiles and intrusions into their airspace echo this sense of restless anxiety that this current existence might soon disappear or be taken from them. The sense of impending doom forces the three friends to reassess their bonds and missed connections providing an opportunity for at least partial emotional honesty even if these unresolved feelings are not fully addressed. Mao Mao too must reevaluate what she was looking for in her relationship with Axin in which he too was perhaps merely putting off the act of confronting himself and his life.

Though they may each discover a way of moving forward, no one seems all that happy about it. Blanche considers leaving her marriage, but ultimately stays perhaps because she lacks the courage to actually do it and resigns herself to an unfulfilling future. Jake still feels adrift and blames himself for the failure of his relationship with Blanche, realising that he let her down out of fear and immaturity. Axin too decides to move on, but is left with a sense of regret, while Mao Mao too can only resolve to start over again from day one. In some ways the friendship between them might have been repaired with the air cleared, but on the other hand as Axin says real friends don’t necessarily need to be in contact all the time and each seems to be left a little lonelier even than before in having closed a door to the past with seemingly none to open to the future.

Last Night in Taipei screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (dialogue free)

Break Free (オドレ！ヤクザ, Yu Nakamoto, 2026) [Fantasia 2026]

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The yakuza as an institution has long been on the decline in Japan, if not on the brink of extinction, thanks to the various anti-organised crime laws that have come into play over the last few decades. The laws are so stringent that members of the yakuza are unable to open bank accounts, rent property, or even take out a mobile phone contract, making their daily lives almost impossible. Meanwhile, dwindling manpower and changing times have meant that the yakuza cannot make a living from its traditional lines of business and has to look for other ways to earn its keep.

It’s this very problem that’s plaguing the heroes of Yu Nakamoto’s warmhearted comedy Break Free (オドレ！ヤクザ, Odore! Yakuza!) who are all doing various other unsatisfying jobs such as working as takeaway delivery drivers, shopping mall mascots, or running low level romance scams online which seems like a more innocent nod to the reality that the actual yakuza’s main new line of business is scamming the elderly and vulnerable. Then again, most of them are really a little young to have joined the yakuza in its heyday and the film really takes place within the context of more recent straight-to-video yakuza movies. Though it makes frequent nods to the darker side of yakuza life, often for comic effect such as the silhouette of Kunio’s (Akio Fujii) colleague Yama (Shigeo Osako) beating a guy with a baseball bat appearing behind him as he shoots a dance video, our heroes are mainly good guys and hapless fools whose problem is that they can’t let go of their old lives nor can they adapt to the modern society.

The inability to get a legitimate phone is perhaps one reason why 38-year-old Kunio is completely unaware of social media and apps like “TikTak” that are dominated by dance videos. Another thing that yakuza really can’t do any more is harm a member of the public, which is why one slimy guy in a suit thinks it’s a good idea to try and show off to his girlfriend by taunting a yakuza knowing he can’t do anything to him. But Kunio unexpectedly fights back through the medium of improvisational street dance and goes viral for his pains. The clan begin to spot a new, less problematic line of business, but the plan is once again complicated by the fact that yakuza are technically banned from having accounts on those kinds of services as well appearing on television. Kunio, while still a yakuza, has to cosplay as one by pretending that the yakuza thing is just a gimmick to give his dance videos more of an edge. 

Deciding to hone his skills, he ends up in a dance class surrounded by little kids and run by a woman who used to be a backup dancer, but decided she liked teaching more and opened a school. In a way, this echoes Kunio’s journey. Marie’s decision to quit being a backup dancer wasn’t a moment of defeat but its opposite as she actively chose the kind of life she thought would suit her better. Kunio’s friend has already left the yakuza because he wanted to get married but didn’t want his girlfriend to become a gangster’s wife. He is still subject to some of the restrictions placed on yakuza so his life isn’t easy, but he makes a good living with his yakiniku restaurant and is very happy in his marriage. 

The pun of the English-language title refers to Kunio’s efforts to “break free” of the moribund yakuza world through the power of break dancing which not only reconnects him with the unfulfilled desires of his late brother but offers him a path to discovering his true self as he realises that in dance he’s finally found something he actually wants to do. Thanks to an unexpectedly supportive new community around him from Marie at the dance school to a pint-sized aspiring idol and veteran influencer Ririko, Kunio begins to see new possibilities for the future, but the yakuza proves harder to escape than one might first expect. Whether he can ever really “break free” remains to be seen, but even while otherwise imprisoned, dance can be liberating. Trading heavily on the incongruities of its concept, the film is nevertheless warmhearted and sympathetic of its gangster heroes who find themselves cast adrift in a world that no longer has much place for them.

