My Mother’s Eyes (マイマザーズアイズ, Takeshi Kushida, 2023)

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“To become a mother, I must move past sanity” the maternal figure at the centre of Takeshi Kushida’s My Mother’s Eyes (マイマザーズアイズ) eventually exclaims, but what exactly are the limits of the parental sacrifice? Should a parent necessarily have to give themselves over body and soul to the next generation leaving nothing of and for themselves, and should the child accept that sacrifice or not considering that it may, in turn, rob them of their own individuality?

Hitomi, whose name ironically sounds like the word for the pupil of the eye though the kanji it uses are those of “virtuous beauty”, clearly feels some level of resentment towards her daughter Eri despite the superficial closeness of their relationship which sees the teenage daughter still cuddling up to her mother in the night. Once a promising cellist herself, Hitomi now makes her living as a teacher and claims that she now enjoys writing songs for Eri to play more than playing herself. Yet it seems Eri too may be rebelling against the necessity of playing the notes her mother has set down for her. “Listen very carefully to the music your partner makes,” Hitomi gently advises on noticing Eri veering off script while rehearsing for a duet she asked her mother to play, “then we can become one piece of music together.”

This sense of reintegration or inseparability seems to be a longed-for quality though for Hitomi perhaps it amounts to an erasure as if she sought to bring her daughter into herself so that she might be free to pursue the career in music denied her by the demands of raising a child alone. Eri, meanwhile, yearns for acceptance, countering her mother’s resentment with her own revealing that even if she had not detected it in her mother’s eyes she clearly felt it in her music in the continual duel which being fought between them. Something Hitomi had kept from her is that she was losing her sight, a sudden entrance of darkness following Eri’s attempt to broach the subject of maternal rejection while driving along a tunnel clearly warning of dangerous curves ahead. The accident leaves Eri paralysed from the neck down, and Hitomi forced to face the reality of her fading sight. 

After contacting a blogger who’d previously written about an experimental treatment but was ominously warned off writing any more, Hitomi is whisked away to a Western-style mansion in the countryside occupied by a man scientist and his creepily robotic son, Satoshi. The treatment comes in the form of a high-tech contact lens which bounces additional light to Hitomi’s fading retinas that can be adjusted via smartphone app through which everything Hitomi sees can be observed by others. As a means of making amends, she agrees to give her life over to the bedridden Eri who sees through her eyes via virtual reality headset and speaks words for Hitomi to repeat just as she had written notes for Eri to play. 

But Hitomi is in other ways free to guide her, transgressively straying into a sexual relationship with the decidedly odd Satoshi who like his father has an odd habit of just appearing out of nowhere or at any rate swiftly like a bird swooping down to land. Hitomi strokes his back like she were playing a playing a cello, making music to communicate to whom remains unclear. Satoshi’s father later says that music was his “light” too as his own sight failed though it seems he no longer plays, music like light to Hitomi, had become painful and he had come to appreciate only “haunting” melodies. Just Eri has taken control of Hitomi, Satoshi’s father is still controlling him partly through the lenses and partly through mysterious tranquilliser pills that might explain his otherwise uncanny manner. 

The relationships between them begin to blur in the incestuous cross currents in which Eri succumb to a phantom pregnancy as her mother becomes a surrogate to child that is somehow hers, Satoshi’s, and his father’s though he later tries to assume control of it roundly telling Hitomi she lacks maternal devotion and is unfit to raise a raise. Her battle is as much to reclaim her maternity as it is to reclaim herself while entering a kind of symbiosis with her daughter that included a notion of duplication and continuity. If every son must kill his father, then perhaps giving birth is paradoxically a cure for motherhood. Asking a series of questions about the use and misuse of such technology that infringes not only on a sense of reality but also the security of the self, Kishida channels a sense of anxious eeriness but ends at least on a note of harmony albeit “haunting” in its nature.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Age of Nudity (素ッ裸の年令, Seijun Suzuki, 1959)

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Stylistically speaking, Seijun Suzuki’s Age of Nudity (素ッ裸の年令, Suppadaka no Nenrei) is one of the least interesting of his early phase and features only brief moments of innovation such as using the cameo effect for Sabu’s flashback and elements of his taste for surrealism with unexpected cutting between events. It does however have something a little more interesting to say about the world of 1959 through the eyes of someone in the process of becoming an angry young man.

The film opens with Sabu (Saburo Fujimaki) in his school uniform gazing at motorbikes and exclaiming that adulthood must be wonderful because you can ride a bike whenever you want. Ken (Keiichiro Akagi), the leader of a group of mainly orphaned delinquents, shows him that he could do that now. His gang make a habit of “borrowing” bikes and makes money through reckless drag races. Ken’s instructions that the bikes must be returned afterwards is symbolic of his desire to live a more honest life. When Sabu gets involved with actual crimes such as robbing a local food stand, he becomes very angry with him for compromising his more noble vision of what this group should be. 

