Author: Hayley Scanlon

Alone No More (得寵先生, Daniel Ho & Thomas Lee Chi-wai, 2024)

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A little dog literally and more figuratively saves the life of a grumpy old man in Daniel Ho & Thomas Lee Chi-wai’s warmhearted drama Alone No More (得寵先生). Touching on themes of old age loneliness, familial estrangement, animal cruelty, and life’s stray dogs, the film makes the case that all lives are important, both human and canine, and that we should try to forgive each other in the same way that dogs seem to continually forgive us.

In any case, it’s difficult to see why stray dog Roast Piggy chooses the grumpy Kai (Lawrence Cheng Tan-shui) to be her owner despite his animosity towards her. Kai is hostile to pretty much everyone and appears to have a strained relationship with his remaining family members from the resentful brother who became his boss at work to the daughter Zoie (Fish Liew) who rarely returns his calls. Having recently retired, it seems that Kai has not much else left to live for which might be why he makes the decision to end his life and leave his retirement fund for Zoie and her daughter. Luckily, Roast Piggy arrives just in time to save Kai and alert Una (Amy Lo) who runs a dog sanctuary and had been trying to catch her.

Though Kai tries to chase Roast Piggy away, she always comes back to him and he eventually comes to accept her but only after getting a lesson in what the consequences of calling animal control can actually be. The film doesn’t go into why Hong Kong seems to have such a large problem with stray dogs but the man at the pound says they euthanise thousands a year many of which are microchipped but have owners who either can’t be contacted or simply refuse to take the dog back. It turns out the Roast Piggy was abandoned by her former owner because a fortune teller told him she was bad luck and it does seem like other of the dogs were similarly released into the wild either because their owners no longer wanted them or because they could not afford to pay for their medical treatment. Una had wanted to adopt Roast Piggy herself if Kai wouldn’t take her, but is cautioned by her boyfriend Chan (Jay Fung Wan-him) that it could get expensive if the problem turns out to be that Roast Piggy had heart worms. Though Roast Piggy seems friendly and used to people, it is clear some of the other stray dogs have unfortunately been mistreated and require further rehabilitation before they can be put up for adoption with a regular family. 

The same might be said of Kai who does begin to mellow after taking in Roast Piggy and getting a new lease of life helping out at the dog sanctuary. Nevertheless, his relationship with his daughter who is married to a Canadian man having moved there with her mother as a child is a little harder to repair. Though Una encourages him to make amends, she also has a strained relationship with her mother she is otherwise unwilling to work on though there is no real reason why she should. This sense of disconnection feeds back into her relationship with boyfriend Chan who, conversely, is under his father’s thumb and as always does exactly as he’s told. It’s Chan’s money that’s bankrolled the sanctuary which adds an additional layer of complication, though he is perhaps being slightly unreasonable when he’s hurt that Una doesn’t agree to suddenly drop everything and move to Edinburgh with him because she wants to stay in Hong Kong to save stray dogs. 

In a way, Kai and Una are the ones left behind, he by his age and loneliness and she by her regret and isolation. It’s clear that Una has replaced relationships with people with those with dogs whom she finds it easier to talk to. A subplot about a horrible person who’s been putting down poisoned meat because they don’t like the dogs being around hints at the callousness and cruelty that led to them becoming strays in the first place but also to the prejudices that see those like Kai and Una excluded from mainstream society even if Kai was indeed a very difficult person to be around before meeting Roast Piggy. Nevertheless they too find sanctuary at the Warm Heart dogs home along with purpose and compassion in caring for these kindhearted animals who have so much love and forgiveness even towards those that tried to cast them out.

UK trailer (English subtitles)

Labyrinth Romanesque (花園の迷宮, Shunya Ito, 1988)

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“Poor things, born in the wrong time,” a woman laments of two girls perhaps not that much younger than herself yet as trapped by the age of militarism as anyone else. Adapted from a short story by Edogawa Rampo, Shunya Ito’s gothic mystery Labyrinth Romanesque (花園の迷宮, Hanazono no Meikyu) effectively skewers militarism’s hypocrisies and lays bare the dehumanising effects its nihilistic philosophy has wrought on the nation as a whole. When killing is almost an imperative, life has little value and brutality seemingly the only acceptable response to mass violence.

Ito conjures a sense of haunting by adding a modern day framing sequence in which the abandoned hotel is an eerie space of cobweb-ridden collapse. A wrecking ball arcs back and fore, threatening to unearth a truth long buried and this is after all a mystery, at least in part. With extraordinary finesse, the camera travels from the ruins into the hotel of old as a woman enters the frame. We are now in 1942. This is Yokohama, a harbour town, and so the “hotel” is filled with military personnel though transgressively it also seems trapped in a kind of before time. The sailors dance to American standards such as Georgia on my Mind and Goodnight Sweetheart though otherwise at war with America. All eyes are on sex worker Yuri (Hitomi Kuroki) and her dashing Zero Fighter pilot boyfriend, Takemiya (Tatsuo Nadaka).

