Author: Hayley Scanlon

It’s Me, It’s Me (俺俺, Satoshi Miki, 2013)

December 6, 2018by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

Some say it’s good to be your own best friend, but then again perhaps too much of your own company isn’t so good for you after all. The hero of Satoshi Miki’s adaptation of the Tomoyuki Hoshino novel, It’s Me, It’s Me (俺俺, Ore Ore), is about to put this hypothesis to the test as his identity literally splinters, overwriting the source code of strangers and replacing it with its own. How can you save your identity when you aren’t sure who you are? Perhaps getting to know yourself isn’t as straightforward a process as most would believe.

Hitoshi (Kazuya Kamenashi), an aimless 20-something, had dreams of becoming a photographer but they’ve fallen by the wayside while he supports himself with a dead end job on the camera counter in a local electronics superstore. Virtually invisible to all around him and so anonymous the woman in the fast food restaurant almost wouldn’t give him the fries he’d ordered, Hitoshi is irritated when two salaryman-types gossiping about how one of them plans to quit the company to pursue his dreams rudely invade his space. Perhaps for this reason, he finds himself taking off with the irritating stranger’s phone after he carelessly allows it to fall onto Hitoshi’s tray.

Emboldened, Hitoshi decides to use the phone to commit an “Ore Ore” scam – a well known telephone fraud in which a stranger rings an elderly person and shouts “it’s me, it’s me!” in a panic so they won’t twig it’s not really their grandson who is ringing them and claiming to be in some kind of terrible trouble which can only be relieved with cold hard cash. Not the sharpest knife in the drawer, Hitoshi gets the money wired to his account and then tries to dispose of the phone but it’s already too late. When he gets home, a strange woman (Keiko Takahashi) is in his apartment and she keeps calling him “Daiki”. What’s more, when he tries to go and see his mum (Midoriko Kimura), another guy is there who looks just like him and his mum won’t let him in.

Hitoshi eventually becomes friends with “Daiki” who introduces him to another “Me”, Nao – a cheerful student slacker. Each in their own way slightly disconnected, the trio build up an easy friendship – they do after all have quite a lot in common, and begin jokingly referring to their shared apartment as “Me Island”. Hitoshi, remarking that he’s never felt so carefree among others, begins to see the upsides of his strange new situation which obviously include the ability to be in two places at once, but too much of himself eventually begins to grate when Nao begins tracking down and bringing home all the other Mes he can find with the intention of launching a Me Empire.

A member of a lost generation, Hitoshi is a perfect example of modern urban malaise. Though he once had dreams, they’ve been steadily killed off by an oppressive society leaving him alone and adrift, unable to connect with others as the light slowly dies in his eyes. Perhaps, however, there is the odd flicker of resistance in his intense resentment towards those who have defiantly not given up – the chatty salaryman talking about his individualist dreams and later his work colleague who has been secretly taking accountancy classes in an effort to escape casual employment hell for a steady, if dull, regular job.

Hitoshi has always regarded relationships as “troublesome” but begins to feel differently through bonding with himself. As Daiki puts it, accepting others means that you’ll be accepted – something Hitoshi unconsciously longs for but is too insecure to believe is possible. His actualisation receives another stimulus when he meets the beautiful and mysterious Sayaka (Yuki Uchida) who again encourages him to accept the one who accepts you and is the only other person who seems to be able to see the “real” him as distinct from all the other Mes. Yet Hitoshi struggles – he can accept parts of but not all of himself, eventually leading to a disastrous turn of events in which the parts of himself he does not like begin being “deleted” as one Me decides to make war on all the others.

Only by ridding his psyche of imperfections can Hitoshi reformat his personality and once again resume full autonomy as the one and only Me. Yet can we be so sure final Hitoshi is the “true” Hitoshi? Who can say – only Hitoshi himself can know the answer to that (or not), the rest of us will just have to accept him as he is in the hope that he will also be able to accept us so that we can in turn accept ourselves.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Farewell to Spring (惜春鳥, Keisuke Kinoshita, 1959)

December 5, 2018by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

For Keisuke Kinoshita, people are basically good even if the world around them often isn’t. Even so, there are limits to goodness. Can friendship survive if an intimate trust is abused, or will betrayal cut the cord once and for all? Unlike many of his contemporaries, “youth” was not a theme in which Kinoshita was particularly interested – or, at least, not quite in the same way. Farewell to Spring (惜春鳥, Sekishuncho) is in some senses an awkward fit for his usual concerns but then the concerns here are perhaps closer to the personal in examining the changing fortunes of a group of five male childhood friends who find themselves scattered in the complicated post-war landscape, facing their mutual troubles in solitary, manly fashion while their friendship withers under the weight of their individual sorrows.

The drama begins when Iwagaki (Yusuke Kawazu) returns to his Aizu mountain village after being away at university for the previous two years. As Iwagaki’s parents have died and his half-brother moved to Hokkaido with his family, Iwagaki has no “home” in his hometown as he sadly tells a familiar face spotted on the train. Nevertheless, his friends are very excited to see him and have all rallied round without even being asked. Iwagaki will be staying at an inn owned by the family of his friend, Minemura (Kazuya Kosaka). The other boys all stayed in the village – Makita (Masahiko Tsugawa), the illegitimate son of a bar owner is being primed to take over the family business while sort of dating the step-daughter of his estranged father; Teshirogi (Akira Ishihama), the younger son of an impoverished former samurai family, is working at a local factory and heavily involved in the labour movement; while Masugi (Toyozo Yamamoto), who is disabled with a lame leg thanks to a childhood accident, works alongside his parents in a traditional lacquerwork shop but finds his livelihood threatened by political troubles with China.

Once a tight group of small-town friends, none of the boys quite wants to acknowledge how far they have drifted apart – not just from each other, but from the young men they once were even though comparatively little time has actually passed. Nevertheless, the shadow of their old bond still exists – it is obvious to all the boys that Iwagaki has returned in some kind of disgrace. A favourite of their teacher, Iwagaki had been given a valuable opportunity to better himself by going to university in Tokyo but has apparently fallen out with his sponsor and into hard times. The story he tells his friends is dark – they’d heard it had to do with a “dalliance” with a maid which annoyed his patron but the way he describes it sounds more like a rape revenge followed by an unwanted romance which he eventually ran away from. Iwagaki is not making himself look good which might suggest that he trusts his friends enough to tell them the truth, or perhaps just doesn’t quite see the various ways in which his conduct discredits him, but either way there is deepening gulf between each of the men in which none is quite being honest with the other.