But Ken is also working with a newspaper reporter and selling him insider stories about pre-teen “delinquents” . It seems as if every day is a slow news day in the Japan in 1959, and the reporter continues to plant scare stories in an effort to create a moral panic about feral children. Ken seems to think that he’ll keep them out of it and not actually report on anything too back that directly involves them, but of course his conviction is naive. Nevertheless, he convinces himself that he’s doing it all for the group so he can get money to buy a fishing boat and support everyone through honest work. But at the same time the fact that it’s the newspapers echoes the ways in which these children have been pushed out of society, while also ironic in that the reason Sabu loses his pair round is because he’s unfairly called a troublemaker when trying to get a reluctant customer to finally pay her bill.

The newspaper round incident bears out the ways in which Sabu is unable to control his temper and his frustration often turns to violence. The reporter asks a friend of his at school hoping he will badmouth him, but the only says that he’s not a bad kid, it’s just that his family’s poor. What Sabu most wants is to stay in school, but his parents won’t pay and his mother even says that he’s getting above himself. Poor people like them don’t go to school they just work. But Sabu’s desire to break that barrier is thwarted by social prejudice and the frustration it arises in him. He first looks up to Ken as a role model, but is also the most betrayed on realising that it was Ken who leaked info on them to the press and that he’s planning to take their share of the loot and make a new life for himself alone in the country.

Humiliated after having been betrayed by the newspaper man, Ken then reverts to Sabu’s way of thinking, that as old as he gets this society won’t respect him. So perhaps he no longer needs to respect it or to stick to the nobility he was trying to teach the kids. Adulthood won’t be what we expected, he tells Yoko, as if he had thought that on turning 20 he’d suddenly be more respected and that he’d be able to forge his own future by buying a boat and becoming a fisherman. The film’s title does not translate particularly well, but the nuance is more like “the naked age” where age refers to that of a person rather than to an era. Sabu goes to the beach and marvels that everyone is “naked”, or rather that they’re all scantily clad in swimwear, and are therefore all the same with the divisions of class and wealth temporarily dissolves. But at the same time it’s more that he himself is naked in that he’s at his most raw and vulnerable. He feels himself to be alone, and has no role models to look to for how he should live his life. Resenting his father for bowing and screaming and his mother for her lack of ambition, he wants more for himself but also can’t find a way to get it. 

The fact that Ken is eventually killed in a fiery crash signals him out as a false prophet. The person the children should have been listening to was the homeless old man (Bokuzen Hidari) who appears in a vision of beatific pastorally at the film’s conclusion posed on a green hill with the sun behind him. Though the children sometimes make fun of him for his disability and what they see as a failure at life, the old man laughs it off and is constantly happy living in a tent with his little dog. He encourages the children and gives them helpful advice that helps to overcome the failures of their birth parents, while his presence suggests that true happiness is to be found only on escaping contemporary capitalist society. Sabu too perhaps comes to a similar conclusion, realising that their “independence” is an illusion when they have to compromise themselves morally in order to earn money. Ken may have given them false hope, but perhaps the old man is different in living his own “independent” life defined by humanism and simplicity free from the constraints of a society which only values and status.

Star Virgin (スターヴァージン, Ichiro Omomo, 1988)

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A young woman sets off to travel the universe and discovers that a lot of it’s full of inappropriate men, which is why is her father thoughtfully gave her a chastity bracelet that can detect “evil intent” and allow her to transform into the superhero Star Virgin to protect her virginity. We first see her do this in a weird reptile planet where, for some reason she’s being crucified as a giant Jabba the Hut-like frog extends his gruesome tongue towards her. 

Produced with the involvement of props team Ogawa Modelling who wad worked on Bye-Bye Jupiter, director Ichiro Omomo intended Star Virgin (スターヴァージン) to be a tokusatsu take on the Supergirl movie from 1984. A pilot version made in 1986 was apparently more serious in tone, though the completed film released two years later is deliberately silly and includes a series of references to contemporary Hollywood cinema such as Eiko and her Earth friend Ko running away from a ball of dung spun by a giant dung beetle like in Indiana Jones, while the robots have a heads up interface that’s clearly inspired by The Terminator, and the inside of the villain’s lair resembles the inside of the ships in Star Wars.

