Author: Hayley Scanlon

Wolves of the Night (夜の狼, Yoichi Ushihara, 1958)

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A cold-hearted yakuza starts to get second thoughts when confronted with the misery his actions create in Yoichi Ushihara’s slice of Nikkatsu Noir, Wolves of the Night (夜の狼, Yoru no Okami). Though the hero is ostensibly Tsukida (Ryoji Hayama), the conflicted gangster unable to reconcile himself with the fact that he has fallen in love with a women he himself destroyed, it’s equally about the women who get caught in the crossfire of a burgeoning gang war and are each victims of male greed and indifference.

In any case, gang boss Tachibana (Somesho Matsumoto) brings a lot of this on himself. The secondary narrative revolves around a woman, Takako (Mari Shiraki), who borrowed money from the Manji gang to build her bar, but now that it’s complete Tachibana swindles her by calling in the debt and foreclosing on the property, passing ownership to Tsukida with instructions to kick Takako out. She, however, doesn’t take well to this and is resentful of Tachibana for screwing her over so she vows revenge. Her original attempt to get it by seducing Tsukida doesn’t work out, so she recruits a yakuza from a rival gang to extort them claiming that they have mole and he’ll only reveal their identity when they hand over the cash. This plan has some pretty tragic consequences and not least for Tachibana himself, but none of this would have happened if he hadn’t behaved so badly in cheating Takako out of the bar she worked so hard to build. He’d also told Tsukida that the bar owner was a beauty and it was understandable if wanted to try seducing her. 

But by this point Tsukida has developed a fondness for Katsumi (Izumi Ashikawa), a young woman he first meets when she’s caught by some of his guys offering herself for sex work in their territory. The other ladies describe Katsumi as “odd” and “an outsider”. It’s clear from her behaviour and the way she’s dressed, not to mention a lack of awareness of the rules of the gang, that she’s never done this before and is terrified. Tsukida calls his men off and tells her to go home, but later realises that it’s his own fault she was put in this situation because he was responsible for collecting the debt her parents owed to Tachibana taken out because her father is bedridden. Tsukida seems shaken by the old lady’s intense resentment, but still takes their money if attempting to convince Tachibana not to pursue them any further because they have nothing left to give, correctly assuming that Katsumi resorted to sex work to get the money. 

It maybe the sense of guilt that proved the last straw as the old couple then take their own lives but rather than freeing her lead Katsumi on a lonely path of self-destruction driven only by her hated for Tachibana and Tsukida. The fact that she later becomes ill further emphasises her positioning as a symbol of a despoiled nation poisoned by the ruthless inhumanity of the post-war society, along with literal a embodiment of Tsukida’s guilty conscience. Tsukida rejects Takako as a person more like himself, an example of corrupted femininity using her body to manipulate men in a world in which a woman has little other power, and instead is drawn to Katsumi who was once innocent, demure, and cheerful but who he himself has destroyed through his own greed and heartlessness.

Spending some time in hospital following a failed suicide attempt seems to heal her in body body and soul, though the total about face in Katsumi’s feelings for Tsukida seems somewhat bewildering even if he did visit her every day and presumably win her over despite her resentment towards him for contributing to her parents’ deaths. Nevertheless, it’s his feelings for Katsumi that see Tsukida longing to quit the yakuza and retreat to the country to live a small, honest life with her free of the city’s corruption. But as so often in the movies, it’s not that simple and this time it’s a tragic consequence born of male failure and insecurity that eventually costs him his shot at a normal life even as his frenemy, a local policeman he often sees in the same bar and gives him unsolicited advice about how he should quit the yakuza, remains surprisingly supportive suggesting that his redemption may merely be on hold rather than cancelled. In any case, though shooting almost entirely on stage sets, Ushihara makes good use of stock footage of contemporary Ginza as a place of bright lights and equally dark shadows where gangsters lurk on every corner and mercy is in desperately short supply.