But later we learn that Takemiya hated planes and was scared of heights to the point that it kept him up at night. Apparently from a military family, he felt unable to avoid going on with this militaristic charade and saw no future for himself other than glorious death. Everyone at the Fukuju Hotel is in their way already dead and chief among them the madam, Tae (Yoko Shimada), who becomes the prime suspect when her unpleasant husband Ichitaro (Akira Nakao) is murdered during the night. Her nemesis is however. Ichitaro’s sister, Kiku (Kyoko Enami), who has just been deported from the US where she had been living after selling herself into sexual slavery in order to financially support Ichitaro after their parents died. 

Kiku had been Tae’s madam, bringing her over from Japan at 17 and as she will do again, actively sitting on her face when she screamed and fought after being assigned her first customer. This brutalisation seems have driven Tae towards a desire for escape, but that was only available to her by marrying Ichiro who then betrayed his own sister to open another brothel that he ran with Tae before leaving the US and setting up in Yokohama in light of the declining relationship between America and Japan. Though she herself was brutalised, Tae can only earn her freedom by exploiting other women. At the beginning of the film two young girls, Mitsu (Mami Nomura), 18, and Fumi (Yuki Kudo), 17, arrive from the country excited for their new lives but without fully understanding what they’ve signed up to. Like Tae, Omitsu fights back when chosen by a sleazy, nouveau riche factory owner who made his money making planes for the navy, and while Tae tries to talk her down Kiku simply sits on her face and tells the man to do his business. Afterwards, Mitsu tries to kill herself and her friendship with Fumi is strained by her internalised sense of shame. Determined to save enough money to redeem Fumi’s contract before the same thing happens to her, she throws herself into sex work and begins to lose Fumi’s respect. 

It’s the two girls who see this place as haunted most clearly, firstly in catching sight of Tae wandering the corridors in her nighty on the night of her husband’s murder, and then by Fumi’s belief she has seen the pale ghost of a geisha only to realise it was just a wig on a shelf. Mitsu says it belonged to a woman who contracted syphilis, went mad, and then died, a fate she now fears may also befall her. Like many of the other women, the girls have been sold into sexual slavery by their parents most likely because their families are poor and they can’t feed their other children. This kind of rural poverty is of course exacerbated by the financial demands of imperial expansion while the dehumanising elements of militarism, the belief that everything must be devoted to the war effort, allow this heinous relic of the feudal past to continue. Sons after all belong to the emperor and will become brave soldiers fighting for their nation, while daughters have no intrinsic value other than as wives or sex workers to be advantageously traded or sold on.

It’s this that Fumi comes to realise and resent. She insists that she will never return to her home or parents because at the end of the day, they sold her. Yet she feels little sympathy on learning that one of the other women is a notorious criminal who murdered her foster parents because they too took girls in to sell them on. The hotel somehow becomes the nexus of all this pain and violence, a place the women can never escape. Ito does his best to make clear that this is hell by travelling through the air ducts, on towards the eerie glow of the furnace and the dank passages running under the hotel and out into the sea. The boiler room connects all other areas of the hotel and exposes all their secrets in the sound that travels through the ducts. But some secrets are designed to remain forever hidden until the wrecking balls of the contemporary era force them into the light and confront us with this buried history. Until then, the hotel exists in a ghostly state, Ito flooding it with hazy images and visitations that read as eternal apparitions of this place’s inescapable despair trapping all within its labyrinth of unresolved longing.

Trailer (no subtitles)

The Greatest Challenge of All (喜劇 一発勝負, Yoji Yamada, 1967)

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A prodigal son rocks the social order in Yoji Yamada’s anarchic nonsense comedy, The Greatest Challenge of All (喜劇 一発勝負, Kigeki: Ippatsu Shobu). The greatest challenge may be trying to manage Kokichi (Hajime Hana), a roguish Del Boy-like figure with an impossible dream of striking it rich. While in some senses he anticipates the equally  anarchic yet basically goodhearted Tora-san, he also represents a modernising and aspirant Japan determined to leave behind dusty old tradition for a new “deluxe” future.

Having taken to the road after being disowned by his conservative father (Daisuke Kato), Kokichi returns 15 years  later a middle-aged man with seemingly nothing to show for his many years of wandering. He has no idea that he has a daughter, Mariko, by a local woman that his parents took in and raised as if she were theirs which was not an especially uncommon solution to the problem of illegitimate birth in the post-war era. Nor did he know his mother had passed away before walking in on her annual memorial service. This sense of parental disconnection one level reflects a lack of filiality that marks him out as a “modern” man uninterested in these familial obligations or a sense of duty towards his family, but it’s also true that it’s to family that he’s returned having mellowed in middle-aged and in a way looking to settle down.

In any case, his life seems to have been a series of crazy episodes from briefly becoming a sumo wrestler to meeting a mysterious woman on a bridge who gets him a job as a snake charmer. When two yakuza types kick up a fuss about not being able to have their usual room at the inn during his mother’s memorial service, Kokichi manages to frighten them off just with bluster, hinting at the way he may have lived for the last 15 years. He also has two friends who turn up to see him, one of whom is a former yakuza who refers to Kokichi as if were his boss and they were a little trio of crime-adjacent buddies.

