Author: Hayley Scanlon

A Woman (孔秀, Wang Chao, 2022)

July 22, 2023by Hayley Scanlon

Adapted from Zhang Xinzhen’s autobiographical novel Dream, Wang Chao’s A Woman (孔秀, Kǒng Xiù) charts an ordinary factory worker’s path through the Cultural Revolution and gradual disillusionment with Maoism before eventually achieving her goals of becoming a novelist amid the social transformations of the 1980s. In some ways a victim of her times, Kong Xiu is ironically an “ironclad” woman overcoming all hardship but it seems unable to escape the patriarchal oppressions of a conservative society.

Opening in 1967, Xue (Shen Shiyu) is told by her mother that at almost 19 she is old not to be married and dutifully becomes the wife of a local man, Hanzhang (Wang Xuedong), whom she quite likes because he is an intellectual even though that is quite a problematic thing to be in the early days of the Cultural Revolution. Xue had once been told that she was the best writer in her class and gifted a book of Grimm’s Fairytales by her proud father, but partly because she is a woman and partly because of the times she is not permitted to finish school and begins working in a textiles factory. Nevertheless she feels proud to be a “worker” and seems to have bought into the Maoist ideology she is regularly required to chant out before work which insists that they serve the only god that matters in the Chinese people through the practice of their productivity.

Chanting about feudalism and imperialism, Xiu is blind to the ways in which it is only the author of her exploitation that has changed for it is still others that profit from her labour giving little back with false promises of social good. She finds herself torn between two worlds, rejecting the feudalistic values of the peasant village where she grew up for the shining modernity of the city. Five years into her marriage, Xiu has two children and has moved into the factory women’s dorm while her relationship with the weak-willed Hanzhong flounders amid their obviously different desires. Hanzhong’s mother objects to Xiu’s modern womanhood, merely sneering when she explains that she’s a “worker” and viewing her as a failed wife who shirks her duties to their family by not returning on Sundays, her only day off, to help out on the farm.

Meanwhile, she’s grown tired of Hanzhong’s sexual demands especially as he becomes Indignant on being asked to wear a condom and she wants no more children. She has already had more than one abortion and is warned by the doctor that she may be endangering her long term health if she carries on doing so with the same frequency. After divorcing Hanzhong she marries another man and has another son but almost dies in childbirth while her second husband, Yang (Zhu Dongqing), does not even bother to return until after the child is born. Dong, her first son, had been considered part of her husband’s family and so she lost him in the divorce, while Yang begins to reject her daughter, Xue, once his own child is born leading her to live with her widowed aunt, Jun, who explains that she wasn’t all that broken up about her husband’s death. He was a nice enough chap but the marriage was arranged by the Party and they were never really man and wife.

A teenage Xue who’s taken to listening to cassette tapes of Teresa Teng songs in the park with a local boy throws back at her mother that she has no right to speak because she has never known love, something the film suggests that both Xiu and her sister have ben robbed of because of the oppressively patriarchal social codes of the feudal village and the Communist Party respectively. Xiu’s second marriage is worse than her first as Yang is violent, strangling or smothering her during sex she otherwise rejects, but she feels she cannot leave him once he becomes ill and is physically disabled. Meanwhile, her pride in her role as a “worker” at the factory begins to weaken as she sees through the cult-like chants and is tacitly accused of being a counter revolutionary for her lack of commitment having been betrayed by both her husband and someone she thought a friend who report her for having said out loud that the factory’s productivity drive was just PR fluff and lies knowing that they produce shoddy goods and cut corners just to look good on paper.

The film begins to open up in the late 1970s once Mao is gone and the Cultural Revolution ended, Xiu remembering a love of literature while there is a sense of exuberant freedom now that you can read Rousseau out loud in the market square. The universities have reopened and even those of Xiu’s generation who missed out consider applying to make up for lost time, but then again attending a book party with sympathetic colleague Comrade Wu (Yu Qingbin) who has long carried a torch for her their brief moment of courtship is abruptly cut short when a patrol passes by and they have to turn out the lights for fear of being caught dancing. When Xiu eventually achieves her dreams and has a story published in the Workers’ Daily, the factory suddenly decides she’s a good role model after all and an embodiment of the spirit of the times even recruiting her to give a speech and displaying her manuscripts for the other workers to read.