Iwagaki’s arrival doesn’t so much stir up old troubles as occur alongside them. The central drama revolves around a squaring off between Makita and Teshirogi over a girl, Yoko (Yukiyo Toake), who is the niece of Makita’s biological father – a nouveau riche pawnbroker with a steely wife, Tane (Teruko Kishi), who hates Makita’s mother for obvious reasons. The mistress and the wife are locked into an internecine battle of wills and resentments and so both are opposed to a marriage between Makita and Yoko even though they have fallen in love independently. As there is no son in the family, Makita’s father needs someone to marry in through marrying Yoko – it would obviously be ideal for him if his “real” son could inherit his estate, but Makita’s mother wants him to take over her bar and Tane is directly opposed to suffering the humiliation of a mistress’ son living under her roof and so they are at an impasse. Meanwhile, Tane has been trying to arrange a socially beneficial marriage and has settled on Teshirogi – the impoverished son of an aristocratic family.

A confluence of post-war problems, the first question pits the traditional arranged marriage against the youngster’s right to choose. Yoko doesn’t want the arranged marriage – she’s doing everything she can to fight it even if she ends up alone, but Makita has already given up believing the situation is futile. Teshirogi tries to ask him if it’s OK to pursue Yoko, but Makita doesn’t really answer. What he says is does as you see fit, but Teshirogi hears only what he wants to hear and fails to notice that Makita minds quite a lot and has only said that out of a sense of despondency and a possible romanticisation of his emotional suffering. Yoko is living in the post-war reality – she rejects the idea of arranged marriage and of her adoptive parents’ right to control her future, but she is unable to fully resist alone – she needs Makita to stand with her, but he doesn’t have her courage. Meanwhile, Makita is also consumed by thoughts of romantic impossibility thanks to the sad story of his melancholy uncle (Keiji Sada) who tried to run off with a geisha (Ineko Arima) only for her to be dragged back by her madam because of an outstanding debt.

Debt bondage is something else that’s thankfully on its way out in the post-war world thanks to the prostitution laws which are contributing to a decline in the fortunes of Minemura’s inn. Feudalism, however, is doing its best to cling on – especially in tiny mountain backwaters. Teshirogi may now be a proletarian factory worker flying the red flag and taking an active part in the labour movement as a striker protesting for better pay and conditions, but at heart he’s still a nobleman and has a natural sense of entitlement and superiority towards his friends which is only deepened by his resentment over his comparative financial inferiority. Yoko asks him to turn down the marriage proposal because she’s in love with Makita and fears her family won’t listen to her alone, but Teshirogi roughly tells her he doesn’t care much for her feelings and will make his own decision. Later he insists on giving his answer “the proper way” by going through his father, and submits himself entirely to the processes of the pre-war society. Making a half-hearted justification to Makita, Teshirogi confesses that his decision to push for the marriage was motivated by his poverty and a desire to regain his status if also partly because he too is attracted to Yoko and admires her spiky spirit even if it otherwise seems to contradict his conservative views.

Teshirogi breaks the bro code in favour of self interest, not actually caring very much if it costs him friendships which he appears not to value. As openly gay as it was possible to be in the late 1950s, Kinoshita creates an intensely homosocial world of male honour-based bonding, but makes a tragic hero of the innocent Masugi who is in a sense feminised by his disability which prevents him from participating in the manly rituals of the other boys – most notably in the coming of age sword dance in which he becomes narrator rather than sword bearer. Teshirogi, in an early instance of smug insensitivity, throws a mildly barbed comment at Masugi in tersely suggesting that his affection for Iwagaki runs beyond friendship – something which the group seems to be aware of but does not want to go into, or at least not really like this. Masugi and Minemura emerge as the most pure hearted and the most hurt among the friends, clinging on to the idea of their friendship even as they are betrayed by those closest to them while Makita wonders if betrayal is an essential component of connection or merely its inevitable end.

Despite the central betrayal, the boys eventually manage to salvage something of their friendships, leaving the field of battle together and alive if also wounded and sorrowful. Unlike the tragic White Tigers in the song which recurs throughout the film who elected mass suicide on believing their battle was lost, the boys move forward – Makita, at least, spurred on by his uncle’s tragic romance decides that love is worth fighting for after all and that he doesn’t have to blindly accept the profound inertia of small-town Aizu life or the natural authority if the hypocritical Teshirogi who shouts socialist slogans but insists on his social superiority. Friendship may not survive the compromises of adulthood, but perhaps the bonds between people aren’t so easily broken after all even if they consistently break your heart.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Seven People in the Cellar (지하실의 7인 / 地下室의 七人, Lee Seong-gu, 1969)

December 4, 2018April 4, 2024by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

The “literary film” was beginning to fall out of favour by 1969. The collapse of the quota system introduced under the 1962 Motion Picture Law, the exclusion of literary film from the “Domestic Films of Excellence” programme (which encouraged producers to produce high quality Korean films to qualify for distributing more lucrative foreign ones), and the rise of television all conspired to produce a shift towards the populist. Lee Seong-gu had made his name with a series of literary adaptations which enabled him to experiment with form in the comparatively more elevated “arthouse” arena but with horizons shrinking even he found himself with nowhere left turn. Seven People in the Cellar (지하실의 7인 / 地下室의 七人 *, Jihasil-ui Chil-in) is Lee’s last “literary film” and is adapted from a stage play by Yun Jo-byeong who was apparently unhappy with Lee’s adaptation in its abandonment of his carefully constructed ideological balance in favour of adhering to the typical rhetoric of the “anti-communist” film.

Set towards the end of the Korean War, Seven in People in the Cellar presents itself as a conflict between the godless and hypocritical forces of communism and the good and righteous Catholic Church. Accordingly, our hero is a priest, Father Ahn (Heo Jang-gang), who has just returned to his church after being forced to flee by the encroaching “puppet army”. Accompanied by a nun, Lucia (Yun So-ra), and a new curate, Brother Jeong (Lee Soon-jae), Father Ahn is glad to be reunited with his flock but there are dark spectres even here – Maria (Yoon Jeong-hee), a young woman Ahn was forced to leave behind when he fled, runs away from the priest on catching sight of him, apparently out of shame. Meanwhile, while Ahn was away, three rogue Communists began squatting in his cellar waiting for the “reinforcements” which are supposedly going to retake the town. Taking Sister Lucia hostage, the Communists force Ahn to feed them while keeping their existence a secret. To Jeong’s consternation, Ahn agrees but out of Christian virtues rather than fear – he feels the Communists too are lost children of God and have been sent to him so that he may guide them back towards the light.