But it does appear that Kokichi has come with a business plan in mind, convinced that he can find the source of a hot spring in the town and build a resort hotel on top of it. To do this, he tries to convince his father to sell him his land and the inn the family run so he can knock it down and build a “deluxe” modern, Western-style hotel in its place. Kokichi’s father obviously isn’t keen. This inn has been in the family for generations, he really wouldn’t want to ruin that and especially not for one of Kokichi’s harebrained schemes. Yet again this brings us back to the battle between the conservatism of Koikichi’s father, and Kokichi’s own consumerist modernism that is more individualistic and no longer sees beauty in the past, only backwardness and stagnation. When he finally does find his hot spring, he builds a vast modernist complex with a botanical water park housed in a giant Hawaiian-themed conservatory complete with dancing hula girls. 

His corrupting presence is most discernible in the changing role of Fumi (Tanie Kitabayashi), the family’s housekeeper who generally dressed in kimono but on moving to Kokichi’s mansion she begins wearing Western dress. Fumi had at one time left the family because Kokichi had unwittingly forced her to betray it in helping him get his hands on a precious family heirloom to pawn as capital for his new business venture. Having done so brings her to a confrontation with the contradictions of her role within the family, both a surrogate mother to Kokichi and also a servant who is expected to abide by a certain code with not stealing from your employers a key tenet. She feels she can no longer look Kokichi’s father in the eye and must now return to her home in the country even though she has likely not seen it since she was a young woman. Having undergone this change, she can no longer return to the inn but is brought back to Kokichi’s modernist home once he strikes it rich. 

But Kokichi too is later confronted by hypocrisies of his own position as a free-spirited man and finally a father on learning the truth about Mariko. Hanging out at the hot spring, the 16-year-old Mariko has attracted the attentions of a couple of fashionable young men and wants to leave with them to visit Tokyo. Despite the intrusion of the modern in the hot springs resort, Mariko doesn’t want to stay in this “deadbeat” town and longs for the bright lights of the big city. Kokichi’s father understandably says no, but Kokichi is originally all for it, perhaps seeing his own desire to be free of his father’s oppressive authority. However, he soon changes his tune on assuming his paternity. He too tells Mariko she can’t go and strikes her for talking back. But just as he had, she leaves anyway. His modernity is no longer modern enough, and the young will always walk towards the future.

One exception might be Kokichi’s painter sister Nobuko (Chieko Baisho) who appears to be happy enough living at the inn and with seemingly no intention of marrying which might be her own kind of rebellion against traditional mores. While other similarly themed films may have emphasised the importance of hard work and the reality of the salaryman dream, this one suggests that it really is possible to bumble along and then strike it lucky but also that you never really travel as far from home as you might think. The desire for patriarchal control rises in Kokichi, but is now ineffectual. Though he didn’t raise her, Mariko is a child of the world he’s created and simply chooses to leave with a final sock in the eye to traditional filiality. 

Trailer (no subtitles)

Nang Nak (นางนาก, Nonzee Nimibutr, 1999)

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Mae Nak Phra Khanong is one of Thailand’s best known and most enduring ghost stories, though Nonzee Nimibutr’s 1999 adaptation Nang Nak (นางนาก) scales back a little on the inherent terror of the folktale, preferring to focus on the romantic tragedy of a loving couple separated by death. You could then read it as a tale of grief, that the husband returning from war cannot accept his wife is dead, rather than the reverse that the wife’s love and devotion is so strong that it overcomes death itself and becomes something that is in that way terrifying.

It does seem, however, that in this instance the ghost is real and it is vengeful. The wronged wife Nak (Inthira Charoenpura) takes revenge on those who betrayed her from the midwife who stole her wedding ring to a local man who tried to tell her husband, Mak (Winai Kraibutr), that his wife was actually dead. Though the framing of the tale may seem in its way uncomfortably sexist despite its romantic overtones, it’s clear that Nak suffered largely because of the male failure around her. Her husband was conscripted for a war which was really nothing to do with him leaving her, pregnant, to manage their farm alone. The implied cause of the miscarriage which leads to her death in childbirth is overwork and she appears to have received no help from the other villagers with many men apparently remaining in the village. When questioned by Mak, she tells him that the other villagers shunned her and called her an adulteress, disputing the parentage of her child with her husband already away at the war. 

But the film does not particularly blame war for Nak’s fate, seemingly accepting it as a necessary duty Mak had to further the cause of his nation which is placed above that he owes to his wife and unborn child. In fact, the ghost issue is later solved only by the intervention of a powerful Buddhist monk, Somdet, which implies that this supranational structure is necessary for maintaining order and that the village is otherwise unable to govern itself. Likewise, it paints Buddhism as a modern religion and essential means of national unity that is inherently superior to the backward superstitions of the villagers who decide to call in a shaman against the advice of the local monk. The shaman turns out to be next to useless and in fact makes things worse until Somdet can arrive and is able to talk peacefully to Nak and convince her that she needs to accept her death and move on to the next cycle of life.

It’s also Somdet who heals Mak of his otherwise fatal war wound and the intercutting of his fight for life with Nak’s during the violence of childbirth suggests that her life is somehow sacrificed for his further emphasising the depth and devotion of her love for him. When his health is recovered, Somdet recommends that Mak become a monk in order to clear out his bad karma but Mak declines explaining that he has a duty to his wife and child in his village and so must return to them. In this way, they become a kind of barrier to his spiritual destiny and emblematic of the attachments he should learn to cast off in order to avoid suffering. Like Nak, Mak’s own devotion extends beyond the grave for he does indeed become a monk and never remarries, keeping the promise to be reincarnated as Nak’s husband in a subsequent life.