Break Free screened as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

Trailer (no subtitles)

White Flowers and Fruits (白の花実, Yukari Sakamoto, 2025)

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The abrupt suicide of a young woman at a protestant Christian boarding school causes those around her to reassess their reality in Yukari Sakamoto’s poetic drama White Flowers and Fruits (白の花実, Shiro no Kajitsu). Perhaps done a disservice by the literalness of its English language title, the film is on one level as the Japanese title implies about the disconnect between form and content, or the extent to which we project ourselves onto others and see only what we want or expect to see.

Anna (Miro) is someone who says she can see “what others can’t”. This most obviously refers to her ability to see ghosts, though of course we can’t be sure whether she is telling the truth or hallucinating reflections of her own anxieties. In any case, she has a rebellious streak which is why her mother has transferred her to a Christian boarding school. “It’s your last chance,” she tells her, implying that Anna has already been expelled from several other institutions for her refusal to conform. Anna, however, promptly discovers an angry ghost hovering directly behind her new roommate Rika (Nico Aoto) and thereafter refuses to the “pointless” rules of the school including wearing her ribbon necktie.

She and “lovely” Rika are then contrasted as model student and its reverse. It’s Rika who remarks that being at odds with everyone all the time must be exhausting and her life might be easier if she made more of an effort to get along with people, but Anna claims that she is simply unlike Rika and this is something she is unable to do even if she wanted to. “Why don’t you try being me?” Rika asks after putting her own ribbon around Anna’s neck, as if she were lifting a burden from herself and placing it onto Anna in a moment of forced conformity if also a well-meaning rather than oppressive gesture. When Rika takes her own life by jumping from the bell tower not long after, it provokes a degree of soul-searching among everyone at the school but most especially Anna and Rika’s best friend Shiori (Anji Ikehata).

After reading Rika’s diary, Anna begins seeing a blue orb she believes to be Rika’s spirit which eventually settles in her chest and begins to alter her personality to become a little more malleable and conformist as expressed by the Edwardian-style high collars of her uniform and newly deferent personality. It’s never quite clear if this is “real”, Anna’s delusion, a manifestation of her attempt to come to terms with grief, or deliberate subterfuge as she begins to develop a friendship with Shiori in part based on the notion that she has been possessed by Rika. The pair are both trying in one sense to get a handle on the sides of Rika that they didn’t have access to in order to understand why she died. 

But Rika’s diary is full of insecurity. She feels herself under pressure training to train for the school’s traditional dance show and is paranoid that she makes those around her worry when she doesn’t perform well enough. The dance itself is strangely sensual and witchy, earthy and rooted in nature in contrast to the religious setting of the school. On reading the diary, Shiori realises that shortly before she died Rika tried to confess her feelings for her, but Shiori simply didn’t understand and worries this accidental and insensitive rejection may have contributed to her desire to take her own life. It is not especially the religiosity of the school that is repressive, however, so much so as the enforced conformity of their social class. 

Aside from their association with “Class S” lesbian romance literature, these kinds of boarding schools are associated most closely with upper-class women who are being trained to become wives of important men. As such it is important that they learn to be, unlike Anna, meek and obedient. On a return home, Shiori attends a dinner party at which only her sister is dressed in red and seated across from a man to whom she has evidently been betrothed for an arranged marriage. Shiori is mildly horrified, but her sister just seems to stare on vacantly as if resigned to her fate. But it’s also this image of properness that may have prevented Rika getting the help she needed before she died as her animosity towards her family and fear of her father were ignored because of their social standing. Rika’s apparently distraught father is determined to retrieve the diary presumably because he fears what might be written inside it. Rika’s role as a model student might then have been a persona that marked her attachment to alternate familial home and a desire to escape sexual abuse at the hands of her father.