But while Eiko seems to be an intergalactic princess, she only speaks Japanese and the design of her fish-like spacecraft, which doesn’t look that big but has room for a giant bubble bath, is inspired more by Japanese sci-fi manga. She’s apparently come to Earth after the bad experience on the reptile planet because she thought there was a chance of it becoming civilised in the future, but is immediately drawn into a bizarre conspiracy run by a man who’s been perfecting various gadgets for the last 84 years in order to reverse Japan’s defeat in the Second World War. Eiko’s new bug-obsessive friend Ko (Fujio Takumi) annoys him by first guessing the First World War and then suggesting perhaps his siphoning off of the imperial navy’s resources is one reason they lost.

Nevertheless, Ko’s indifference lays bare a generational divide in which wartime defeat has become a kind of joke and something that only old people go on about rather than a serious wound on the national psyche. Colonel Arashiyama (Isao Sasaki), however, is intent on turning the cold war hot so Russia will nuke America, while Japan will be safe because of the protective barrier he’s placed around it. He’s also enabled his secret island to float in the sky for protection and has kidnapped Ko because he thinks he’s stolen a precious gem that stems back to the gods of Japan’s creation myth which he needs to win the war as if he’s essentially weaponising Japaneseness. Predictably, he wants Eiko to be his new princess and dresses her in white gown while taking some kind of elixir to make himself young and virile. Of course, she only needs to string him along until he finally goes too far and activates the chastity belt.

Not being able to activate it at will seems like a serious design fault, while it’s not altogether clear if it would still activate if Eiko herself were to pursue a romance. Not that that’s all that likely given the frankly inappropriate treatment she receives from men other than Ko. In fact, she’s a bit confused why he doesn’t try anything, but it’s mainly because he’s too busy thinking about bugs. In any case, they have to team up together to escape Colonel Arashiyama’s lair and stop all of his dastardly plans. Though it was clearly made on a shoestring, the special effects and production design are incredibly impressive and have a real sense of charm and invention. Never taking itself too seriously, the film nevertheless completely commits itself to its bizarre world of alien princesses and conspiracy, before finally returning to what it presented itself as in the beginning, a teenage girl’s travel diary. Even the evil robot’s programming is broken as he’s taken in by some local children and becomes their friend, just as Eiko and Ko enjoy a fun time at beach in a classic idol movie-style ending.

Traffickers (공모자들, Kim Hong-sun, 2012)

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The one with money and power wins. The ones without it lose everything they’ve got. In many ways, it’s the overriding message of contemporary Korean cinema, but the words take on an even darker hue when uttered by the villain of Kim Hong-sun’s illegal organ transplant drama, Traffickers (공모자들, Gongmojadeul). The film’s Korean title, Conspirators, hints at the ways that this world reduces everyone to one degree or another to something less than human as they chase often small dreams of health, comfort, and happiness, in which the central conspiracy comes to stand in for a world ruled by power and money.

Young-gyu (Im Chang-jung) used to be an organ trafficker, but gave up that side of his business when his best friend was killed by a victim who woke up unexpectedly and tried to escape. Since then, he’s smuggled moderately less inhuman things and has developed a crush on a young woman who works on the ticket counter at the port. Yu-ri (Jo Yoon-hee) has a sick father who needs a transplant, but the one was lined up for is cancelled at the last minute apparently because she neglected to inform them of an issue which gave them an excuse to pull out in what seems to be a suggestion that the list is being manipulated. Fearing her only option is the black market, Yu-ri is in desperate need of money and turn to one of Young-gyu’s acquaintances, the leader of a Chinese gang. To get her the money Young-gyu decides to pull one last job, but soon finds himself in over his head as his new target turns out to have a connection to his past.

The film never really goes into Yu-ri’s decision get her father a black market transplant but rather focuses on her desperation as someone who has been frozen out of the legitimate system which itself already prioritises those with means to fight for better or more efficient treatment. It’s not clear if she is aware that the organ may come from someone who has been killed deliberately for that purpose, or if she knew but decided her father’s life was more important than theirs. Nor is it clear if she’s thought through the repercussions of indebting herself to gangsters for some of whom organ harvesting is just another means of debt collection. In any case, all she really cares about is saving her father and it seems she is willing to do whatever that takes. 

To that extent, what they prey on is desperation. The gangsters don’t expect their victims to ask too many questions, because this is all illegal anyway and they’re already at their last resort to save a loved one’s life. That said, it seems strange that they would choose Chae-hee (Jung Ji-yoon), a young woman who uses a wheelchair and thinks she’s just going to China on holiday, who is travelling with her husband, to be their next victim given that there is obviously someone who is going to be looking for her. They generally assume most of their other victims won’t be missed and write them off as those of little consequence swallowed by a dog-eat-dog world. It seems that part of the gangster’s motivation is that they don’t want to become victims themselves so have chosen the path of violence and inhumanity. 