The local priest had told Nak that scaring monks is a sin, which is odd in a way that it’s somehow worse to scare these spiritually powerful beings than the ordinary villagers. Nevertheless Nonzee Nimibutr gives her the somewhat familiar attributes of a Thai ghost, allowing her to hang from the ceiling with her hair flowing down while she stares at the monks with bloodshot eyes and a pale face. She is able to enchant Mak so that he does not notice the dilapidation of their home or that all their food is rotten even if he later becomes suspicious of the large number of rats around. Primarily she seems to use natural creatures to enact her revenge with the midwife’s corpse torn apart by lizards, though Mak too has terrifying nightmares of his friend dying in his arms and then melting away with quite sickening effects. Even so, it seems Nonzee Nimibutr is keener to emphasise the romantic tragedy and primacy of Buddhist thought rather than ghostly horror while making it clear that death, along with grief and loss, is something that must be accepted so the spiritual order may be maintained and with it order in the mortal realm.

Trailer (no dialogue)

Four Hours of Terror (高度7000米　恐怖の四時間, Tsuneo Kobayashi, 1959)

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It seems quite strange now to think of a time when air travel was both new and exciting and as easy as catching a bus. It’s this juxtaposition that Tsuneo Kobayashi’s hijacking thriller Four Hours of Terror (高度7000米　恐怖の四時間, Kodo Nanasen Metoru: Kyofu no Yojikan) plays with as an armed fugitive takes a passenger plane hostage in an attempt to escape after committing a murder while those on board struggle to accommodate themselves to this new form of transportation. 

This sense of exoticisation is obvious from the opening voiceover which sings the praises of Haneda airport as the gateway to a newly internationalised Japan though in actuality the flight in question is a domestic service travelling from Tokyo to Sapporo. The voiceover also introduces us to each of the passengers which come from differing strata of society and even includes a middle-aged American couple. There are in fact three generations of couples on board who seem to represent different stages of life from the newly wed students so wrapped up marital bliss that they barely notice anything else, to a long-married reporter and his wife on their first holiday together since their honeymoon, and an elderly couple returning from a trip to the capital who are mystified by this new age of mass media and air travel. The newlyweds apparently won this free trip on an aeroplane after agreeing to have their wedding broadcast on television in an early example of reality TV, reinforcing the sense of irony that they weren’t necessarily supposed to be on this doomed flight after all. 

Neither was car saleswoman Kazuko (Hitomi Nakahara) who has apparently been pulled away to Sapporo by a short notice business opportunity. She gets a standby ticket, as does her boyfriend/rival Fujio (Tatsuo Umemiya) who is also on track to the same opportunity. Weirdly, Kazuko is not overly sympathetic having randomly kicked a basket containing a little dog about to be smuggled on the plane by its doting owner, but does perhaps represent something of a more independent post-war womanhood even as she effortlessly deflects unwanted attentions from a client she may also have been exploiting in order to obtain his business. Having boarded the plane, she ends up sitting next to another man who requested a standby ticket and was using a surname that was the same as hers but evidently turns out to have been assumed. So lax is the security, you don’t necessarily have to travel under your legal name. In any case, she briefly flirts with him as an overture to a business relationship and also to annoy Fujio before overhearing a news report about the escaped fugitive on her portable radio.

Kida (Fumitake Omura), the fugitive, is dressed like a stereotypical yakuza which makes it odd that no one treats him with suspicion until they spot he’s carrying a gun which he had no trouble at all bringing on board. Though hijackings are not exactly unheard of, they aren’t particularly common either so no one would really suppose anyone had any reason to take a domestic flight to the provinces hostage, and really that was never Kida’s intention merely a last resort after being discovered. Later he gives a partial justification for his life of crime in that his mother beat him and then threw him off a cliff which is why he has a false leg. In any case, there’s a small moment of potential redemption towards the end when the kindly old lady tells him he can’t undo what he’s done, but could still resolve to change assuming they all survive this difficult situation with the plane which now has mechanical problems thanks to the gun going off. 

Even so, it’s the passengers who tie Kida up after the pilot ,Yamamoto (Ken Takakura), manages to disarm him by weaponising the plane. By flying to a high altitude, they knock him out with the air pressure, but are then faced with the mechanical failure of the landing gear which seems to be linked to with Yamamoto’s wartime trauma. A secondary drama revolves around his stoical character with one of the stewardesses apparently in love with him while simultaneously wary of his iciness given that he apparently showed no emotion after receiving the news his wife had passed away but simply flew the plane home as normal. Some see this as his devotion to the aircraft which is in a way a commitment to his duty over his human feelings, the factor that perhaps allows him to save the plane and get the passengers home safely. He is however saved by his love for his late wife with the cigarette case that contains her photo saving him from the worst effects of a bullet. 