A video is leaked showing a young girl smoking in one of the school’s bedrooms with many believing it to be Rika, though it isn’t really clear who is it just as it is often unclear whether Anna is Rika or a version of herself. A final moment of rebellion, Anna challenges the enquiry into Rika’s death accusing them of using Rika’s death for their own ends to explore questions about themselves rather than directly confronting their own realities, though perhaps this is what she too has been doing. In an ironic way, it’s through letting Rika go that Anna and Shiori are able to move forward with their lives, but in other ways they take her with them as if she really had settled somewhere in Anna’s chest. Anna has learned how to dance for herself and come to some kind of accommodation with the world, while Shiori has been presented with a picture of herself that is also a picture of Rika in its reflected gaze. Sakamoto leans into J-horror territory in capturing the gothic atmosphere of the school, though as Anna later says, the ghosts themselves are not really frightening so much as an expression of that which remains unknown an acceptance of which defines adult enlightenment.

White Flowers and Fruits screened as part of this year’s JAPAN CUTS.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Funky Freaky Freaks (충충충, Han Chang-lok, 2025)

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The gentle balance between three outsiders is disrupted by an elite transfer student in Han Chang-lok’s stylish drama Funky Freaky Freaks (충충충, Chungchungchung). Divided into three chapters, Impulse, Collision, and Shock, the film is, in many ways, a slow motion car crash or a path towards an inevitably destructive conclusion as the hero finds himself cast further out and abandoned by those close to him while his dream of becoming a superhero and saving the world by saving the woman he loves drifts further and further away.

Yong-ki (Joo Min-hyeong) doesn’t have many friends at school and is a fairly non-descript presence. He spends most of his time with two friends who, like him, are cast out of the mainstream and battling a sense of powerlessness. Ji-sook (Baek Ji-hye) is a survivor of domestic violence and has developed body dysmorphia that has left her with an eating disorder. She sells used underwear to men with fetishes in order to buy weight-loss drugs and seems to be considered the weird girl at school. Dumbo (Shin Jun-hang), meanwhile, is bullied for two different reasons. The first being that he is simply chubby. The second is however that he is gay and effeminate. He puts on a woman’s voice and chats to men on the internet, often conning them into buying him dinner before, perhaps unwisely, reverting to a more masculine voice to humiliate the person he’s been calling. 

Everything changes for each of them when a new transfer student arrives at the school. Woo-ju (Jeong Soo-hyun) is said to be from a wealthy and prominent family and a candidate for the national Olympic judo team. Of course, it’s a little odd for someone like him to transfer to Yong-ki’s school which is in a fairly rundown backwater and not exactly offering top facilities or teaching staff. Most people don’t think this far, but it’s obvious that Woo-ju has most likely been sent there there because it’s out of the way. His elite father is sick of his antics and is keen to limit the damage. Nevertheless, with his handsome looks and cool demeanour along with a touch of urban sophistication Woo-ju is an instant hit at school all of which inflames Yong-ki’s resentment especially when he seems to become friendly with Ji-sook.

Yong-ki sees Woo-ju as an embodiment of everything he’d like to be but isn’t, and is therefore desperate to knock him off his pedestal. Part of his resentment stems from the fact that Woo-ju has large numbers of online followers which seems to be how the kids measure success and social hierarchy. Yet through his investigations he discovers that Woo-ju may simply have paid for them, while there are rumours that he’s a bit of a playboy with a history of callous behaviour towards sexual partners. Others suggest that he was once a wimp and the shortest guy in class until his wealthy family got him growth hormones. His father clears up his messes by forcing people to sign NDAs, but Woo-ju may be a kind of victim too in that his father can’t accept failure and beats him every time he fails to win a judo match.

This fuels Yong-ki’s belief that they are basically the same in that Woo-ju is a loser too and the only difference between them is money, though rather than provoking empathy it seems to deepen his resentment. He becomes determined to avenge Ji-sook who has been seduced and abandoned by Woo-ju, becoming a figure of fun at school, as a means of convincing her to choose him, though she does not appear to have realised that Yong-ki has feelings for her. Abandoned by his mother who has not returned home in two months and has secretly been living somewhere else with a new man, Yong-ki’s sense of loneliness and desperation begins to push him towards an eventual explosion. Woo-ju too may have been fighting back against a sense of powerlessness, but his existence only bears out the ways in which Yong-ki continues to suffer because of social inequality. Han mixes media using CCTV footage, poetic black and white sequences, video cam, and VHS-style imagery to reflect Yong-ki’s childhood dreams while lending a note of ironic absurdity to the bleakness of his life in which the only possible reaction to his despair is violence.

Funky Freaky Freaks screens as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)