But despite his occupation, Young-gyu is conflicted about the bloodiness of his work and on realising that he has a connection to Chae-hee begins to want to save her while equally wanting to save Yu-ri and her father. The traffickers have, however, sold them all false promise in that it’s mainly the people who were trying to buy transplants that end up becoming victims and it’s not actually clear who is getting any of these organs until a final suggestion that they’re actually going to rich people in Korea who wanted to jump the transplant queue, meaning people like Yu-ri and and her father lose out twice over. Organ trafficking works hand in hand with life insurance scams looking to make money off human misery while rich elderly men buy the blood and organs of young ones in a kind of human sacrifice they think will return their youth and and vitality in an one the nose metaphor for how the older generation oppresses the young. In this bleak and nihilistic world, the film suggests that its villain was right. The ones with money and power win, while those without are quite literally consumed and exploited by a corrupt and inhuman system. 

Trailer (English subtitles

Invisible 2: Chasing The Ghost Sound (귀신소리 찾기, Yoo Jun-suk, 2011)

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After hearing ghostly voices in her guest house, a middle-aged woman calls in a famous paranormal investigator but is put out when he arrives with a film crew in tow in Yoo Jun-suk’s eerie fake documentary footage horror movie, Invisible 2: Chasing The Ghost Sound (귀신소리 찾기, Gwisin Soli Chajgi). As might be assumed, nothing is quite as it seems, but as the relations between Geum-ja (Jeong Eui-soon), ghost hunter Pil-woo, and the few crew begin to  decline, the ghost may be the least of their worries.

Geum-ja’s guest house is a traditional-style villa out in the country and at this time of year all but cut off by snow which is why it proves so hard for the team to reach. However, if the place is haunted, it’s by someone much more recently deceased than the Joseon-era past. Geum-ja suspects it may be her late sister and that she may have a message for her. That’s apparently why she contacted Pil-woo, hoping he would be able to record the ghostly voices and tell her what they say. 

Pil-woo, however, is suspicious of Geum-ja and suspects she may have been somehow involved with her sister’s death. Unable to find any sings of the paranormal activity, he thinks the ghost is probably a manifestation of Geum-ja’s guilt. He’s not particularly bothered about the potential crime, but is quite irritated that she’s wasted his time. She had indeed been reluctant to key him in on the facts of the case and may also have misled him. It seems Geum-ja’s sister Geum-seon may have been having an affair with Geum-ja’s husband, who has apparently not returned to haunt Geum-ja, or at least not in this form. 

But just as the crew are leaving, Geum-ja begins screaming and claims she can hear a voice that no one else can. Pil-woo too picks up five fragments of a ghostly voice from around the villa but struggles to assemble them into a coherent whole. This sudden reversal, however, only raises suspicion with the director of the TV crew who find Pil-woo’s discovery a little too convenient. He suggests that Pil-woo and Geum-ja may be in it together to cook up a ghost show. Pil-woo sees himself a genuine investigator and seems unhappy about working with the TV crew in the first place. He thinks of them as charlatans who regularly stage paranormal investigations to make the show entertaining. 

Geum-ja didn’t want to be on TV, either, though perhaps as Pil-woo suspects that she doesn’t really want to draw attention to herself or risk other things she might not want exposed coming to light. Pil-woo had suggested it was all a manifestation of her guilt, but never stopped to consider that both things could be true. Geum-ja and Geum-seon were twins, which means she is essentially haunted and confronting herself as expressed through the lengthy mirror shot in which Geum-ja converses with Geum-seon though her own reflection. Geum-seon plays a kind of game with her as if they were children, turning the sounds into a puzzle that must be solved in order to unlock the truth of her message. 

Yoo finally returns to make ionic usage of the eerie shot through a glass coffee table that opened the film as the malevolent presence eventually makes itself known.The villa becomes a more literal kind of haunted space, but as Pil-woo discovers its melancholy secret may be of a more ordinary kind, Geum-ja seeks a kind of reverse retribution, comforting the ghost of her sister but also asking for an apology as if she had the upper hand in this situation while wandering around in the team’s “stupid helmet” trying to root Geum-seon out. The dread only deepens as she comes closer to solving the puzzle and receiving its chilling message. Then again, perhaps the message is that Geum-ja should have just ignored the nagging voices in her head rather than chasing after ghostly echoes or seeking absolution from spirits rather than reckon with a painful reality. Though Geum-ja may see herself as the victim, so too may Geum-seon as the pair chase each other through the eerie space of the darkened villa with seemingly no escape for either.

Girlfriends (女孩不平凡, Tracy Choi Ian-Sin, 2025)

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Now in her mid-30s, Lok (Fish Liew) feels as if she were perpetually standing at a crossing waiting for the light to turn green. She made her first film five years ago, but hasn’t been able to make another one since. A producer likes her script, but tells her that with this kind of content they won’t be able to release it in Mainland China or Malaysia, so they won’t be able to recoup their investment. As he says though, the script can always be tweaked and if she rewrote it including a role for an actress looking for a comeback they might be in business.