The same may go for the co-pilot Hara (Kenji Imai) who is dragging his feet over his marriage to Yamamoto’s sister because he wants to achieve 3000 flight hours before getting married so he can call himself a real pilot. Though the film plants the seeds of these random plot threads and the social commentary that goes with them, it does not particularly engage while the hijacking itself remains fairly low key given that Kida is not a particularly “bad” bad guy. He just wants to go to a random place where the police won’t be waiting for him, but otherwise refrains from harassing the passengers save threatening a little boy travelling on his own to return to his parents after visiting his grandfather in Tokyo. In essence, there’s a kind of innocence and naivety in play which speaks to something of post-war hopefulness and a wonder in the frantic pace of progress in which the day is saved by keeping calm and carrying on even in the face of severe adversity.

Trailer (no subtitles)

The Colors Within (きみの色, Naoko Yamada, 2024)

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“If I could see my own colour, what kind of colour would it be?” the heroine of Naoko Yamada’s The Colors Within (きみの色, Kimi no Iro) asks herself. Yet there’s a curious pun in the film’s Japanese title in that the word “kimi” simply means “you” but it’s also the name of another girl by whom Totsuko (Sayu Suzukawa) is captivated though she doesn’t quite have the ability to articulate her feelings beyond the fact she feels “all sparkly inside”. 

In any case, Totsuko has the ability to see people as colours but largely keeps it to herself in fear that people will think she’s “weird”. Totsuko does indeed appear to be slightly otherworldly, though no one really seems to reject her for her ethereality save perhaps one classmate who describes her as that girl who sits in the chapel on her own all the time. What she’s mostly doing in there is reciting the serenity prayer to find “peace of mind,” and talking to the cool nun at her Catholic boarding school, Sister Hiyoko (Yui Aragaki), who tries probe gently into whatever it is that’s bothering Totsuko but equally avoiding pressuring her reveal anything before she’s ready. Then again, Totsuko may not quite know what it is that’s making her feel uneasy even if she remains upbeat and cheerful with a childlike sense of fun and innocence.

This quality of joyfulness is directly contrasted with the intense melancholy of Kimi (Akari Takaishi) with whom Totsuko becomes fascinated after catching sight of her “beautiful” and “clear” colours. When Kimi disappears from the school it’s rumoured she talked back to a teacher or that they found out she had a boyfriend, but it seems a Catholic education just isn’t a good fit for Kimi so she decided to drop out. Like Totsuko, Kimi has a secret but hers is that she can’t bring herself to tell her grandmother, who attended the same school and is over the moon about her going there, that it isn’t working out for her. What with it being a Catholic school, there’s also the implication that Kimi and also Totsuko may be struggling to define themselves within a repressive environment and reconcile their differences in the intense fear of not only being rejected by their community but damned to hell. 

After Totsuko checks every bookshop in town because someone said they saw Kimi working in one, she accidentally starts a band with her and a boy who just happened to wander in, Rui (Taisei Kido). Rui also has a secret which is his love of music which he fears conflicts with his responsibility of taking over the family medical practice. He isn’t exactly sure he wants this future that’s been forced on him and prevents him from following his dreams. In fact, none of the teens really wants the kind of life their parents wanted for them but they aren’t yet certain of the kinds of lives they do want or really who they are which is why Totsuko is still unable to see her own colour despite clearly discerning everyone else’s.

Through making music together, they discover new ways of expressing themselves and with it growing self-acceptance that allows them to be honest with themselves and others about who they are and what they want. Music in itself becomes an act of holy communion with the universe, a pure communication of one soul to another much like Totsuko’s synaesthetic ability to see people as colours. Even Sister Hiyoko insists that any song that is about goodness, beauty, truth or indeed suffering is itself a hymn and in the end Totsuko’s song is about all those things. Her joy, Kimi’s sadness, and Rui’s confusion coming together in a harmonised symphony as a consequence of “sharing secrets and feelings of love”. This sense of delicacy extends to the animation itself which has a watery, ethereal quality. Produced by Science Saru, this is the first of Yamada’s films not based on existing material and is underpinned by a tremendous empathy for its anxious adolescents as well as their uncertain adults along with a true sense of wonder for a world of colour and light hidden from most but visible to the ever cheerful Totsuko content to dance through life for the pure joy of it even if as she says she wasn’t very good.

The Colors Within screened as part of this year’s BFI London Film Festival and is released in UK cinemas on 31st January courtesy of All the Anime.

Trailer (Japanese with English subtitles)

Images: © 2024 “THE COLORS WITHIN” FILM PARTNERS

Born to Fly (长空之王, Liu Xiaoshi, 2023)

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Elite test pilots set out to reclaim Chinese “dignity and security” through the development of a next generation stealth fighter in Liu Xiaoshi’s action drama, Born to Fly (长空之王, Chángkōng zhī Wáng). Clearly a riposte to Top Gun: Maverick (which was not approved for release in Mainland China), the film was originally scheduled as a National Day release and is another in a long line of “main melody” movies paying tribute to particular areas of military and civil service as evidenced by the use of actual voice recordings from downed pilots at the film’s conclusion and a lengthy pause on an aerial shot of the airmen’s cemetery praising those who gave their lives for the country. 

The main thrust is however that China is ready to defend itself. The film ends with a show of force much like that at the end of Operation Red Sea, though curiously for a propaganda film the implication is very much that China is lagging behind in terms of military technology and as the film begins lacks the necessary capability to hold its own against foreign aggression. The planes that stray into its airspace buzzing an oil rig and causing havoc with a sonic boom are never directly named as American but their pilots speak US-accented English while sticking one finger up and declaring “we can come and go wherever we want”.