“It’s the past, don’t let it trouble you,” Xiu remarks on receiving a long overdue apology and in many ways it seems to be the way she lives her life which has been filled with hardship and heartbreak from the broken relationship with her eldest son who declines to return her letters to her seeming loneliness once again returning to the village a new woman but one also who stands astride the contradictions of a new China. Each step of her life is accompanied by the sound of a train, heralding her path towards “modernity” if coloured by a sense of loss in the persistent memory of what it once took from her. A poignant examination of the destructive social codes not only of the feudal era, but the false promises of equality under Maoism and the terrors of the Cultural Revolution, Wang’s drama may subversively suggest that it isn’t all sunshine and roses in an unseen contemporary China but nevertheless ironically hails its heroine’s “ironclad” resilience in the face of persistent social oppression.

A Woman screens July 23 as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Mad Fate (命案, Soi Cheang, 2023)

July 21, 2023by Hayley Scanlon

“No one can stray from the path paved by fate.” a policewoman gasps while interrogating The Master (Gordon Lam Ka-Tung), a man whose mind was already strained even before he walked in on the murder of a woman he’d been trying to save only to end up losing to destiny. A noticeably lighter affair than his previous film Limbo, Mad Fate (命案) sees Soi Cheang (AKA Cheang Pou-soi) step into the Milky Way orbit directing a screenplay by Yau Nai-hoi produced by Johnnie To and very much bound up with the kinds of cosmic coincidences the studio is known for.

It’s Fate or maybe God that The Master is resisting, though what the difference between the two might be is never quite clear save for the implication that it’s God who is master of Fate which is otherwise without will. The Master insists that “Fate can be changed,” but he resolutely fails to do so. In the opening sequence, he’s in the middle of burying a woman, May, alive as part of a ritual to stave off a forthcoming “calamity” only he’s unable to complete it in part because of the woman’s understandable anxiety that it’s The Master who’s going to end up killing her, and in part because it starts raining which puts out the paper clothing that should have been burnt to change her fate. May runs off and climbs in a taxi home where she is accosted by a serial killer who has been targeting sex workers. The Master follows her but arrives just too late while the police later chase the killer but are unable to catch him.

The Master sees his attempts frustrated but also does not consider that the rain itself was a manifestation of Fate or sign that in the end nothing can be changed. In an effort to atone for his inability to save May, The Master ends up taking under his wing a strange young man who also stumbled on the murder by coincidence while working as a delivery driver but is fascinated rather than repulsed by the bloody scene. Obsessed with knives and killing, Siu-tung (Lokman Yeung) is already known to the policeman investigating (Berg Ng Ting-Yip) because he arrested him for killing a cat in his teens. According to The Master’s reading of his fate, Siu-tung will eventually kill someone and end up in prison for 20 years. He doesn’t much like the sound of that so he ends up going along with The Master’s zany plans to make him a nicer person and save two lives in the process.

Ironically most of The Master’s suggestions still involve Siu-tung being imprisoned in some way. To get him out of his “unlucky” flat, he rents him another place that very much feels like a prison cell and later does actually lock him up inside a shed fearing that he’s about to kill. As he explains, it can help to preemptively accept your fate so moving in somewhere that is “like” a prison can stop you going there for real, but it doesn’t do much to alleviate Siu-tung’s desire to kill and most particularly to kill the policeman who has been following him most of his life because he’s “sure” that he’s going to commit a serious crime. Repeatedly describing him as “vermin”, the policeman has no confidence that Siu-tung could “change” and thinks he’s already past redemption while The Master quite reasonably asks if it’s fair to persecute him in this way just because he happened to be born different.

The Master’s question provokes another about free will and responsibility and if anything is really anyone’s fault if it’s all down to Fate in which case the role of the policeman becomes almost moot. He is also resisting his own fate in his intense fear of mental illness which he worries he will inherit from his parents each of whom suffered from some kind of mental distress. This fear has caused him retreat from life and it seems may have contributed another’s suicide while his divination has an otherwise manic quality as he finds himself constantly trying to outwit Fate. The two men soon find themselves in a battle with the skies, remarking that God is striking back every time they make a move to try and change their destiny.

Eventually The Master rationalises that a plant must wither before it fruits, allowing himself to slip into “madness” as means of rejecting his fate. His strategies become wilder and finally seem as if they might lead him to kill which would certainly be one way of altering Siu-tung’s destiny if ironically, while conversely something does indeed seem to change for Siu-tung who is understandably concerned by The Master’s increasingly erratic behaviour but has escaped his desire to kill. Then again, could this all not be Fate too, how would you know if you’d overcome it? As The Master comes to accept, the path maybe set but the way you walk it is up to you. Only by accepting his Fate can he free himself from it. There may be a more subversive reading to found in Cheang’s depiction of Hong Kong as a rain-soaked prison in which lives are largely defined by forces outside of their control, but he does at least suggest that his heroes have more power than they think even if it relies on a contradiction in the active choice to embrace one’s fate.