But Lok doesn’t really want to compromise. Tracy Choi Ian-Sin’s semi-autobiographical Girlfriends (女孩不平凡) is in many ways about the of fear of being railroaded into something that’s not what you really want. After an argument with her girlfriend Bei (Jennifer Yu), Lok begins to look back on her life in reverse chronological order inching towards the source of her insecurity in her Macao childhood. At 17, she faced intense pressure to conform. As a member of the debate team, she’s tasked with making an argument for something she doesn’t believe in and resents being forced to say what’s expected of her rather than how she really feels. Her parents expect her to go a local university and become a civil servant without really giving her much choice in the matter. The older sister of a classmate, Faye (Eliz Lum) is the first person who asks her what it is she really wants. 

Lok finds herself watching 2004 Hong Kong drama Butterfly and trying to sort out her confusing feelings for Faye while secretly taking the exam to study at a university in Taiwan in the hope of living a freer life, if only for four years. There seems to be a part of present-day Lok that still thinks she’s on an extended holiday and will one day have to return to Macao and become a civil servant after all. She’s incapable of thinking of the future and seems to be mothered, to a certain extent, in all her relationships as her respective partners take on the burden of practical considerations like financial planning. Each time things start to get serious, she begins to back away, even ghosting her Taiwan girlfriend to return to Macao alone without saying goodbye.

Both the Taiwan girlfriend and Bei seem to want move back to Macao with Lok without even really considering if she actually wants to go. This assumption seems to further fuel her desperation and send her looking for an escape route. Returning to Macao with a girlfriend does not seem to be an option for her because Macao represents conventionality and the life she doesn’t really want but still deep down thinks she is unable to escape. Never having fully addressed her lost love for Faye, she lacks the courage to commit or to believe in a long-term future. Her apartment seems to be full of reminders of old lovers, while she remains uncommunicative and insecure. Using sex as a means of avoiding confrontation, she has a tendency to storm out rather than have a conversation and has never fully accepted herself. When her long-term girlfriend Bei starts talking about serious things like marriage and children, she tells her that she wants her to have a “normal” life, as if she were preventing Bei from having one.

Bei is indeed under the pressure of conventionality, nagged by parents who still haven’t accepted her relationship with Lok to settle down and marry a man. Lok’s family in Macao seem to have already accepted Bei as her wife, but still Lok can’t get over the mental hurdle of believing that she has a right to a future of her own choosing. After her script is turned down, she goes to the cinema to see The Lyricist Wannabe and over identifies with a line in which the heroine is bluntly told that if she’s spent all this time waiting and still not got anywhere, perhaps it’s time to consider another career. Her lack of success further deepens her insecurity as Bei practically points out that they do actually need some money coming in, and perhaps they might have to compromise their artistic dreams as an actress and a director under the pressure of living in difficult economic circumstances while planning for their long-term financial future. It doesn’t sound very romantic, but in a way it is. It’s only by looking back over her life and failed relationships and returning to Macao to put her past to rest, that Lok is finally able to stop chasing the ghost of Faye and gains the courage to seize the future that she really wants.

Girlfriends screened as part of this year’s Queer East.

Trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

The Mother Tree (怪談乳房榎, Goro Kadono, 1958)

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An amoral ronin worms his way into the home of a famous painter with the intention of stealing his wife in Goro Kadono’s eerie tale of ghostly revenge, The Mother Tree (怪談乳房榎, Kaidan Chibusa Enoki). As might be expected, it doesn’t go particularly well for him. He is, though, perhaps a symbol of the latent fear of social interlopers and those displaced within the Edo-era class system. Namihei (Asao Matsumoto) claims that he was let go by his master for being too interested in painting, though is otherwise focused on short-term gains and causing destruction.

Shigenobu (Akira Nakamura) is said to be “the greatest artist in Edo”, and is certainly very much in demand. He is father to an infant son, Mayotaro, and husband to devoted wife Kise (Katsuko Wakasugi). He appears to be a good man, if a little scatterbrained and hugely overworked, which is one reason why he was grateful to take on a pupil. The irony is that both Kise and the family’s maid Hana (Keiko Hasegawa) remark on what a nice guy Namihei is and how glad they are to have him in the household. He’s even good with the baby who apparently likes to be held by him. All of which suggests that he might have actually had talent for painting and could probably have succeeded Shigenobu, in time, if hadn’t been such a terrible person. 