Mash Ville (매쉬빌, Hwang Wook, 2024) [Fantasia 2024]

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The Hwaseong of Mashville (매쉬빌), a far out rural backwater, is a kind frontier town drenched in moonshine and melancholy where the local pastime is loneliness. You can almost see what attracted the murderous cultists at the film’s centre to their strange conviction that a convoluted ritual will save a world that’s fallen into chaos with “pure love”, were it not that one of them also remarks on how foolish he feels remembering himself as man who once believed all were equal before the law. 

The law in these parts is a laughing policeman who doesn’t like it when things happen outside of his jurisdiction, but actually does not very much at all to prosecute the “pseudo-religion” he later tells a colleague he’s been tracking while arriving to clear up their mess. Otherwise, there are two other concurrent crimes that should probably be pressing on his time including the deadly moonshine pedalled by liquor entrepreneur Se-jeong and his two bearded brothers, and the strange case of a young woman charged with acquiring a fake zombie corpse for a movie shoot only to turn up with what she suspects is an actual dead body. A rather strange set of events brings them all into the same orbit while preventing them from leaving Hwaseong where the cultists, who are all male but dress in female hanbok for otherwise unexplained reasons, are still on the prowl looking to complete their zodiac of sacrificial victims. 

Then again, the cultists may be victims too. Their former leader soon turns up in town apparently regretting his life’s work while explaining cryptically that the darkness is in his bag, which turns out to be full of money. We sees the eyes flash of Hyun-man, a local man, when he opens it as if he were corrupted in one instant though this day of being targeted by religious extremists already seems to have taken its toll on him. In the opening sequence, he’d celebrated a kind of birthday with two friends, asking only for a hug but both men refused him. He’s also one of the few villagers that didn’t leave on a trip to the hot springs which lends Hwaseong a lonelier air than it might otherwise have had. 

Even the brothers are longing for someone, yearning for the return of their mother who abandoned them many years ago and if Se-jeong’s dream is to be believed sending them the incredibly inappropriate gift of Wild Turkey whiskey when they were just kids waiting for her to come home. Se-jeong feels he can’t leave Hwaseong because a part of him’s waiting for his mother to come back, but the other half is perhaps just afraid to do so. In any case, a mistake by his strange brothers seems to have turned his whiskey into poison, so his hand’s been forced even if it weren’t for all the other weird goings on.

The irony maybe that pure love really does save the world, Se-jeong reflecting that he might have been in love for the first time in his life while finally gaining the courage to move on from Hwaseong in acceptance of the fact his mother likely won’t be returning anyway. His brothers almost got inducted into the cult, mistaken as fellow priests and strangely captivated by the weird ritual movements the killers perform of over the bodies acknowledging that there is something relaxing in thrusting their hands up into the air while curious enough about the ritual to see it through despite its grimness and moral indefensibility. 

Like the cult’s beliefs, not much makes a lot of sense though Hwang lends his strange small town enough crazy vibes to make it all hang together in a place in which whiskey itself appears to be close to a religion and as much of a salve for the world’s unkindness as anything else. “You need to quit drinking,” one his brothers ironically tells Se-jeong when he tries tell him about his recent emotional experiences though in another way he may actually have been saved by an unexpected miracle provoked by the ritual which didn’t work in the way it was intended but may have banished darkness from Se-jeong’s life at least, freeing him from a life in “mash ville” and the kind of the liquor that causes the dead to rise.

Mash Ville screened as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Pilot (파일럿, Kim Han-gyul, 2024)

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“You can’t say things like that anymore,” the men of Pilot (파일럿) are fond of chuckling but still they think them and on a baseline level are unable to understand what’s wrong with what they see as merely offering a compliment. Adapted from the 2012 Swedish film Cockpit, Kim Han-gyul’s non-romcom takes its cues from films like Tootsie and Mrs Doubtfire to explore the inherent sexism and misogyny at the heart of contemporary Korean society if perhaps problematically doing so through the means of a male redemption story.