Mad Fate screens July 22 as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Images: © MakerVille Company Limited and Noble Castle Asia Limited

Geylang (芽籠, Boi Kwong, 2022)

July 20, 2023by Hayley Scanlon

Close to the end of Boi Kwong’s Geylang (芽籠), a young woman compares herself to a butterfly whose wings have begun to disintegrate, trapping in her in the environs of the famous red light district along with several others who all seem to have been the victim of cruel coincidence one rainy night. The world is indeed shades of grey, each of them having “good” reasons for behaving the way they do but also perhaps also selfish, or greedy, or merely afraid and seeking escape.

The strangest thing about this night in Geylang is that in the morning before it the body of a sex worker, Xiao Ling, was discovered near a remote stretch of road, only pretty much everyone seems to have forgotten about her and she is both incredibly central and an incidental detail in this karmic whirlpool of greed and desperation. Meanwhile, another sex worker, Shangri-La, is kidnapped by a crazed doctor trying to find a kidney donor for his seriously ill little girl. Shangri-La had also been in the middle of a blackmail plot against a politician running in the local election over a compromising video assisted by her pimp, Fatty, who is busy trying to care for his elderly father who has dementia. Meanwhile, activist lawyer Celine argues with her husband who is standing for office on a platform of cleaning up Geylang and is therefore unsupportive of her desire to continue to protect sex workers from violence and exploitation.

What looks like simple greed turns out to be desperation born out of love and despair which nevertheless leads to little more than self-destruction. In a sense they are all seeking escape from Geylang, Fatty quite literally trying to run to Indonesia after his father ends up stabbing a loanshark to death, save perhaps Celine who may be seeking escape inside it in detailing her traumatic past and marriage to an abusive husband whom she no longer loves. The quest to retrieve the compromising video turns out to have a different purpose than we first thought, exposing another kind of prejudice that leads to shame and repression but also heartbreak and the hurt of betrayal. Love doesn’t have much currency in Geylang save perhaps the parental in the wholesome relationship between Fatty and his dad even if it is to an extent inverted in the mad doctor’s unethical determination to steal Shangri-La’s kidney.

Even so, the election’s hypocrisy hangs over the rest of the action as a politician makes speeches about wanting to clean up the area as if the people who live there were just rubbish to swept away. Celine who runs Project Angel protecting vulnerable women working in the red light district feels differently but even she eventually reflects that the best way to protect herself is by gaining political power in addition to that granted to her by social position and wealth. She gives as good as she gets protecting a transgender sex worker from harrassment by a pair of obnoxious men but is also herself a victim of the ingrained misogyny of the world around her in which women’s bodies have been commodified yet have little value. Everyone seems to have forgotten Xiao Ling already, though there is quite a lot going on this particular night, as they scrabble for an exit.

Shot with noirish flair, the film surprises in its frankness amid the otherwise conservative Singapore painting a vivid picture of the other side of the underworld peopled by ordinary men and women just trying to by often in quite difficult circumstances. The irony is that the reason the video was so important wasn’t in its salacious content, but what it captured by mistake long after most had already stopped watching once again rendering its subject forgotten, a random after thought or loose end destined to remain untied. Dark moments of nihilistic humour hint at the sense of despair along with the cosmic irony that has drawn each of these people together united by their desire for a better life for themselves or others and their willingness to do whatever it takes to acquire it while seeking a way out of the neon-lit hell of Geylang only to realise that their tattered wings may no longer be able to carry them.

Geylang screens July 21 as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Everyphone Everywhere (全個世界都有電話, Amos Why, 2023)

July 19, 2023by Hayley Scanlon

Have we become too dependent on our phones, allowing them to divide rather than connect us? For those at the centre of Amos Why’s zeitgeisty comedy Everyphone Everywhere (全個世界都有電話), they do seem to have become a double-edged sword. Yet in the end, it’s a series of handsets that reconnect them with their youth if only to remind them of the disappointed hopes of a defeated middle-age given additional an weight by subtle hints of post-Handover despair.