Unfortunately, however, Namihei reminds Shigenobu that he promised to paint a freeze for a temple some distance away and had sort of forgotten about it. An impulsive soul, Shigenobu decides he’d better leave right away if only to shake off this sense of unfulfilled obligation that’s been plaguing him. He entrusts the women of the household to Namihei in his absence and has no reason to fear any harm may come to them while he’s away. Namihei, however, attempts to rape Kise as soon as he leaves. Though she resists him, he threatens to kill her son and she is forced to give in to a prolonged period of sexual exploitation.

This is actually quite a dangerous move on Namihei’s part considering that the penalty for adultery under Tokugawa law is death, which might be why he finally ends up killing Hana after she witnesses Kise being abused and tries to help her. Namihei evidently doesn’t have a long-term plan for how all this is supposed to pan out and panics on hearing that Shigenobu will be returning much earlier than he expected. The irony may be that Shigenobu intended to paint eyes that might see into the next world and eventually becomes a vengeful ghost after being brutally murdered by Namihei, though was unable to see his treachery. Evidently never having read a ghost story himself, Namihei dumps the body in a pond, which is all but guaranteed to come back and haunt him. “Though you kill me, I will not die,” Shigenobu curses, vowing that he cannot pass on while his dragons lack eyes. 

What might be surprising is that neither of the vengeful ghosts blame Kise for her plight or seek revenge against her. The rage of a vengeful ghost can often be indiscriminate, but both Shigenobu and Hana seem to understand that Kise has been abused by Namihei and only submitted to him out of maternal devotion in the desire to have her son. Namihei’s transgression aims at straight at the concept of motherhood and with it the entire social order. Having displaced Shigenobu, Mayotaro now seems a nuisance to him. He believes he’s conquered Kise by fear and no longer needs this leverage to control her now her husband is dead.

It is mainly fear that causes people to behave in strange ways. Namihei orders their servant Shosuke (Hiroshi Hayashi) to kill Mayotaro, telling Kise that he is to be sent to a noble samurai family that will assist in his social advancement. Kise seems to go along with this, despite having sworn to raise Mayotaro to take revenge. Shosuke is unable to resist after Namihei threatens him with death, but places Mayotoyo by the Mother Tree which had once nourished him. Following her husband’s murder, Kise’s milk had dried up in shock as if echoing this attempt on her maternity which was then restored by the ancient natural authority of the tree. 

That it’s the Buddhist priest that becomes a figure of moral authority and goodness positions Buddhism as the counter to the amoral nihilism of men like Namihei. Having been struck by Namihei, Kise leaves her son in the priest’s care who will raise him not for revenge but peace and forgiveness. This might run counter to the Shinto-inflected role of the Mother Tree as a symbol of the power of nature, but ultimately suggests that true righteousness is found in Buddhism and its values. Namihei pays for his amoral venality after being tormented by spirits appearing as flaming orbs. Japanese ghosts rarely harm humans directly, but cause them to hurt themselves through fear and madness. That he ultimately kills Kise despite Shigenobu’s telling her to raise their son suggests that she is being punished too, though none of this was her fault and it is really she who puts end to Namihei’s reign of terror. With his death, order is, in a sense, restored as Shigenobu returns to put the eyes on his dragons who can indeed see a better world free of greed or cruelty. 

Ciao UFO (再見UFO, Patrick Leung Pak-Kin, 2019/2026)

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“Where will I go in this future?” a young man tearfully asks, unexpectedly cast adrift and handed a future he never expected to have with no one to help him navigate this new reality. Speaking from the perspective of the Handover, his confusion hints at a sense of despair falling over Hong Kong, but also echoes through the contemporary society in a place where, as he later says, nothing stays the same, though that might not necessarily be such a bad thing.

Long delayed for a wider release, Patrick Leung Pak-Kin’s Obayashi-esque drama has a potent sense of nostalgia for a lost Hong Kong of the 80s and 90s, but also a hope that, even if the past cannot be reclaimed and we cannot become who we once were, it is never too late to start again or to choose a new path that leads back to who we were really supposed to be. As children, Heem, Kin, Hoyi, and her unnamed little brother were firm friends living on the Wah Fu estate. The fact that they are no longer in touch reflects a sense of displacement amid the rapid economic growth of that later 20th century in which these kinds of apartment complexes fell out of use leaving communities scattered as the housing market escalated to the extremes of today thanks to rampant property speculation. 

The children see the UFO at moment of extreme emotional despair and it gives them only a temporary respite from the terrors of a more adult world. In the mid-1990s, they have all lost their way. Kin (Chui Tien-you) once said he wanted to be an explorer like his father, but is now working several low-paying jobs such as manning a paper stand, selling vacuum cleaners, and acting as an agent of encroaching modernity by setting up home computers for first-time users. He no longer believes in aliens or the UFO, and though he reconnects with an equally melancholy former schoolmate, keeps her at arms’ length and lacks the courage to fight for what he really wants. Heem (Wong You-nam), whose childhood leukaemia has gone into remission, is working as an extra without much of a plan for the rest of his life, because he never expected to have one. He still believes in the UFO and tries to reconnect with his childhood friends amid the X-Files inspired alien obsessions of the ‘90s.