Not a natural fit for the world of the anti-communist film, Lee does his best to undermine the prevalent ideology even if he must in the end come down hard with Ahn’s essential moral goodness. Thus, Communists aside, the conflict becomes one of age and youth, male and female, as much as between “right” and “wrong” or “North” and “South”. Jeong, youthful and hotheaded, lacks Ahn’s Christian compassion – he bristles when Ahn immediately sets about feeding the starving villagers with their own rations, and disagrees with his decision to harbour the Communists even while knowing that Lucia’s life is at stake if they refuse. Twice he tries to kill the communist “enemy”, threatened by their ideological opposition to his own cause – once when he enters the cellar and misinterprets an altercation between Lucia and sympathetic soldier Park (Park Geun-hyeong), and secondly when the troop’s female commander, Ok (Kim Hye-jeong), attempts to seduce him.

Sexuality becomes spiritual battleground with Christian chastity winning out over Communist free love. Ok, as unsympathetic a communist as it’s possible to be, is sexually liberated and provocative. She suggestively loosens her shirt and fondles her breast in front of a confused junior officer, later taking him into the forest and more or less ordering him to make love to her (which he, eventually, does). However, it is to her simply a matter of a need satisfied. Ok describes the moment she has just shared with her comrade as no different than sharing a meal. She was “hungry”, she ate. When she’s hungry again she will eat again but there’s no more to it than that and there is no emotional or spiritual component in her act of “lovemaking”, only the elimination of a nagging hunger.

Ok’s transgressive and “amoral” sexuality is contrasted with that of the abused Maria who was tortured and later raped by the Communists’ commanding officer. Forced to betray a nun, she was robbed not only of her innocence but also of her faith. Maria is the “pure woman” corrupted by Communist cruelty. Her chastity was removed from her by force, and she sees no other option than to continue to ruin herself in atonement for her “sin”. Unable to live with the consequences of her actions, she sees no way out other than madness or martyrdom.

The fact that Maria’s torturer is another woman, and such an atypical woman at that, is another facet of the Communist’s animalistic inhumanity. As in The General’s Mustache, the Communists are seen to use innocent children as bargaining chips when ordinary torture fails, even this time killing one to prevent him telling the village about their hiding place. Yet the height of their cruelty is perhaps in their indifference to each other – Park, touched by Sister Lucia’s refusal to leave when he tried to let her go fearing that he would face reprisals, announces his intention to defect to the South and is shot dead by his commander in cold and brutal fashion. Park’s defection is a minor “win” for Ahn who sought restore the Communists’ sense of humanity and bring their souls to God, but it’s also born of misogynistic pique in his intense resentment of the “bossy” Ok who turns out to be an undercover officer from HQ on a special mission to spy against him.

With the one redeemed Communist dead, all that remains is for the others is to slowly destroy themselves. Ahn, cool and composed in absolute faith, waits patiently certain that the friendly South Korean soldiers will shortly liberate them. A hero priest, Ahn is the saintly opposite of the Communists’ cruelty in his compassionate determination to save them even at the risk of his own life. Lee keeps the tension high, creating siege drama that feels real and human in contrast with the often didactic and heavily stylised narrative of the “anti-communist” film, subtly muddying the essential messages but allowing Ahn’s compassion (rather than his “faith”) to shine through as the best weapon against oppressive inhumanity.

Seven People in the Cellar is the fourth and final film included in the Korean Film Archive’s Lee Seong-gu box set. Not currently available to stream online.

* In rendering the Hanja title, the landscape poster uses the arabic numeral 7 while the portrait version uses the Chinese character 七.

The General’s Mustache (장군의 수염 / 將軍의 수염, Lee Seong-gu, 1968)

December 3, 2018by Hayley Scanlon1 Comment

Broken dreams of the post-war society prove too much for one man to bear in Lee Seong-gu’s masterpiece of Korean Modernism – The General’s Mustache (장군의 수염 / 將軍의 수염, Janggun-ui Suyeom). Adapted from the novel by Lee O-young, Lee’s film co-opts the procedural but subtly subverts it, taking a cue from the film noir to turn it in on itself and ask if we can truly ever know another person, or if we simply conjure an image of everyone we know based on a collection of external observations gathered by ourselves and others. Our hero, Cheol-hun (Shin Seong-il), is a melancholy man who has chosen to live in a world of his own creation but when his shield of artifice is pierced by a spear of reality he can endure it no longer. Cheol-hun is dead, but who, if anyone, killed him and can we ever really understand why he died without his words to guide us?

Lee opens with a scream as Cheol-hun’s landlady discovers his body, draped half naked over his bed next to a stove with the safety cover removed. Concluding that carbon monoxide poisoning is likely the cause of death, the police find the panicked landlady suspicious but leave with three clues – a ladies’ stocking, a missing camera, and the scar on Cheol-hun’s forehead. The stocking takes them to Cheol-hun’s ex, who tells them that Cheol-hun gave his camera to a “nude model” which was perhaps a point of tension between the two, but not apparently the reason they decided to separate. The scar, ruining the detective’s (Kim Seung-ho) theory, turns out to be an old one – received in infancy when his exhausted mother (Han Eun-jin) dropped an iron on his head after a long day at the press.

After the testimony from Cheol-hun’s mother, the scar seems incidental but turns out to be anything but. Cheol-hun’s mother blames herself for his childhood injury (as any mother would) and has spent her life worrying about him, believing that the scar itself has been the cause of all his misfortune and sent him off on an unlucky path. From Cheol-hun’s sister (Kim Sin-jae) we learn that the family was once wealthy – local landowners who valued their “aristocratic” blood. After the war all that ended. The land was given back to the people, and Cheol-hun’s family were stripped of not only of their prestige but of their means of living. Nevertheless, Cheol-hun’s austere father refused to let his children play with the “commoners”, and so little Cheol-hun’s loneliness was born.

The testimony of Cheol-hun’s former boss reinforces the view that Cheol-hun was an eccentric loner, ill equipped for life in the “real” world. A former photojournalist, Cheol-hun lost his job as a result of a disastrous interview with a recently returned scholar who had enjoyed some minor success in America. The scholar, having been abroad five years, peppers his speech with random English and puts up a pretence of having forgotten his Korean. He complains that Korean kimchee is too spicy, and suggests that the key to improving the “backward” nation lies in “reforming” the cuisine. Cheol-hun, becoming ever more irritated, offers a few barbed comments but cannot contain himself when the kids, “John” and “Mary” who do not speak any Korean, arrive. American names, he points out, are usually associated with dogs and sex workers – why would you give them to your children if you plan to live in Korea? Needless to say, the interview is over.