Asked why he’s decided to move to the UK, Raymond (Peter Chan Charm-Man) replies that everybody’s doing it even if he resented being sent away to study in Aberdeen, Scotland as a teenager in the wake of the Handover. The real reason is that he’s got himself involved in a lot of shady stuff and has just had his phone hacked so he fears blackmail or arrest. He’s organised a farewell dinner with old high school friends Chit (Endy Chow Kwok-Yin) and An (Rosa Maria Velasco), but nothing quite goes to plan in the curious ways the lives of three former friends remain entwined even if they’ve all been in some sense corrupted by the changes in their society. “All is well as long as we never change” reads a teenage message to a future self, but of course it’s a promise that can’t be kept even if in the end, “life must go on anyway.”

Still, the society itself is fairly corrupt given the prevalence of scams many of them connected to our phones. Raymond failed to get his hacked phone fixed and opted for a new number instead, but Ana in particular keeps getting weird calls from him she later realises must be an attempt to scam her out of money by someone posing as Raymond and explaining that he needs money desperately. But Ana is also the victim of another “scam” in the form of Chit’s new business strategy of getting a “monthly fee” from clients rather than be reliant on work for hire arrangements. Even the restaurant itself along with its “Japanese” chef seems to be fraudulent, while An remains preoccupied with her husband’s womanising and Raymond ironically with his series of bad decisions that culminate in tax fraud. Meanwhile Raymond’s daughter Yanki (Amy Tang Lai-Ying) is also indulging in a kind of scamming selling intimate pictures to nerdy guys via telegram and smartphone apps and ironically remarking that she doesn’t want to get scammed again when discussing ever increasing payment options with her hapless targets.

Yet as Chit discovers when he leaves his phone at home, everything seems inconvenient when you’re phoneless. In a running gag, he repeatedly tries to borrow someone’s landline but is refused leaving him wandering around the city looking for a “restaurant” in one of three very similarly named redeveloped blocks. His wife’s is the only number he remembers by heart, but she remains resentful of his meeting up with Ana, his first love, whom he previously described as a “gullible” auntie and is on some level “scamming” by convincing her to keep him on a monthly retainer. Raymond’s phone threatens to expose him, Ana uses hers to spy on her husband and stepson, and Chit’s in a sense incapacitates him, leaving him alone and disorientated in his own city no longer certain how to travel around it amid the rapidly changing landscape and seemingly identical redevelopment projects.

Life hasn’t turned out the way any of them thought it would, recalling their carefree days 25 years previously in pre-Handover Hong Kong. Banners advertise a “New Era”, but the trio are trapped in the past with which they are eventually reconnected thanks to the retro handsets that unlike the technology of today still work and contain a series of time capsule messages to their future selves. History in a sense repeats itself as Raymond prepares to leave, but each is able to come to terms with their unfinished business and begin making concrete decisions about their futures. Suddenly “can we meet on Saturday?” takes on a new sense of poignancy when everyone seems to be leaving but then again, perhaps our phones really do connect us even if they sometimes connect us to scammers or people we don’t really want to talk to. Subtly hinting a sense of disappointment which runs a little deeper than middle-age malaise, Why looks back to the carefree days of 1997 allying the broken dreams of youth with the “New Era” of today but nevertheless grants his heroes a sense of new sense of possibility even the face of their despair.

Everyphone Everywhere screens July 20 as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Hello! Junichi (ハロー!純一, Katsuhito Ishii, Kanoko Kawaguchi, Atsushi Yoshioka, 2014)

July 18, 2023by Hayley Scanlon

A collection of confused nine-year-olds decides the best way to solve all their problems is to start a band in charming kids ensemble movie, Hello! Junichi (ハロー!純一). Co-directed by Katsuhito Ishii, Kanoko Kawaguchi, and Atsushi Yoshioka, the film is more linear and less surreal than most of Ishii’s other work but has a refreshing take on the childhood adventure movie as the kids each deal with their various problems many of which still plague the adults around them.

After all as kindhearted rocker Takao (Ryu Morioka) admits, the children aren’t really all that different from us. Shy and a little on the timid side, Junichi (Amon Kabe) is a peripheral member of his friendship group and perpetual fall guy who lists his only talent as the ability to carry everybody’s bags. His main problem is that he borrowed a rabbit-shaped eraser from his crush, Maeda, about a month ago and is too shy to return it. Now all he can think about is whether he should pluck up the courage or pretend to have forgotten. Things get more complicated when a new student teacher, the beautiful Miss Anna (Hikari Mitsushima), joins his school and confiscates the eraser as part of a cruel power game before agreeing to give it back if he helps her find out who scratched an offensive word into the side of her flashy car.