In any case, Han Jung-woo (Jo Jung-suk) is mindless more than anything else later claiming that sometimes it’s better “to say yes and go with the flow” than risk creating unpleasantness. Seemingly excelling at everything, he graduated top his class at the Korean Air Force Academy and was fought over by several large airlines becoming a minor celebrity and apparent pilot influencer. But behind the scenes, he’s somewhat false and self-involved as evidenced by his attempt to show off a video of himself tearfully paying tribute to his mother for raising him and his sister alone but refusing to answer a telephone call from her at the same time. His celebrity fame comes back to bite him when a video of team dinner in which he rejected his boss’ comment about the new intake of stewardesses not being pretty enough by referring to them as a beautiful bouquet is leaked online. The clip goes viral with his boss getting the brunt of the abuse and while he is not visible many are able to identify him by his voice. The airline soon goes bust and unsurprisingly no one else is willing to hire him. 

The issue is that neither his boss nor Jung-woo understand what was wrong with what they said. They just parrot back that what they said was nice so they can’t see the problem with it but fail to understand that their comments are demeaning because they belittle women’s talents and reduce them to objects for male appreciation. Hyun-seok (Shin Seung-ho), who attended the Air Force Academy with Jung-woo, gets him an interview at his airline but it’s run by a female CEO (Seo Jae-hee) who happens to be the sister of his old boss and is apparently on a mission to make her company more egalitarian by having at least 50% female pilots so she’s only hiring women. Nevertheless, she also asks sexist questions at the interview looking closely at a female candidate’s age and asking her if she is married or in a relationship, whether she intends to have children and when. The female candidate fires back a pre-prepared speech that she’s uninterested in marriage and is not planning to have her eggs frozen or anything like that so she can devote herself fully to the job. 

Hyun-seok expresses sympathy, echoing Jung-woo’s earlier comment that all that matters in flying is skill and people should be hired for their merits not their gender. But it’s impossible not to read into his words that he thinks women are inherently not as capable as men and wouldn’t be getting the job at all if it weren’t for this affirmative action, which is to say it’s all about gender after all and only men are suited to the job. He says as much later on when the plane he’s piloting runs into trouble while he’s unwittingly co-piloted by Jung-woo in his female persona Jung-mi, having posed as a woman in order to pass the interview. “Men should step up during times of emergency, not women,” he screams while losing the plot as the plane plunges and refusing to hand over the controls to his female co-pilot until Jung-woo takes them by force. 

Despite being slightly younger and believing himself to be a modern man, Hyun-seok is still incredibly sexist and openly flirts with Jung-mi to the point of sexual harassment even while she bluntly tells him that she isn’t interested. Jung-woo had been flattered and overjoyed the first time someone called him “miss” on the street and alluded to his unconventional, broad-shouldered beauty but quickly discovers that that gets old and becomes aware of how “annoying” or even scary some men can be in their entitled treatment of women, and by extension the various ways in which his own treatment of women may not have been appropriate. Becoming Jung-mi allows him to become himself, rediscovering his love of flying no longer so hung up on the external validation of internet fame and more interested in and considerate of those around him in the absence of the kind of toxic masculinity that infects men like Hyun-seok.

Though his wife divorces him when he loses his job if more because of his persistent emotional neglect than disappointment or financial worry, he becomes more aware of and sympathetic towards his son who, just as he had says yes and goes with the flow by saying a toy aeroplane was fine despite having been engrossed in the Barbie aisle seconds before but presumably afraid of disappointing his father if he told him he’d rather have a doll instead. Nevertheless, the film strangely refuses to engage with ideas of gender and sexuality and becoming Jung-mi does not really unlock Jung-woo’s femininity even if it evidently makes him a better and more considerate person, while his sometime love interest Seul-gi (Lee Ju-myoung) is more or less queer coded and her attempts to stand up for herself as a woman and an equal are not always well respected by the film. Even so the betrayal of CEO Noh who is revealed to be a ruthless businesswomen perfectly willing to exploit other women and throw them under the bus if necessary highlights the ways in which entrenched patriarchy pits women against each other. 

Thus the underlying misogyny of the present society is fully exposed, if ironically by a man experiencing what it is really like to live as a woman which is to be ignored and disrespected, judged by appealingness to men and obedient temperament while skills go undervalued or worse are viewed as a threat to often fragile masculinity. Though the film largely avoids making Jung-woo’s cross-dressing a joke in itself, it does find humour in the absurdity of the demands of performative femininity in a rigid and conformist society in which a woman is rarely permitted to sit in the cockpit of her own life.