Hoyi (Charlene Choi), meanwhile, who wanted to be a joker making people laugh has been pushed onto a more conventional path as a professional accountant that appears to be making her unhappy, though she’s unable to escape it. While Kin falls victim to stock market mania and Heem Tamagotchi profiteering before joining his brother’s burgeoning real estate business, Hoyi’s straight and steady path would seem to be the winner, though perhaps there’s not so much need for accountants when everyone’s going bankrupt in the Asian financial crisis just as no has the money to buy apartments, which is something Heem’s brother didn’t seem to consider in thinking himself superior to those who got hooked on the stock market.

Several times the three’s path cross, though they do not meet each other and remain locked on their own melancholy paths. Hoyi’s free spirited “hippie” uncle teaches her a classical song written by an ancient poet that he says is about learning to find beauty in loneliness, perhaps sensing her sense of isolation as she wilfully suppresses herself to be the person that she thinks she’s supposed to be including a potential marriage to a man who’s the polar opposite of her authentic self. Austin (Joey Leung) pulls her back to earth when she’s lost in space, which is another way of saying that he crushes her dreams and desire for happiness by telling her to forget about UFOs and concentrate on being a wife and mother after their wedding.

The UFO then comes to represent a kind of nostalgia and the longing for a lost a past, but within that also finds a sense of hope that what once was can be again. It might not be the same, but it’s still there and it’s not too late to turn around and rediscover that sense of wonder in life. The childhood friends eventually reunite and find new solidarity in their shared experience that makes this new reality a little more bearable, even amid its painfulness and irony. The film ends with Hoyi’s brother (Ng Siu-hin) wearing a mask and telling us that it is April 1, 2003, which is the day that Leslie Cheung died, along with perhaps a certain vision of another Hong Kong, but also hints at the SARS crisis that would strike that year along with the more recent pandemic. Perhaps everything is a cycle, but as they say, the end of one thing is the start of another. They haven’t seen any UFOs for a long time and perhaps won’t ever see one again, but the hope remains, and with it the courage to live in this new future whatever it may hold.

Ciao UFO is in UK cinemas from 15th May courtesy of Central City Media.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Middle-Aged Man (をぢさん, Minoru Shibuya, 1943)

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The middle-aged man in the title of Minoru Shibuya’s wam-hearted drama is a factory foreman who believes in the power of human kindness. A machine is no better than the human hand, he tells his staff somewhat prophetically explaining to them that they must remember that they are human and take of themselves and others. Yet even at work, there are those who are annoyed by him as he wanders around checking people’s work and offering advice.

Yet when Kondo is asked to go to another factory in Nagano to teach some children, he tries to object that he doesn’t know anything about teaching, though is eventually persuaded to go anyway much to the annoyance of his wife, Okiyo, who thinks he’s too much of a soft touch. She might be right that regard, and there is something to be said for the idea that they asked him because they knew he wouldn’t put up too much of a fight. She eventually goes on such a long rant about how annoyed she is by her husband’s excessive kindness that it almost ends up ruining her brother’s engagement. Kondo’s thoughts are unexpectedly progressive in contrast with those of his wife as he tells her that taking care of children is a meaningful job in its own right that not everyone can do, though the couple appear to have no children of their own.

Kondo has, however, taken on the role of surrogate father to the son of a widowed neighbour, Haruo. He continues to call the boy “bocchan” which means something equivalent to “young master”, while the boy calls him “Ojisan”, a fairly generic way of addressing a middle-aged man, bearing out the class disparity between them. A similar sense of class disparity exists between Okiyo’s brother Jukichi and his prospective bride Kazuko who turns out to come from a former samurai family who have a suit of armour in the living room and show Mrs Kondo a long scroll listing their ancestors going back to the Sengoku era. When she tries to tell Kondo about it, he misunderstands and thinks she’s talking about a kind of fish, so alien all of this is to him. 

The film seems to be saying that class barriers like these need to come down as Jukichi and Kazuko appear to be getting on quite well, effectively dating despite having been set up for an arranged marriage. Despite the difficult economic circumstances, Jukichi has been able to rent a house and a date house now been set for the wedding. This may, in its way, be a reminder that everyone needs to pull together as one for the war effort rather than allowing outdated feudal notions of class distinction prevent them working together effectively. Kondo’s kindness operates in quite the same way as he pitches in to help his neighbours plant tomatoes and is generally available whenever anyone needs help. 