Miss Anna is either the best teacher in the world or the absolute worst. She arrives dressed for a night out and puts on a cutie pie act for her dejected middle-aged boss Achikita (Yoshiyuki Morishita) which she immediately drops as soon as he leaves the room inappropriately giving the children far too much information about her personal life but they do at least get some maths out of it. She also smokes by an oil can round the back of the building and talks like an aggressive high school girl when her boss’ back is turned, but eventually comes round to her responsibility as a teacher after bonding with the kids.

In comparison to some, Junichi’s problems aren’t really all that big except that his parents have to work late so he often has to prepare dinner for himself and his philosophising grandpa (Tatsuya Gashuin). Kuramoto (Yohei Hotta) meanwhile is beginning to act out at school because he’s got problems at home caused by his father’s gambling addiction which forces his mother (Chizuru Ikewaki) to run herself ragged just to stay afloat. With Miss Anna’s help, the kids decide to put on a concert for Mrs Kuramoto’s birthday which might on one level be charmingly naive but does in the end seem to cheer her up while allowing them to bond over their shared issues many of which are romantic in nature.

During the opening sequence in the park, child actor Machida (Shoma Suginomori) had given the other boys some grown up love advice he picked up on set which amounted to getting girls to like you by giving them cliched compliments such as remarking on the beauty of their smile. It’s not terribly good advice and a little a bit patronising not mention insincere, but amusingly enough is the same approach eventually taken by Takao when he and Miss Anna awkwardly try to address their mutual attraction. In the end, she has to concede that she doesn’t know what to say either and they end up having a rather childish conversation about favourite foods which is all to say it doesn’t get any easier and the adults don’t necessarily know much more than the kids.

Then again, there are some distinctly bad examples in Achikita’s thankfully ineffective attempt at workplace harassment and stalking of Miss Anna even if he eventually gives the most important life lesson in dressing down a trio of teenage bullies by telling them they have to learn love and appreciation or they’ll be weak men incapable of protecting anyone. Protecting people is something Junichi’s been worried about too, especially after failing to act when he spotted female classmate Tanaka (Rio Sasaki) duct taped to a pole by the bullies though she thankfully managed to save herself while uttering some particularly choice language for a nine-year-old. Still as his grandfather tells him he’s an unpolished stone. He has a weak side and a strong side and is still in the process of settling though the real business of growing up may be knowing which to be when. Charmingly quirky and infinitely warmhearted, Ishii, Kawaguchi, and Yoshioka masterfully capture an authentic sense of childhood anxiety while suggesting that none us is really so different after all.

Hello! Junichi is out now the UK on blu-ray as part of Third Window Films’ Katsuhito Ishii Collection.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Sorasoi (そらそい, Katsuhito Ishii, Shunichiro Miki, Yuka Osumi, 2008)

July 17, 2023July 17, 2023by Hayley Scanlon

Students on a dance summer camp pick up a few lessons in authenticity and self-confidence while staying in an out of the way coastal hotel in Katsuhito Ishii, Shunichiro Miki, and Yuka Osumi’s goofy comedy Sorasoi (そらそい). Reuniting Ishii and Miki after Funky Forest, the film is less episodic in nature than the directors’ other work and quirky rather than surreal but otherwise offers some of the same lessons as those found in Party 7 as the students begin to discover new things about themselves and others while practicing dance on the beach.

Led by teacher Tabe (Sota Aoyama) who claims to have been a top dancer with the Royal Ballet before an injury ended his career, the dance team consists of four girls and three boys all of whom Tabe regards as no hopers with little motivation to succeed. A trio of men lounging in donuts floating nearby in the sea gently mock them from a distance, but nevertheless utter a few words of encouragement as they leave the beach. Meanwhile, another young woman, Yuri (Sayuri Ichikawa), arrives to stay at the hotel after approaching the local tourist information office and asking for a reservation at somewhere that isn’t listed in the phonebook.

Her request may echo that of Party 7’s Miki and her reasoning is similar in that she is clearly hoping to take some time out and doesn’t want to be bothered as evidenced by her decision to ignore missed calls and texts on her phone. The inn owner is forever trying to convince her to travel to a nearby beauty spot named the Cape of Love and its Lovers’ Bell though also dropping in casually that people sometimes take their own lives there which may be irresponsible given Yuri’s ambiguous mental state. In any case, she quickly catches the attention of student Ryu (Ryu Morioka) who begins pursuing her in a friendly if decidedly inappropriate way.