To that extent, the central battle is as much between Western individualism and the collective spirit as it is a race for hegemony over the skies. Hot shot pilot Lei Yu (Wang Yibo) originally turns down the opportunity to join the elite test pilot squad because he wants to fight on the frontline and get personal revenge against the enemy planes. He also has a grudge against arch rival Deng Fang (Yu Shi) because he did not salute him after he beat him to a coveted Golden Helmet award and then accused him of cheating. What they have to set aside is, in contrast to the American Top Gun, the notion of “being the best” or engaging in an egoistic individual struggle to be named a winner. Instead, they must learn to work together for the common good so that China may be declared the winner as the planes they’ve risked their lives to perfect are in the best shape to protect frontline pilots and allow them to safeguard the Chinese people. 

Meanwhile, like other recent similarly themed main melody movies, the film is keen to sell the message that China stands alone and has been unfairly shunned by the international community. The leaders of the test pilot programme constantly complain that Western powers have refused to share technology with them or have attempted to limit their ability to innovate through embargoes and blackouts. They insist that China will have to create its own discoveries, but hint at an under-confidence in their ability to do so which is in some ways at odds with the usual propaganda messaging even if it spurs a sense of collective urgency that all hands are needed on deck to solve this particular problem before it’s too late. 

Lei’s unsupportive father even tells him point blank that he does not believe China can develop a stealth fighter and he is risking his life for nothing. Tellingly, Lei’s father had wanted to send him abroad and resents his decision to join the military. In order to serve his country, Lei must break a taboo by defying his father, while it’s later revealed that Deng’s father was a fighter pilot who was killed on the frontlines after winning an award while training in Russia. In another moment of surprising messaging, Deng wonders if his father might have survived if he’d been given a better plane to fly which is why he’s committed to the test pilot programme and the reason he’s eventually able to give up his ego and agree to assist Lei in testing his bright new idea for the stealth fighter rather than chasing glory for himself as the lead pilot. 

All of that aside, Lei is allowed the mild distraction of an extremely subtle romance with an airforce doctor played by Zhou Dongyu in a “special appearance” who decides to give up her transfer back to the south to commit herself to the test pilot programme after being touched by Lei’s grumpy heroism. In any case, the message is very much about pushing the limits as far as they will go while striving together for the common good. Jingoistic it may be but Liu manages to sell the aerial spectacle and sense of danger as his elite pilots risk all in the name of patriotism.

Trailer (Simplified Chinese / English subtitles)

Castle of Owls (忍者秘帖 梟の城, Eiichi Kudo, 1963)

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A surviving member of the Iga clan swears vengeance on Toyotomi Hideyoshi only to slowly come to the realisation that the best revenge is living well in Eiichi Kudo’s ninja drama, Castle of Owls (忍者秘帖 梟の城, Ninja Hicho: Fukuro no Shiro). Adapted from the novel by Ryotaro Shiba, the film is somewhat unusual in its positivity in allowing its hero to first reject the codes by which he was raised and then those of the prevailing times in eventually choosing love and happiness over the internecine obligation to gain vengeance against a corrupt social order.

Hoping to solidify his grip on power, Oda Nobunaga has his right-hand man Toyotomi Hideyoshi massacre the Iga clan of ninjas who are then almost entirely wiped out. Juzo (Ryutaro Otomo) and his friend Gohei (Minoru Oki) both survive, but Juzo’s entire family is brutally murdered while his sister takes her own life after being gang raped by Hideyoshi’s soldiers, using her final breath to tell her brother to avenge her. Overwhelmed by grief, Juzo is chastised by veteran ninja Jiroza (Kensaku Hara) for his show of emotion. He reminds him that a ninja should be as unbreakable as stone and that he should abandon all human sentiment. Juzo, however, insists that he may be a ninja but is also human and refuses to apologise for his feelings. 

This is it seems the major conflict. Jiroza has already signalled his own heartlessness and practicality when he advised the surviving ninja to flee, for escape is less dishonourable than death. Those who refuse are welcome to surrender, and those who cannot run must be left behind to their fate. For Jiroza, all that matters is survival for both himself and his small daughter Kizaru (Chiyoko Honma) who is currently tied to his back (no mention is made of her mother, perhaps she had already passed away). Now that his family are dead, Juzo has a new mission and reason for survival insisting that what the living can do for the dead is vengeance, though in his case it is personal rather than principled for he mostly wanted revenge for his sister rather than the Iga clan as a whole or anything it represents which he otherwise seems to be at odds with. 

10 years later, Oda Nobunaga has already been bumped off in an act of betrayal by one of his own men leaving Toyotomi Hideyoshi in charge and now the target for Juzo’s revenge. Around this time, Hideyoshi is planning an invasion of Korea against the advice of most of his courtiers in order to legitimise his rule through imperial ambition and military dominance. Juzo has been trying to assassinate him, and has apparently failed five times already. A surprise visit from Jiroza and his now teenage daughter involves a job opportunity promising a monetary reward should he succeed, but Juzo is wary. The merchant who hires him says he wants Hideyoshi out of the way because a war in Korea will damage his business prospects, but as Juzo points out Hideyoshi’s death will leave a power vacuum resulting in another civil war. The merchant, however, giggles childishly and remarks that domestic wars are good for business, leading Juzo to suspect he’s here on behalf of Tokugawa Ieyasu, the most likely to assume power in the event of Hideyoshi’s death.