Cheol-hun has now been characterised as a man who cannot read the air, but it’s time to hear from him too though it will have to be second hand. Shin-hye (Yoon Jeong-hee), the girlfriend, radically changing under testimony broadly agrees with this view of the man she loved but could no longer live with. Cheol-hun told her that he’d never been good with people and had no real friends save one in the army – interestingly enough a man descended from royalty, but that he died leaving Cheol-hun alone again with the lingering guilt that he was unable to save his only friend. His tragedy is that he yearns for true connection, to truly become one with another person, but he cannot achieve it. His life with Shin-hye crumbles not because of “reality” but because Shin-hye craves the real – to live in the real world where people bleed and hurt. She cannot live with Cheol-hun in his escapist paradise, but he cannot bear to leave it.

The title of the film comes from the book that Cheol-hun wanted to write. In the story, a victorious general fighting for “independence” returns to his “liberated” country. The general is dashing and brave and he has on his face the most magnificent mustache. A weedy reporter giddily asks him if he too might dare to grow such a wonderful mustache to which the general cooly assents. Before long a mustache craze sweeps the nation. Even those who cannot grow a mustache of their own have taken to wearing wigs, but our protagonist says no. He doesn’t want a moustache and refuses to wear one. He loses his job, but it remains open whether the fact of his not having a mustache (which no one forces him to have) or his melancholy loneliness in not wanting to have one and not understanding why everyone else does is the cause of all his suffering.

The quote at the film’s beginning, painted on Cheol-hun’s maddeningly crowded walls, reads “I refuse to, That’s why I’m alive”. Yet it isn’t quite a refusal so much as a lack of capacity. Cheol-hun’s boss had a point when he said that Cheol-hun was fundamentally unsuited to living in human society, as did Shin-hye when she described him as a lonely child in need of a guardian. If anything killed Cheol-hun, it was loneliness – a revelation which profoundly shakes the conviction of the veteran detective. After all, you can’t put handcuffs on spiritual isolation. The detective thinks of his family, and decides to take a watermelon home to share with them as means of reinforcing his own shallow connections but it’s clear that his conception of the world, of his abilities as a detective and the entire framework of his existence have been irreparably compromised by his investigation into the life and death of Kim Cheol-hun.

Partly a satirical swipe at post-war conformity, Lee’s film also subtly subverts a popular trope from the anti-communist genre in its apparent sympathy for landlords. Cheol-hun’s loneliness is posited as a direct result of his “fall” from his rightful position – the only friend he ever makes is also a fallen nobleman, and he struggles to adapt himself to the “classless” society of the “democratic” era. Yet it’s precisely these outdated ideas of “class” that have ruined his life in his father’s refusal to let him play with the other children. Cheol-hun retreats to a fantasy childhood world to avoid the harshness of modern life, but cannot escape his loneliness or his longing and when he realises Shin-hye is not the soulmate with whom he thought he could forge a new, perfectly isolated paradise, his entire existence becomes impossible.

Lee conjures a mosaic of Cheol-hun composed of the memories of those around him, gradually thickening in texture and finally coming into focus but always only a simulacrum of a man and not the man himself. Adopting a standard procedural narrative, Lee adds in extensive flashback and hypothetical dramatisations as the police investigate, switching to black and white for raw hypotheses and even breaking into elegantly drawn animation to recreate the surreal world of Cheol-hun’s putative novel. Dark and sad, The General’s Mustache seems to imply that there is no answer for solitude, that you can never really know another person fully, and that the loneliest man of all is the one born without a “mustache”, already naked of face in having no final mask to expose but finding that no one wants to see his true self only the one which is demanded he wear to appear just like everyone else.

The General’s Mustache is the third film included in the Korean Film Archive’s Lee Seong-gu box set. Also available to stream via the Korean Film Archive’s YouTube Channel.

When the Buckwheat Blooms (메밀꽃 필 무렵, Lee Seong-gu, 1967)

December 2, 2018by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

Life’s little ironies conspire against an ordinary pedlar in Lee Seong-gu’s adaptation of the Lee Hyo-seok short story When the Buckwheat Blooms (메밀꽃 필 무렵, Memilkkot Pil Muryeop). Set in the colonial period, the film tracks the long sad story of an unlucky man and his impossible love as he finds himself continually pushed to the edges of a world which is already disappearing. Yet as bad as things are for the heartbroken pedlar, they’re far worse for his long lost lady who finds herself continually handed from one man to another, abused, and exploited with no possibility of escape.

The story begins with three pedlars – Heo (Park No-sik) who hawks fabric, Jo (Kim Hee-gab) who sells paper, and Yun (Heo Jang-gang) who peddles “medicine”. Heo gets into an altercation with another, younger man, Dong-i (Lee Soon-jae), who he accuses of cutting in on his business. Unable to let the matter drop, Heo starts arguing with Dong-i again at an inn at which point he departs and leaves the old men to it. Heading back on the road, Heo entertains his friends with a familiar story – the one about his night in the buckwheat fields with his one true love.

Flashing back almost 20 years, the pedlars are all young men and only Jo is already married with a pregnant wife (Do Geum-bong) he takes with him on the road. In the marketplace one day, Heo catches sight of Bun-i (Kim Ji-mi), a noblewoman fallen on hard times whose father apparently plans to sell her to pay for his gambling debts. Crestfallen, Heo goes back to his business but catches sight of Bun-i once again and “enjoys” a spot of not exactly consensual sex in the middle of a beautiful buckwheat field. Heo asks Bun-i to wait for him, insisting that he will find the money to buy her from her father before he sells her to someone less nice. After trying several madcap schemes to get the requisite funds (including wrestling to win a bull), Heo sells his beloved donkey but is too late – Bun-i’s dad left in a hurry and sold her off somewhere or other but no one knows where. Heo sets off on a five year quest to find her but remains perpetually too late, only a little way behind but always arriving just after Bun-i and the son which is presumably Heo’s have been sold on to their next “owners.”