The three guys tell each other that they’re only doing dance to get girls and that the fact the ones from the dance troupe aren’t interested in them can be excused because they are “different”. Engaging in stereotypically crude male banter one of them later tries to steal the girls’ underwear but as it turns out, at least two of them do actually like dancing and discover new things about themselves in the midst of their romantic pursuits, Ryu’s for Yuri and Atsushi’s (Atsushi Yoshioka) for Kano (Kanoko Kawaguchi ), a mysterious kimono’d woman who arrives to visit. The girls meanwhile are similarly focussed on romance with Ai (Ai Makino) besotted with the grumpy teacher Tabe and Kikka (Kikka) dropping entirely unsubtle hints that she’s in love with the seemingly straight Mako (Masako Satoh) who thinks she’s just playing around.

They are all, however, keeping some kind of secret mainly because they fear being judged by others whether it relates to their sexuality, having embellished their CV, or having told a slightly bigger lie to help achieve their dancing dreams. What each of them learns is that it doesn’t matter very much if their dancing isn’t very good so long as they enjoy doing it and feel good about spreading that joy to others. Yuri, meanwhile, has some much more grown up dilemmas to consider especially as it transpires she may have been attempting to escape an abusive relationship with a degree of pressure placed on her from various directions to return because her boyfriend is “really a good guy” who made a “mistake” in a momentary fit of temper which is a fairly dated and uncomfortable sentiment to see presented so uncritically even in 2008. Nevertheless, the sense of discomfort is somewhat undercut in a counter courtship from Ryu who offers a sweet and romantic note that leaves the ball entirely in her court.

In the best tradition of summer break movies, the film’s relaxed atmosphere adds to its laidback charm as do the unfussy indie visuals while the enthusiastic performances from a largely amateur cast of students from Ishii’s acting school (bar the participation of Warped Forest’s Fumi Nikaido and Ryu Morioka) reinforce the central messages of working hard at something you love whether it goes anywhere or not. The mutual solidarity of those around them with similar dreams affords the students the confidence to be more of who they are while clarifying what it is they may actually want out of life even if for some the future still seems uncertain.

Sorasoi is released in the UK on blu-ray on 17th July as part of Third Window Films’ Katsuhito Ishii Collection.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

KimStim Acquires North American Rights to Remembering Every Night

July 17, 2023by Hayley Scanlon

KimStim has acquired the North American rights to Yui Kiyohara’s breezy drama Remembering Every Night. Set in the tranquil environment of Tama New Town, the film follows a series of women each in search of something on a bright summer day.

Check out our review:

Told with breezy serenity, Kiyohara’s playful summer drama circles the unreality of the everyday but finds in it a kind of comfort if perhaps tempered by melancholy.

Remembering Every Night’s theatrical release begins at New York’s Lincoln Center on Sept. 15 with a wider North American rollout to follow.

Dream (드림, Lee Byeong-heon, 2023)

July 16, 2023by Hayley Scanlon

A disgraced football player gets a shot at redemption after agreeing to coach a team hoping to take part in the Homeless Olympics in Lee Byeong-heon’s sporting drama, Dream (드림). The Homeless Olympics was founded in order to advocate for the end of homelessness while combatting discrimination and stigma and takes place annually with teams of homeless people from all over the world taking part. Set in 2010 and inspired by the first Korean delegation to participate, the film is essentially an underdog sports drama in which the act of scoring a single goal is the same as an overall victory.

It is also, meanwhile, heavily critical of celebrity and sensationalist media each of which have a habit of latching onto popular causes in order to further their own careers. Hong-dae (Park Seo-jun) was a popular footballer insecure in his talents, but gained notoriety after poking an obnoxious reporter in the eyes when he repeatedly brought up the topic of his mother who happens to be a fugitive from justice. Deciding to retire from the game, Hong-dae is picked up by a talent agency who want to make him a star and is convinced to become the coach of the homeless football team in order to improve his personal brand while documentarian So-min (Lee Ji-eun) hopes to do something much the same by producing a semi-scripted reality show following the team’s fortunes.

Accordingly, So-min instructs Hong-dae to let her “cast” the key players on the basis of their touching backstories rather than their sporting ability. She comes up with a selection of people who have each for various reasons ended up on the streets but are looking for a way to turn their lives around and repair fractured relationships with family members. One man turned to booze and women while riding high but found himself out of luck when the Asian Financial Crisis ruined his business, while another claims that he’s not really homeless just lying low for a while, and a third was scammed by a friend and saddened by the impending exit of his ex-wife and daughter who will shortly be moving to Australia with her new husband. The film strays into more interesting territory in exploring the story of 44-year-old Beom-su (Jung Seung-gil) who ended up on the streets after a workplace accident left him with a chronic illness he did not have the money to treat, but otherwise falls into the same trap as So-min’s documentary in taking a fairly superficial view of homelessness. By the end of the film many of the players have thankfully moved into stable accommodation but do so largely without explanation aside from having apparently managed to save up for a deposit.