The irony is though Juzo very definitely wants Hideyoshi dead, when someone else suggests it he becomes conflicted because he knows it will lead to another period of chaos in which even more people will die. Meanwhile, a ninja’s allegiance should belong to his client, who is always the highest bidder, so this is both a win-win situation and a mild conflict of interest. Conversely, Gohei (Minoru Oki), who was betrothed to Kizaru, has apparently betrayed the clan and taken a position as a retainer for one of Hideyoshi’s lords. He agrees to betray the Iga, inform on the plan to assassinate Hideyoshi, and even bring in Juzo in return for a 300-koku stipend and a shot of advancement under the new regime.

Now, on one level this might be understandable. Japan has emerged from a couple of hundred years of constant warfare, there’s no place for ninja in a world of peace as former Iga man Mimi (Tokue Hanasawa) remarks revealing that he’s survived the last 10 years through begging. It’s also understandable given that a ninja is expected to be duplicitous and act in self-interest. Even Juzo applaud’s Jiroza’s ninjutsu on realising that he’s teamed up with Gohei to betray him in order to take out the leader of the Koga ninjas. In essence, he’s only really done what Juzo later does but also the opposite in choosing his individual happiness through betraying those around him to throw his lot in with the person who murdered his entire clan. 

Juzo meanwhile is shaken by his unexpected attraction to female ninja Kohagi (Hizuru Takachiho), a daughter of the Koga,  who like him finds herself conflicted in her mission because of her growing affection for Juzo. Kohagi asks him if they really have to live on hate when they could live happily together instead, but even while conflicted Juzo can’t bring himself to let go of the idea of vengeance and is haunted by images of his friends and family dying. Even so, having decided to give up on a happy future and risk his life to kill Hideyoshi he finds that it ceases to matter. Confronting him, his hatred melts away. He begins to recognise the futility of revenge and that it would be silly to cause a war and make a merchant rich to prove a point. Gohei, meanwhile, pays a heavy price for his choices when his lord disowns him. Even when Juzo comes to rescue him from jail, he laughs that he’s caught him at last. Having escaped from the Iga life to live in the sun, he finds himself in darkness once again. Juzo, however, rides off into the sunshine with Kohagi to live in peace that’s divorced from the wider world. They choose to exile themselves from this world of darkness and duplicity, to live freely in the sunlight rather than be consumed by the internecine codes by which they were raised. Kudo films his ninja battles in near total silence with an almost balletic intensity and paints this world as one of infinite mistrust and uncertainty but equally affirms that it is possible to simply walk away and choose happiness over duty or hate.

Leaving on the 15th Spring (旅立ちの島唄～十五の春～, Yasuhiro Yoshida, 2013)

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“How many of them will come back?” a man on the shore ominously asks as he watches the young people of his island ship out to pursue their education in the comparatively better equipped capital. Rural depopulation has become a minor theme in recent Japanese cinema, but the situation is arguably all the worse in the outlying islands of Okinawa. As the title of Yasuhiro Yoshida’s Leaving on the 15th Spring (旅立ちの島唄～十五の春～, Tabidachi no Shima Uta: Jugo no Haru) suggests, teens from the small island of Minami Daito (South Daito) must leave at 15 if they want to attend high school because there isn’t one on the island.

That said, there are more kids than you’d expect in young Yuna’s (Ayaka Miyoshi) middle school and it’s more than just a handful who leave the island each spring, many of them choosing to make lives for themselves in the wider world rather than return to their childhood home. On Minami Daito, the main industry is sugarcane but the prospect of Japan joining the TPP trade agreement has many worried that it will soon no longer be viable and with even fewer economic opportunities available many will have no choice other than to abandon the island for good. 

We’re often reminded just how far the island is from the Okinawan capital Naha and how difficult it is to get to. To leave, the kids are placed in a kind of cage and lifted onto a larger boat moored by a small jetty. Even to get to the next island Kita Daito (North Daito) it’s some time on a ferry which might not run if the weather is bad. Distance becomes a persistent theme, not just in Yuna’s impending exit but the scattering of her family. When kids leave for high school, a parent often goes with them as Yuna’s mother Akemi (Shinobu Otake) did when it was time for her sister Mina (Saori) to depart. But Mina is now a grown woman married with a child of her own and Akemi has not been back to the island for two years. This forcible separation continues to disrupt familial bonds as couples necessarily grow apart and children begin to choose their own paths in life which often take them away from their parents. 

It’s this sense of distance which plays on Yuna’s mind, a kind of countdown starting inside her as she witnesses another girl sing the Okinawa folk song “Abayoi” which means “goodbye” in the local dialect and recounts a young person’s sorrow as they must leave their family and childhood home behind on coming of age. Reminded that she’s next in only a year’s time, Yuna meditates on her past and future while reconsidering her relationships. Abandonment often occurs through a simple lapse in contact. Akemi now rarely phones home while Yuna’s nascent first love with a boy from Kita Daito falters when he abruptly stops calling or returning her letters. Eventually she finds out that despite their pledge to attend the same high school on Naha, he has decided to stay and take over his father’s fishing boat because of his dad’s ill health. 