International trailer (Simplified Chinese & English subtitles)

Successor (抓娃娃, Yan Fei & Peng Damo, 2024)

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Embodying the contradictions of the modern China, Successor (抓娃娃, zhuā wáwa), the latest from the FunAge team sees a billionaire father recreate a utopian vision of crushing poverty amid the socialist values of China pre the 90s reforms but only so that his son can develop a desire to become a capitalist fat cat. For all that, however, it’s also a reaction against micromanaging parents, life under oppressive state control, and a high pressure, conformist society obsessed with very narrowly defined visions of success that are increasingly at odds with what a younger generation might want.

The surprising thing is how easily the young boy, Jiye, is able to straddle these two worlds while only gradually beginning to realise that it’s odd his neighbours keep asking him complex maths questions and he’s always running into foreigners who conveniently want to know the way to the local post office. Ostensibly, the Ma family live in an old-fashioned courtyard that according to the sign over the front entrance was constructed in 1958. As the film opens, Jiye’s teacher has brought a wealthy man to their home, in fact the father of one of Jiye’s classmates, who offers to sponsor his education while each of them look mystified around the flat which seems to exist in a kind of time warp. Jiye’s father, Chenggang (Shen Teng), sends them the packing explaining that they live exactly as they want to and don’t need anyone’s help. 

Yet Jiye is fascinated by his friend’s iPad and aware of the world outside works even as his parents try live like it’s the 1960s, sitting round reading good socialist literature which is also recommend to Jiye by the man who owns the bookshop downstairs and is actually one of Changgang’s many hidden “teachers”. But unbeknownst to him, there’s a lift behind his parents’ closet door that leads to a huge control centre where his every move is being monitored. Chenggang is actually a fantastically wealthy businessman who wants Jiye to develop good character so that he can take over his business after getting into a prestigious university.

In a very high tech and invasive way, it’s a reflection of the confused ideology being forced on Jiye by unseen external forces. Once he’s a little older and able to see that his world is definitely not normal, he begins to feel as if some mysterious force is indeed controlling his life but attributes it to vague notions of fate or cosmos rather than wider authoritarianism or parental manipulation. Chenggang is convinced this is the proper way to educate his son, to give him both old-fashioned socialist values and a heathy desire to overcome his poverty and live in a fancy mansion. He feels this way in part due to his dissatisfaction with a grown-up son from a previous relationship who failed his exams and was sent to America in disgrace. Somewhat uncomfortably, one of the reasons Chenggang is so disappointed in Dajun (Zhang Zidong) who continues to crave his approval is that he’s gay and in a committed relationship with an American man who probably should have given more thought to his Chinese name. 

In order to keep up the pretence, Chenggang never tells Jiye that he has a half-brother though he does allow him to see his maternal grandparents on occasion though they, evidently very wealthy themselves, do not approve of Chenngang’s parenting and resent being unable to spoil their grandson in the way they’d like. Chenngang may have a point here, though his chief objection being that the little Jiye was already quite chubby from being relentlessly pampered lands in the realms of fat shaming rather than a serious questioning of indulgent parenting in the wake of the One Child Policy.. He didn’t want him to grow up to be selfish and entitled or to have a distorted sense of the value of money but also seems to have a conviction that the boy will just laugh and say thank you when he finds out his entire life has been a lie and his parents made him suffer needlessly when they were in reality vastly wealthy. 

But what Jiye emerges with is, perhaps surprisingly, a more wholesome sense of rebellion, stepping out from the cosseted false reality his parents had given him and prepared to chart his own course. In an undercutting of the apparent homophobia which surrounds Dajun, the film also refreshingly, and perhaps subversively given the usual treatment of LGBTQ+ themes in mainstream Chinese cinema, suggests that he has done the same and was right to do so validating his relationship with Peter while a kind of solidarity emerges between the brothers in the shared defiance of the path their parents had set down for them. Often hilarious in its surreal humour and penetrating in its satire, the film echoes a sense of dissatisfaction amid contemporary youth no longer so hung up on outdated ideology and craving more individual freedom in a society in which lives can ultimately feel oppressively micromanaged by shady, unseen forces.