When the Buckwheat Blooms is very much Heo’s “depressing” (as he later describes it) life story. We see Bun-i on the periphery of his flashback, but he never finds her and so does not know of all she’s suffered since they parted, nor even that she has a child. Much of his melancholia is born of being old and of being poor. It is clear that his life has been ruined through poverty and lack of prospects – no one chooses to be a pedlar (as the pedlars keep pointing out), it’s what you do when you can’t do anything else. An itinerant existence has deprived each of them of a traditional family life. Jo had a wife in the flashback, but she and her children now live in a permanent home which Jo only rarely visits. Meanwhile Yun’s wife left him after the first time he took off for the road, unable to bear the loneliness and lack of stability involved in being a pedlar’s wife. Heo had remained single because of his lack of financial stability, but meeting Bun-i gave him hope for a different kind of life. He planned to give up peddling and set up as a farmer but, of course, it was not to be.

If that weren’t all the times are changing. The pedlars’ business is disrupted by the arrival of a band of fiddlers, but they haven’t just come to make merry – they’re advertising the “future”. They come to sing the virtues of the newfangled “department store” which is apparently a “foreign” invention and stocks “everything” – it has everything the market has and more, only cheaper and better quality. Dong-i, a young man, plans to give up peddling and try his luck in the gold mine, but there’s precious little hope for old men like Heo who have spent their lives living hand to mouth day by day and are now ill-equipped for anything else.

Heo is, at least, an “honest” man – he drinks but not to excess, and is frugal rather than throwing his money away on sex or gambling. Nevertheless, it’s hard to get away from his quasi-rape of Bun-i as she tries to run from him in the forest. The violence of the initial encounter undermines the romance of Heo’s ongoing tale as he hunts down his missing woman, apparently wanting to save her by buying her back from whoever it is “owns” her at the current time.

Told from Heo’s perspective, Bun-i’s feelings do not much factor in to his narrative but her life has been just as miserable as his, if not more so. A once noble lady, she suffers the humiliation of being “sold” by her father, and then sold on numerous times to other men each of whom abuse and mistreat her. By this time she also has a young son on whose behalf she resolves to suffer, even as her various “husbands” threaten to separate them. Bun-i has no freedom or possibility of escape. She is as chained as Heo’s donkey and treated with far less kindness.

Yet it is Heo to whom the central tragedy to ascribed – he yearns, searches, is frustrated and then forced to give up on his dreams while continuing to harbour enough of a spark of hope as to prevent him from moving forward with his life. He is condemned to grow old walking in circles burdened by an unrealisable dream. Once again shooting entirely on location, Lee aims for a more “sophisticated” aesthetic than many of his contemporaries, co-opting a shooting style much closer to European or Japanese film than is usual in ‘60s Korean cinema. A melancholy tale with an ironic, perhaps “happy” ending, Lee’s sad story of missed opportunities and ruined hopes is an oddly apt one for the post-war world but one which finds its share of cheerfulness even in abject misery.

When the Buckwheat Blooms is the second film included in the Korean Film Archive’s Lee Seong-gu box set. Also available to stream via the Korean Film Archive’s YouTube Channel.

Ilwol: The Sun and the Moon (일월 / 日月, Lee Seong-gu, 1967)

December 1, 2018by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

Old habits die hard in Lee Seong-gu’s Ilwol: The Sun and the Moon (일월 / 日月). The feudal past refuses to ease its icy grip even in the new “democratic” era in which freedom and prosperity are promised to all. Lee Seong-gu, closely associated with the Western Modernist movement, flexes his Literary Film muscles with an adaptation of Hwang Sun-won’s novel. Mixing a standard melodrama narrative with an exploration of “outdated” social prejudices and the gradually fracturing psyche of a man who learns a “dark secret” regarding his personal family history, Lee isolates the individual within a changing society as an ordinary man finds himself unable to move forward despite his own desire to be free of the superstitious past.

Lee opens with a scene more in keeping with a romantic comedy. Aspiring architect In-cheol (Shin Seong-il) meets drama student Na-mi (Nam Jeong-im) at an upscale ski resort and is instantly smitten. After spending time with her, In-cheol goes home and visits a childhood friend, Da-hye (Moon Hee). Da-hye is quite obviously in love with In-cheol – a fact of which he is obviously unaware or just completely insensitive since his purpose in coming is to tell her about Na-mi. Despite her personal pain, Da-hye is a good friend and gives In-cheol the appropriate advice regarding his romantic endeavour, reminding him that many of his previous relationships have failed because he was too diffident and he let them drift away.

Meanwhile, In-cheol is called into his father’s study to meet his dad’s new business contact who, it happens, wants a house designed. In a piece of near dynastic finagling, In-cheol gets a new job and, surprise surprise, the house turns out to be for Na-mi who is the daughter of the bank manager In-cheol’s dad wants a loan from. Everything is working out just fine, but then In-cheol’s brother – the Mayor of Gwanju (Jang Min-ho), turns up in a state of agitation and tells them he’s being blackmailed. Someone has discovered their dark family secret – In-cheol’s dad ran away from his family because they were butchers, a near “untouchable” class even in the Korean society of 1967. In-cheol thinks this is all very silly, who cares about things like that anymore? But on another level the discovery profoundly disturbs him in what it says about him as a person and about the society in which he lives.

It does seem ridiculous to stigmatise such commonplace occupation in a supposedly modern society, but In-cheol can’t seem to move past it. He pays a visit to a slaughter house which is just as awful as he’d expected it to be as he watches a once powerful cow twitching helplessly on the floor while other workers dismember the corpses of animals, pulling out entrails and severing heads ready for keener butchery. Still, In-cheol reminds himself it’s just a job and resolves to meet his cousin, but his cousin, insisting that he has no relatives, won’t talk to him. In-cheol takes this for rudeness or rejection, but really his cousin is attempting to protect him. In having internalised the constant abuse he suffers – even once being arrested by the police when a murder took place nearby solely because he is a butcher and had no alibi, In-cheol’s cousin avoids contact with those outside of his group and does not want to taint him with the butcher brush. Yet In-cheol keeps pushing, only for his cousin to roundly tell him to leave it alone unless he has the courage to accept his butcher blood fully for all it is.

The problems are manifold. In-cheol’s father’s first engagement was broken when the bride found out he came from a butcher family, while his wife (who married him without knowing) became a religious obsessive after learning of her husband’s origins. In-cheol’s marriage prospects are almost certainly off the table if anyone finds out, but even if someone agrees to marry him knowing the truth should he really invite them to do so knowing that they (and their children) will share his shame?