Positioning their battle for sporting success as a means of reclaiming their self-esteem might also uncomfortably suggest that the reason they’re on the streets is a matter of mental attitude while ignoring other systemic issues that led them there or prevented them from moving on (assuming that they wish to do so). Aligning their struggles with Hong-dae’s and to a lesser extent So-min’s might do something similar while they too are also battling cynicism and self-esteem issues, Hong-dae continuing to blame his mother for his problems complaining that he was born to be second place because she never put him first. As Hong-dae later points out, So-min is also to an extent exploiting the homeless in trying to create an inspirational narrative for her TV show before she like everyone else realises there are other ways to win besides the literal.

The final message is more one of never giving up as the team finally travel to the Olympics and find themselves out of their depth before deciding to give it everything they have even if it’s very unlikely they will win. There had indeed been discrimination in Korea, a sponsor pulling out describing the homeless as “smelly and disgusting” and expressing a degree of squeamishness about involving them with their brand, but at the Olympics they become the most popular team despite their lack of skill purely because of their charismatic perseverance. One player’s late in the game announcement that he is gay but has now come to accept himself in the knowledge that the problem lies with the world that will not accept him also makes the case for a greater equality if perhaps clumsily conflating two different issues. Nevertheless, IU’s lively performance and the film’s warmhearted tone help to overcome any mild sense of discomfort in its otherwise genial tale of never giving up and regaining your self-esteem even if you feel as if the world has already abandoned you.

Dream screens July 17 as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Lost in the Stars (消失的她, Cui Rui & Liu Xiang, 2023)

July 15, 2023by Hayley Scanlon

A desperate husband with five days left on his visa finds himself at the mercy of a foreign police department when his wife suddenly disappears into thin air during their honeymoon in a fictional South East Asian nation in Liu Xiang & Cui Rui’s hugely entertaining mystery thriller Lost in the Stars (消失的她, xiāoshī de tā). Produced and co-scripted and produced by Detective Chinatown’s Chen Sicheng, the film draws inspiration from the 1990 Russian drama Trap for a Lonely Man which was itself adapted from a 1960 French play, Piège pour un homme seul, which Alfred Hitchcock had once been interested in adapting.

It’s not difficult to see why seeing as the film revolves around a classic “wrong man” in frantic husband He Fei (Zhu Yilong) who like so many Hitchcock heroes is left feeling like the only sane man in an insane world when he wakes up next to a woman who claims to be his missing wife only he’s never seen her before and is adamant that something untoward must be going on though all the evidence points to the contrary and no one really believes him. The film never really entertains the possibility that the “fake” wife (Janice Man) is indeed telling the truth and Fei is undergoing some kind of psychotic break but does leave a question mark over his mental state and credibility on revealing that he is suffering from a neurological condition caused by his work as a diving instructor for which he is on serious medication.

In any case, the film opens with him bursting into a local police station exasperated with their lack of interest in his wife’s disappearance. In something of a trope in recent Mainland cinema, the action takes place in a fictional South East Asian nation which has shades of Thailand and Indonesia where the implication is the authorities don’t really care very much about a missing tourist. A Chinese policeman, Zheng (Du Jiang), eventually admits as much confessing that the police department is massively understaffed and only investigates “criminal” cases which they don’t believe his wife’s to be, rather that she most likely got fed up with Fei and has gone off of her own accord. Their lack of concern echoes a persistent theme in mainstream Mainland movies that the safest place for Chinese citizens is at home, an idea only reinforced by the film’s melancholy conclusion and the implications of Chen Mai (Ni Ni), a top international lawyer Fei meets by chance, who suggests that his wife may have been taken by an international trafficking ring.

Nevertheless, in its various twists and turns the film also has a few things to say about class disparities in contemporary China in which as someone later says money may even buy the Devil’s soul. With his visa running out, Fei insists that he won’t leave without finding out what’s happened to his “real” wife and what’s going on with the “imposter” who soon drops any pretence and openly admits that she’s out to get Fei for reasons he finds unclear though assumes to be financial. Then again, we start to realise that perhaps he hasn’t been a hundred percent honest even with the information he’s giving Mai who is the only person interested in helping him find his wife who may or may not be at the mercy of vicious international gang backed by important people against whom an ordinary tourist like Fei or even an international figure like Mai has little power.