Kenta has realised that his place is Kita Daito and he will remain there the rest of his life while harbouring a degree of resentment that he couldn’t go to high school or pursue his romance with Yuna. He feels their relationship is doomed simply from the fact that they’re from different islands. He won’t leave his, and she likely would not settle on Kita Daito preferring, either a life in the cities or her childhood home. It’s the same for her parents, Akemi deciding that she prefers life in the city and the degree of independence she has there while her father Toshiharu (Kaoru Kobayashi) would not survive off the island. Both of her siblings have already left, Mina returning with her infant daughter apparently on the verge of separating with her husband partly it seems because of the insecurity the separation of her family has left her with, while Yuna’s brother seems to be a harried workaholic with no family life to speak of. 

Rather childishly she thinks she can reunite her family and dreams of buying a big house on Naha for them all to live together, adult siblings included, without fully accepting that the relationship between her parents has been gradually worn away leaving them strangers to each other and each desiring different kinds of futures. What she comes to is perhaps an acceptance of the distance in her life, the longing for her island home where she says everyone is one big family, as she finds herself choosing independence. A picturesque vision of Minami Daito and its idyllic landscape along with the traditions of the island including its rich musical culture and Okinawan Sanshin, Yoshida’s gentle drama discovers that “abayoi” is a part of life that can’t be avoided but can be sweet as well as bitter once you’ve learned to accept it.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Swimmers (ฝากไว้..ในกายเธอ, Sophon Sakdaphisit, 2014)

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Fragile masculinity and male failure bring about tragic consequences in Sophon Sakdaphisit’s possibly ironically named psychological horror, The Swimmers (ฝากไว้..ในกายเธอ). Though some might alternately claim that its final resolutions are overly moralising or else morally ambiguous, it’s also true that the film otherwise has a progressive quality in suggesting that it wasn’t sex itself that was the problem but the failure to use protection and a subsequent inability on the part father to accept any responsibility for an unplanned pregnancy. 

At least, though it is revealed only gradually, it seems obvious to us that high schooler Perth (Chutavuth Pattarakampol) must have fathered Ice’s (Supassra Thanachat) baby and has kept quiet about it amid rumours that she took her own life after becoming pregnant. In actuality, there’s a lot more to it than that, but it appears as if he does this mostly out of a sense of awkwardness because Ice had been the girlfriend of his best friend and rival, Tan (Thanapob Leeratanakachorn), who, though they had broken up, is now determined to enact revenge on the dirtbag who got Ice pregnant and then presumably left her to deal with it on her own at which point she decided to end her life.

We can see that Perth idolises Tan and feels inadequate in his presence. After Ice’s death, he hooks up with another girl, Mint (Violette Wautier), and asks her if she would have been interested in him if hadn’t just won a gold medal in the swimming tournament. There are others that say he only won because Tan was not able to compete. Though Ice asks him to tell Tan about their relationship himself, Perth can’t do it and continues to act sheepishly around his friend out of some kind of bro code or fear of disappointing him. But we might also wonder if his desire for Ice is only a way of mediating his desire for Tan in the context of the obviously homoerotic relationship between them though in another sense it’s perhaps more that he simply wishes to become Tan and would be glad if he were out of the way. If that were the case, however, he’d forever be haunted by the spectre of his own inadequacy with no way of knowing if he could ever really have beaten his rival and psychologically will always be in second place. 

His failure to measure up to Tan also impacts on Perth’s fragile masculinity as his coach, who has begun an affair with his mother, pressures him to eat raw eggs to improve his stamina. The fact it’s eggs he’s eating has a continual irony while Perth begins to exhibit a degree of gender confusion as he puts on weight and loses his athletic physique. He’d jokingly told Ice, after explaining he didn’t bring a condom, that he’d carry the child if they got pregnant and is now convinced that, like the seahorses they’re learning about in class, he is actually gestating his unborn baby. Perhaps as Ice would have to have done, he wears baggy jackets, binds his belly, and attempts to hide his physique at the swimming pool in the hope of concealing what he fully believes to be a pregnancy that is also the result of his latent guilt for his treatment of ice coupled with the awkwardness of Tan finding out it was him who fathered her child.

Perth’s secrecy and cowardliness are directly contrasted with the equally problematic masculinity exhibited by Tan in his obsession with revenge which sees him attempt to hack Ice’s phone and social media accounts before later beating up another boy Perth had set up as a scapegoat. One could argue much of this could have been avoided if Perth had only been honest with Tan from the beginning about his relationship with Ice, but he was incapable of doing so and is willing to go to extreme lengths to conceal the truths about himself. Sophon Sakdaphisit, however, reveals them to us patiently and exposes Perth as an unreliable narrator, a snivelling coward and insecure sociopath who will do anything and everything to avoid facing reality. Though the film may suggest that he will face no consequences for his treatment of Ice, it simultaneously implies that he will forever be haunted by the spectres of his inadequacy, male failure, and hopelessness no matter how he may otherwise prosper in life.

International trailer (English subtitles)