Matters take a more serious turn when Haruo becomes ill after eating a sweet Kondo brought back from Nagano. Though there is no way to know that it was the sweet that made him ill, Kondo feels responsible and insists on taking him to the hospital where it is discovered that his condition is more serious than anyone had assumed. The doctors eventually suggest a blood transfusion. Kondo is not a match and has to content himself with cold baths at the Shinto shrine to pray for Haruo’s recovery, but Okiyo is and in a weird way it’s like she gets a transfusion herself. No longer so grumpy, she’s come round to her husband’s way of thinking and learned how good it can feel to help others. 

Meanwhile, she’d also objected to Kondo’s interest in traditional kagura ritual dance which she’d made him promise to give up on they marriage. He is nevertheless roped into it, and Haruo is fascinated by this ancient art form that Okiyo only regards as “silly dancing”. When he falls ill, all Haruo wants is to see the dance again and the possibility of doing so when he’s better encourages him to hang in there. Thus the film probably gets around any need for patriotic content with its embrace of kagura while otherwise sending positive messages about the importance of community and supporting one another so that the nation, like Haruo, remains robust.

Art of Assassination (女殺し屋　牝犬, Yoshio Inoue, 1969)

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Kyoko Enami joined Daiei in 1959 and became one of its biggest stars seven years later when she played the lead in the 17-part Woman Gambler series that continued until 1971. The Art of Assassination (女殺し屋　牝犬, Onna koroshiya: Mesu Inu) shares many of the same members of the creative team while adapted from a novel by Shinji Fujiwara and written by Mitsuro Otaki who had adapted the Raizo Ichikawa vehicle Killer’s Key. Set in the present day, the film seems to be setting up another long-running series for Enami in its hints at the backstory of its hit woman heroine, though it appears not to have gone any further. 

In any case, the film anticipates the paranoia cinema of the coming decade as the ice cool Kayo (Kyoko Enami) finds herself mixed up in shady political intrigue when a yakuza working for a regular company hires her to take out a would-be-whistle-blower. Tobita, a corrupt politician in cahoots with Toyo Trading CEO Abe, has evidently been up to no good and possibly unwisely chose to freeze out one of his co-conspirators, Ishizuka. Ishizuka has now been released from prison and is minded to spill the beans on their whole operation, so Tobita wants him taken out before he can reveal his explosive memo. 

The relationship between Tobita, who is shameless in his corruption, Toyo Trading, and corporatising yakuza outfit Kijima Industries bears out a contemporary uneasiness regarding the interplay between politics, violence, and big business in the age of high prosperity. Kayo’s friend Mika works as an advertising model and has become the mistress of Toyo boss Abe to further her career. She tells Kayo that it was her dream to have her own place and live a life of luxury, which she’s ironically achieved through promoting consumerism and commodifying herself as Abe’s mistress. When Kayo is later forced to kill him, rather insensitively in Mika’s apartment, Mika seems less emotionally wounded by Abe’s death or shocked by learning the truth of her friend’s identity, than filled with despair that Kayo has now shattered her dreams. She won’t be getting any more work from Toyo nor will Abe be paying for her apartment, so she might lose everything she’s worked so build. 

Kayo, by contrast, dresses in a kimono for her cover job running a cafe and presents as the exact opposite of a modern girl like Mika. Her favourite weapon is a chunky emerald ring that conceals an extendable needle she uses to silently take out her targets. She is only really able to operate in this way precisely because of her femininity. She manages to kill Ishizuka while he’s arrogantly lounging around in a public pool at the hotel where he’s holed up by swimming under his lilo and puncturing his neck from below. This way of dispatching her targets necessarily means she has to get in close and is able to do so precisely because no suspects her. She is, however, prepared to use guns where necessary and is meticulous in her work while seemingly having no inner personality outside of her identity as a contract killer. Mika thinks they’re friends, but Kayo uses her without a second thought and seems only mildly guilty about getting her involved, placing a share of the bounty in front of her by way of compensation.

The film flirts with a backstory, offering a few flashbacks to Kayo as a child sitting in a pool of blood, but never explains any further. It seems Kayo’s coolness is a trauma response, but this job has her feeling very annoyed. As she says, it’s the first time she’s ever killed for rage rather than money and demands vengeance from those who’ve doubled crossed her. In that sense, it doesn’t really matter that her ultimate targets are the evils of the age from corrupt politicians to amoral capitalists and disingenuous yakuza because her quest is personal and driven and her own particular code of ethics, but it does nevertheless say something about contemporary anxieties. That Daiei chose to advertise this using a poster with Enami in a swimsuit, which does admittedly appear in the film, along with the Japanese title (Female Killer: Bitch) which makes the film sound a little more salacious than it actually is, suggests they may have had a different audience in mind from their usual fare, but it is a shame that Enami did not get the opportunity to further flesh out this ultra-cool heroine.