Unable to speak, unable to move forward or back, In-cheol spirals into a depressive cycle of inertia and suffering. Da-hye tries to talk to Na-mi to get him to wake up, but Na-mi tells her she’s not much bothered about In-cheol’s mental state and has only been messing around. Nevertheless, she finally draws closer to him as means both of assuming the leading role in her relationship, and as a way of annoying her father whilst potentially getting herself involved in a small scale scandal. Meanwhile, Da-hye who had pointed out that In-cheol’s problem was his passivity, ironically reveals that she too has been waiting for him to wake up and realise her feelings for him, only now realising she has probably missed her chance. The melodramatic device of the love triangle becomes a symbol of In-cheol’s ongoing psychological fracturing as he finds himself caught between two women and realising he can choose neither of them because his “ancestral curse” has effectively disqualified him from living in the modern world.

Using innovative editing techniques, Lee dramatises the tragedy of an isolated generation, supposedly living in a “modern” society but unable to escape the outdated social codes of the past. Rather than attempt to free themselves from irrational and superstitious ways of thinking, they choose self-exile and willingly accept their unhappiness in an otherwise altruistic intention of preventing the spread of a contagion. Melancholy yet urgent, Ilwol: The Sun and the Moon uses the ridiculous survival of an ancient prejudice to lay bare a dark secret at the centre of its own society but finds only tragedy without sense of an escape.

Ilwol: The Sun and the Moon is the first film included in the Korean Film Archive’s Lee Seong-gu box set. (Not currently available to stream via the Korean Film Archive’s YouTube Channel).

The Wandering Princess (流転の王妃, Kinuyo Tanaka, 1960)

November 30, 2018by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

As in her third film, The Eternal Breasts, Kinuyo Tanaka’s fourth directorial feature, The Wandering Princess (流転の王妃, Ruten no Ouhi), finds her working with extremely recent material – in this case the memoirs of Japanese noblewoman Hiro Saga which had become a bestseller immediately after publication in 1959. Tanaka’s filmic adaptation arrived mere months later in January 1960 which was, in an ironic twist, a year before the real life tale would meet something like the conventional romantic ending familiar from classic melodrama. Nevertheless, working with Daiei’s top talent including Kon Ichikawa’s regular screenwriter (and wife) Natto Wada, Tanaka attempts to reframe the darkness of the preceding 20 years as the defeat of compassionate idealism at the hands of rigid austerity and unstoppable oppression.

Tanaka opens with a scene taking place in 1957 which in fact depicts a somewhat notorious incident already known to the contemporary audience and otherwise unexplained on-screen in which the older Ryuko (Machiko Kyo) tenderly bends over the body of lifeless schoolgirl. The camera then pulls back to find another girl in school uniform, Ryuko, twenty years earlier. A young woman with innocent dreams, Ryuko’s life encounters the usual kind of unwelcome disruption in the unexpected arrival of a marriage proposal but this is no ordinary wedding. Ryuko, as the oldest daughter of a prominent noble family, has been selected as a possible bride for the younger brother of the former Qing emperor now installed as the symbolic leader of the Japanese puppet state of Manchuria. Against the odds, Ryuko and her new husband Futetsu (Eiji Funakoshi) are well matched and endeavour to build a happy home together just as they intend to commit themselves to the creation of a new nation born from the twin legacies of the fallen Chinese empire and the resurgent Japan.

Foregrounding Ryuko’s experience, the film does its best to set “politics” aside but the inescapable truth is that each of our protagonists is a prisoner of the times in which they live. The second scene finds Ryuko in 1937 as an innocent schoolgirl gazing at the young men in uniform as they march past her. She remains out of step with them, walking idly and at her own uneven rhythm while they keep rigorous and seemingly unstoppable time. The family are understandably wary of the implications of the marriage proposal, especially as it comes with a military escort, with Ryuko’s beloved grandmother the only one brave enough to ask to see whoever’s in charge of this outrage only to be told that their fates are in the hands of the nebulous concept known as “army” which knows no individual will.

Assured by her family that the decision rests with her, Ryuko consents – not only to becoming a stranger’s wife (which would have been her fate in any case) but to being a kind of ambassador, the presentable face of imperial ambition. On her marriage she’s presented with a deep red cheongsam and continues to dress in Chinese fashion for remainder of her life in Manchuria where she learns to speak Mandarin and devotes herself to becoming as Chinese as it’s possible to be. Meanwhile, her husband Futetsu busies himself with a complementary desire to become Japanese, intensely worried that the sometimes degrading treatment he and his family receive is exclusively caused by his problematic nationality. When their daughter, Eisei, is born, the couple determine to raise her as the child of a new world, the embodiment of idealised cultural integration.

The world, however, is not so kind and the blunt force of militarism continues to present a barrier to familial harmony. Futetsu is prevented from seeing his brother by the officious forces of the military police while the lonely, paranoid “emperor” suspects that Ryuko is nothing more than a Japanese spy sent to undermine his rule. Ryuko was sent to Manchuria to be the bridge between two cultures. Her, in a sense, feminine energy which attempts to build connection through compassion and understanding is consistently contrasted with the prevailing male energy of the age which prizes only destruction and dominance. Filled with the naivety of idealism, she truly believes in the goodness of the Manchurian project and is entirely blind to the less altruistic actions of her countrymen engaged in the same endeavour.

Confronted by some children in a park while pushing the infant Eisei in a pram, Ryuko is identified as a Japanese woman by her accent while conversing in Mandarin. She assures the children that Eisei is Manchurian like them, and that seeing as she married a Manchurian she is now too despite her Japanese birth. The kids are satisfied, so much so that they warn her that some Manchurians were killed recently in this park by Japanese soldiers, adding a mild complaint that it upsets their parents when Japanese people come to their restaurant and leave without paying. Mortified, Ryuko decides to use some of her (meagre) resources to buy all of the kids and everyone else in the park some sweets from a nearby stand, fulfilling her role as a Japanese ambassador even while insisting that she is a proud citizen of the newly born state of Manchuria.

Nevertheless the Manchurian project is doomed to fail, the kind of idealism fought for by Ryuko and Futetsu crushed under the boot of militarism. Despite everything, Ryuko still wants to be the bridge if only to prevent a catastrophe of this kind happening again (while perhaps refusing to engage with some of the reasons it happened in the first place) but in Eisei’s eventual death, foreshadowed in the melancholy opening, a deeply uncomfortable implication is made that the kind of cross-cultural harmony that Ryuko dreams of may not be viable. In contrast to the salaciously reported real life events (somewhat alluded to by presence of a schoolboy’s cap next to the body) which hinted at a suicide pact or murder, Ryuko attributes Eisei’s decision to end her life to an inability to reconcile her twin heritage coupled with the heavy burden of being the last descendent of the Qing Dynasty. Despite this minor misstep of tying the fate of Eisei to the failure of the Manchurian dream and the loss of its misplaced idealism, Ryuko ends her account on a hopeful note in admiring the flowers she planted finally in bloom and looking forward to a more hopeful age governed by warmth and compassion rather than violence and austerity.