While the film noticeably carries a strong anti-gambling message perfectly in tune with the censors’ sensibilities, it also has a surprising queer subtext in the quite obviously coded persona of super lawyer Mai who makes a dramatic motorbike entrance and then more or less steals the film as she tries to ascertain the whereabouts of Fei’s missing wife. Nothing is quite as it first seems, subterfuge piles on on subterfuge along with altered realities and personal myth making though the film’s title takes on a poignant note in the closing moments in which another starry image is presented in an attempt to evoke an emotional reaction from an otherwise heartless villain. Boasting excellent production values and elegant production design, the film is careful never to lose itself in its various twists and reversals before quite literally dropping the curtain on its extremely satisfying conclusion in which we discover just how far some are willing to go in pursuit of the stars.

Lost in the Stars is in UK cinemas now courtesy of CineAsia.

Trailer (Simplified Chinese / English subtitles)

Party 7 (Katsuhito Ishii, 2000)

July 14, 2023by Hayley Scanlon

“This shit’s for real.” according to the front desk guy at Hotel New Mexico, an out of the way spot just perfect for those looking to lay low for a little while. Like a lot of Katsuhito Ishii’s work, Party 7 is essentially a series of self-contained vignettes which eventually collide following a series of bizarre coincidences revolving around some money stolen from the mob, a two-way mirror in a regular hotel room, and the receptionist’s tendency to almost literally shoot the shit.

Following a brief prologue, Ishii opens with striking animated sequence which introduces each of the main players with an arcade game aesthetic and explains that Miki (Masatoshi Nagase) has stolen money from the mob and is currently on the run which is why he’s turned up at the infinitely weird Hotel New Mexico. The running gag is that Miki thinks he’s holed up somewhere no one will find him, but sure enough a series of “friends” soon turn up in part thanks to a loose-lipped travel agent. The fact that people can find it so easily dampens the impression of the Hotel New Mexico as some kind of interstitial space. It’s not so much existing in a weird parallel world as a bit run down and staffed by a series of eccentrics. It does however have a “peep room” hidden behind a two-way mirror where “Captain Banana” (Yoshio Harada) is attempting to pass his knowledge on to the young Okita (Tadanobu Asano), the son of a recently deceased friend who has been repeatedly arrested for voyeurism.

Captain Banana’s insistence on his surreal superhero suit is in a way ironic, if perhaps hinting at the super empowerment of accepting one’s authentic self. “It’s your soul,” he tells Okita, “it’s screaming ‘I want to peep’.’” Meanwhile, Miki gets into an argument with his ex-girlfriend Kana (Akemi Kobayashi) who has turned up in the hope of reclaiming money that he owes her. Kana too seems to be less than rigorous with the truth if perhaps emotionally authentic. She’s now now engaged to a nerdy guy having somewhat misrepresented herself as the innocent girl next-door type. Her refusal to let her fiancé into her apartment perhaps hints at a more literal barrier to intimacy or at least that she is intent on preventing him from seeing her true self. What she doesn’t know is that her fiancé hasn’t been completely honest either, in part because he thinks she’s out of his league and is insecure in their romance.

Miki too maybe somewhat insecure, having run off with the gang’s money after hearing them bad mouth his associate Sonoda (Keisuke Horibe) who has now been charged with killing him and getting the money back. But Sonoda too has reasons to doubt the boss’ affection for him after Miki and the others point out that gifts he thought were so valuable are really just cheap knock offs that suggest the boss thinks very little of him at all. Okita’s psychiatrist tells him that there are “no rules in making friends”, and maybe in a strange way that’s what everyone is trying to do. Kana wanted the money to overcome her anxiety about having no friends or family to invite to the wedding, while all Sonoda wanted was the boss’ approval and though Miki had deliberately gone somewhere he thought no one would find him nevertheless attracts a series of followers.

Even the receptionists seem to be desperate for human contact with their strange stories of poo falling from the sky and bizarre approach to hospitality. “The point is whether you believe it or not,” one tells the other after spinning what sounds like a yarn but then again might not be. Ishii’s zany world has its own surreal logic culminating in a piece of cosmic irony and defined by coincidence as the otherwise unrelated stories begin to come together and slowly find their way to Hotel New Mexico but seems to suggest the point is in the serendipity of the meeting and its concurrent authenticity even if a literal shot in the arm is a less than ideal way of brokering a friendship.

Party 7 is released in the UK on blu-ray on 17th July as part of Third Window Films’ Katsuhito Ishii Collection.

Original trailer (English subtitles)