The Wandering Princess was presented by Japan Foundation London as part of a series of events marking the publication of Tanaka Kinuyo: Nation, Stardom and Female Subjectivity.

Dead Souls (死靈魂, Wang Bing, 2018)

November 29, 2018July 21, 2019by Hayley Scanlon3 Comments

For his eight hour exploration of China’s painful past, Wang Bing borrows a title from Gogol’s famous 19th century Russian novel which aimed to poke fun at the various flaws in contemporary cultural norms. “Dead Souls” (死靈魂, Sǐ Línghún), in Gogol’s case, referred to serfs which had passed on but were still included in a landlord’s register of property and therefore liable for taxation (the novel’s protagonist, a corrupt former civil servant, is keen to “buy” these “virtual” serfs as part of a mysterious money making scam). Wang Bing’s aims are about as far from comic as it’s possible to be, but he too is intent on unmasking national hypocrisy in ensuring the testimonies of the hundreds of men and women who survived Mao’s “Anti-Rightest Movement” of the late 1950s are finally heard. The alleged rightists became “dead souls” in more ways than one – having lost their party affiliation they no longer quite existed in the intensely conformist post-revolutionary world where they found themselves betrayed and abandoned by an increasingly oppressive regime that eventually robbed them of their humanity.

In 1956, the Communist Party had announced the Hundred Flowers campaign in which ordinary people were encouraged to voice their innermost thoughts about the state of the revolution. After a short lived period of liberalism, the Hundred Flowers campaign was exposed as a ruse to root out so called reactionary elements. The Anti-Rightist Movement which began in 1957 rounded up those who had offered up constructive criticism of the party as well as capitalists, intellectuals, and just about anyone with a vaguely questionable history, and packed them off for “re-education” at various labour camps throughout China.

Mostly offered through lengthy direct to camera monologues, Wang presents a first hand account of the Jiabiangou Labor Camp from those who managed to survive (around 500 of 3200 internees) after famine and disease took hold. Many of the alleged “rightists”, most “rehabilitated” after the Cultural Revolution and subsequent economic reforms, affirm that they have no idea what it is they did “wrong” but are convinced that it was petty jealousies and personal resentments that landed them in hot water rather than a political dispute. Many found themselves at the mercy of an official they’d already reported for incompetence or corruption, disappeared for reasons of expediency or convenience. Others were told that their re-education was for the public good and they’d be back in a matter of months in their old job with their old salary, or else their family could come live with them on the utopian farm that would arise from their efforts in the camp.

Of course, the reality was very different and the harrowing stories recounted by the now elderly men with a mix of retrospective black humour and deeply held resentment speak of death on a mass scale, starvation, walking corpses, and rampant disease. With famine intensified by the failure of the Great Leap Forward, food supplies grew increasingly short while numbers of “rightists” in need of re-education only increased thanks to a kind of quota system. Those most likely to survive were the ones who made themselves the most useful – the physically strong, the tenders of horses, and the kitchen staff who could survive by pinching food when no one was looking. One strangely gleeful old man calmly recounts how he finagled his way into the kitchen and then set about pilfering the best of the supplies for himself with the help of the other cooks (seemingly without remorse), while another man recounts spotting a similar practice and taking the greedy to task by reminding them that the food they were scoffing came out of someone else’s mouth. Those who survived did so either because their families were able to smuggle in food for them, or else they were lucky.

Breaking away from the rigorous, sometimes oppressive interviews, Wang wanders the grounds of the former camps now levelled in an attempt to erase their existence but still painfully visible in the arid, scarred landscape. Bones litter surface as if squeezed out of the earth while human skulls rest eerily in the middle of barren land. A group of survivors attempts to identify remains through stones placed atop the bodies of those who died when those left behind still had the strength to bury them, but fail to read the faded names while their attempt to erect a monument to those who lost their lives to a malicious failure of government ends with only more destruction. What they were not permitted to do Wang accomplishes if intangibly in creating an indelible monument to human suffering through the first hand testimony of a persecuted generation finally able to break the long decades of silence and give voice to a truth still so painfully hidden.

Short clip from the beginning of the film (English subtitles)

Narratage (ナラタージュ, Isao Yukisada, 2017)

November 28, 2018by Hayley Scanlon2 Comments

Isao Yukisada made his name with the jun-ai landmark Crying Out Love in the Centre of the World back in 2004. Adapted from a best selling novel (which had also been adapted as a TV drama around the same time), Crying Out Love was the epitome of a short lived genre in which melancholy, lovelorn and lonely middle-aged heroes looked back on the lost love of their youths. Jun-ai has never really gone away though it might not be so popular as it once was, but the focus has perhaps shifted and in an unexpected direction. Narratage (ナラタージュ), once again adapted from a best selling novel though this time one by an author still in her early 20s when the book was written (incidentally smack in the middle of the jun-ai boom), is another sad story of frustrated love though in contrast to the jun-ai norm, its tragedies revolve around loves which were tested and subsequently failed, leaving the broken hearted romantics trapped within their own tiny bubbles of nostalgia.

The heroine, Izumi (Kasumi Arimura), narrates her tale from three distinct periods of her young life speaking from the perspective of her still young self now living as a lonely office worker. A lonely high school misfit, she found herself drawn to a sensitive teacher, Hayama (Jun Matsumoto), who rescued her from despair through an invitation to join the drama club. Relying on him ever more, she began regularly visiting his office for guidance and the pair bonded over their shared love of cinema. On graduation Izumi decided to declare her love, but earned a sad story in return and resolved to move on with her life. Then in the second year of university, she gets an unexpected phone call, calling her back to help out with a play at the school’s culture festival.

Yukisada begins with a rather unsubtle metaphor in which the older Izumi lovingly fondles an antique pocket watch which has long since stopped ticking. 20-something Izumi apparently has very little in her life, a pang of melancholy envy passing her face as she talks to a friend on the phone at home with a new baby while she prepares for another lonely night of (unnecessary) overtime. Where the heroes of jun-ai obsess over true love lost, Izumi struggles to face the fact that the man she loved did not, could not, love her in the way that she wanted him to. There is, of course, something deeply inappropriate in the awkward relationship between Izumi and Hayama who are a teenage student and her teacher respectively – connect as they might, there are moments when a line is crossed even while Izumi is still a schoolgirl which is in no way justified by the presentation of their (non)romance as a natural consequence of their mutual suffering.

Hayama and Izumi are presented as equals but they aren’t and never could be. As if to continue the chain, university era Izumi gets a love confession of her own from old classmate Ono (Kentaro Sakaguchi) who has apparently been carrying a torch for her all this time. Ono’s love, like Izumi’s, is originally generous and altruistic – he understands her unrequited affection for Hayama and perhaps even sympathises, but once Izumi decides to try and make things work with someone who loves her it all starts to go wrong. Ono is jealous, possessive, desperate. He demands to inspect her phone, insists she erase Hayama from her mind and devote herself only to him. Izumi, sadly, goes along with all of this, even when her attempts to turn to Ono for protection when afraid and alone are petulantly refused. When the inevitable happens and she decides to try and sort things out with Hayama, Ono tries to exert an authority he doesn’t really have, ordering her to bow to him (literally), and harping on about all the hard work he personally has put into their relationship which, he feels, she doesn’t really appreciate while berating her for not really loving him enough. As it turns out, neither of Izumi’s romantic options is particularly healthy or indeed viable.

At one particularly unsubtle moment, Izumi (alone) attends a screening of Naruse’s Floating Clouds – another film about a couple who fail to move on from a failed love affair though their struggle is ultimately more about the vagaries of the post-war world than it is about impossible love. Meanwhile the school play is to be A Midsummer Night’s Dream which is also about misplaced and unrequited loves which spontaneously sort themselves out thanks to some fairy magic and a night in a confusing forest. No magic powers are going to sort out Izumi’s broken heart for her. Like the pocket watch, her heart has stopped ticking and her romantic outlook appears to be arrested at the schoolgirl level. She and Hayama maybe equally damaged people who save and damn each other in equal measure, but the central messages seem to be that difficult, complicated, and unresolved loves and the obsessive sadness they entail produce nothing more than inescapable chains of loneliness. Simplistic as it may be, Izumi at least is beginning to find the strength to set time moving once again prompted perhaps by another incoming bout of possibly requitable love lingering on the horizon.

International trailer (English subtitles)

A Fishwife’s Tale (魚河岸の女石松, Eiichi Kudo, 1961)

November 27, 2018by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

Who better to take on post-war corruption and personal injustice than Hibari Misora? In another of her typically feisty roles, Hibari stands up for her friends, her community, and her family when they are threatened by the exploitative forces of the tabloid press, rubbish boyfriends, and evil corporations all while accidentally falling in love with Ken Takakura in an early role as cynical reporter with a heart of gold. Eiichi Kudo may be best remembered for a string of samurai movies in the ‘60s including 13 Assassins and The Great Killing, but like many of his generation he made a fair few programme pictures including several starring Hibari Misora of which A Fishwife’s Tale (魚河岸の女石松, Kashi no Onna Ishimatsu) is one.

Kudo opens with stock footage of a small fishing harbour which is all aflutter with the arrival of some unusual outsiders. A photographer from a “magazine” has arrived claiming that he wants to document the lives of ordinary working class people from the fishing industry. While some of the young women doll themselves up and plead with the photographer, “Lady Ishimatsu”, Keiko Kano (Hibari Misora), steals all the attention by defiantly rolling through in her truck ready for a day’s work. As predicted Keiko doesn’t want anything to do with this photography nonsense, and as it turns out she was right not to. The guys aren’t from the Sundays or National Geographic, they’re a scandal rag and they’ve bulked out their story with a lot of made up rubbish about the “sexy lives of fishwives” which paints them all as predatory nymphomaniacs. Matters come to a head when Keiko’s friend Yoko (Yukiko Nikaido) tries to kill herself in shame because of the paper’s implication that she’s a loose woman which causes her wealthy boyfriend to dump her (luckily, she’d mixed up tummy tablets with sleeping pills so thankfully survived even if feeling a little sick and silly).

The newspaper business has a second unforeseen consequence. When Keiko stands up to the achingly cool reporter, he realises she’s connected to another case he’s working on. Across town, a canned food magnate is facing ruin thanks to a standards scandal and is also earnestly searching for his long lost daughter, born to a geisha 20 years earlier and then adopted by another family. Dogged reporter Kitagawa (Ken Takakura), recognising the necklace around Keiko’s neck, wonders if she might be the girl Tachibana’s looking for. When it turns out that he’s right, Keiko’s world turns upside-down. Tachibana (Eijiro Yanagi), overjoyed to have found his daughter, goes about everything the wrong way and tries to take her back from her loving home with the promise of wealth and comfort, but Keiko loves her parents even if they aren’t hers by blood and resents the attempt to drag her away.

Nevertheless, when the two cases turn out to be even more connected thanks to Yoko’s terrible boyfriend being the no good son of one of the conspirators, and Mr. Tachibana falling ill though the stress of his situation, the entire family reconsiders if they haven’t perhaps been selfish in resolutely rejecting a lonely old man trying to make up for a past mistake. Keiko becomes committed to standing up to the bullies. “We’re still young, as long we’re alive we’ll resist you” she tells her biological father’s arch enemy in what might as well be a rallying cry for post-war youth fed up with the corrupted older generation.

Then again perhaps things don’t change all that much. Rather than a salt scam or rice profiteering, this time it’s fiddling with the labels on tin cans but ordinary people are still having their food supply tampered with by those with enough money not to need to worry so much about food security – the amoral petty samurai of the Edo era have merely become amoral businessmen in the dog eat dog post-war world.

Comparatively light on song and dance – Hibari sings the title track as she drives in on her truck, hums a few tunes, and gets one dramatic musical number when she goes undercover as a nightclub singer to spy on the bad guys, Kudo ups the action quotient as Hibari makes herself the chief of the fishwives and takes on the photographers, sneaks around investigating, and then starts a full on brawl with goons in the final showdown. This time around the romance between frequent co-stars Hibari Misora and Ken Takakura is spiky and sparky, fuelled by Keiko’s strange positioning as a “tomboyish” bossy boots more at home in her truck and wellies than prancing around for the camera like the other girls. Oddly warm and filled with rebellious energy, A Fishwife’s Tale is, in its own quiet way, perhaps subversive in allowing a little political spirit of the age to creep in around the edges as Keiko steps forward to stay true to her roots, opposing injustice wherever she sees it and always acting on her own initiative.

Selection of scenes from the movie including Hibari’s big club number (no subtitles)

Maintitles song – Hibari no Dodonpa