International trailer (Simplified Chinese / English subtitles)

Tokyo Lullaby (東京夜曲, Jun Ichikawa, 1997)

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A meditation on lost love and middle-aged regret, Jun Ichikawa’s Tokyo Lullaby (東京夜曲, Tokyo Yakyoku) weaves a melancholy path through a lonely city but finds in it a sense of comfort or perhaps serenity in the gentle rhythms of ordinary lives that somehow become something greater. A diffident translator in love with an unhappily married middle-aged woman slowly uncovers a deep well of unresolved longing largely thanks to those around him who will remember for those who do not wish to speak. 

Ichikawa signals his intentions early on, transitioning from a nighttime shot of the city to a small cafe where a woman is sitting in the foreground looking forlorn while customers behind her discuss the reappearance of Koichi (Kyozo Nagatsuka), the son of the man who owns the electronics store opposite, who had walked out on his family several years previously but has abruptly returned. From this short scene, we can perhaps infer that there is some connection between Koichi and the woman, Tami (Kaori Momoi), though we aren’t quite sure what it is. In any case, the cafe, which bears the name of her late husband Osawa, becomes a kind of nexus uniting the lives of the various community members who each come there to play go and discuss the past. 

Like Tami, Koichi is reticent and melancholy. He says nothing of where he’s been and his wife, Hisako (Mitsuko Baisho), asks him no questions. She later tells the writer, Tei, whose affections she does not return, that she doesn’t really care about how Koichi is living his life because she is busy living her own and likes to do as she pleases. His sister asks him if he plans to stay this time, but Koichi can’t answer her seemingly uncomfortable in himself and unable either to stay or to go. Walking on crutches his injured foot seems to symbolise his emotional unsteadiness literally unable to find sure footing or move forward with his life. 

Piecing the tale together, Tei figures out that Koichi and Tami were once together but she suddenly married someone else who had a terminal illness and passed away shortly afterwards around the time that Koichi first went walkabout. Hisako, meanwhile, had been in love with Osawa though he loved Tami who did not love him. Somehow it’s all very complicated and incredibly simple, the way they’ve sabotaged their own lives and happiness though it couldn’t have been any other way. Tei watches something similar play out in the neighbourhood. One of the young men who works at the electronics shop had been dating a girl who worked at the record store, but he abruptly begins pursuing Ng, a Chinese woman who works at the cafe, and eventually marries her leaving the record store girl heartbroken. 

Things change and they stay the same. Ng takes over the cafe, Koichi’s foot heals while he also manages to resurrect the family business by turning it into a shop that video games as if taking a symbolic step into modernity that suggests this time he’ll stay just as Tami decides it’s time for her to leave. Paths cross endlessly, Ichikawa frequently cutting away to tiny vignettes of other cafe goers as their stories weave through each other, each one note in the great symphony of the city without which life would be impossible. Yet what’s more important is what is not said, the silences that exist between people and perhaps within them too. Things that are understood, and those which are not. 

Tami explains that she looked for answers but all she found was junk until the relief of boredom became her only frame of happiness. Only by escaping the city does it seem that she’ll be happy while Koichi seems as if he’s getting itchy feet and Tei, joining the cycle, decides to move on rather than remain in painful proximity to Hisako who as she said has her own life and does not seem to want to share it with anyone much less him. The pain of the past cannot fully be healed, only borne amid the cheerful scenes of city life, children playing, people doing business, the sun shining and elderly couples meeting in cafes. Pain and loneliness seem to be the natural conditions of urbanity, but Ichikawa paints them with a kind of rosiness, merely the sadness that unpins the lullaby of a city which is always changing yet remains the same in its unwalled alleyways and those that exist only in the deepest recesses of memory. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Black Dog (狗阵, Guan Hu, 2024)

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When a dusty sign pops up in Guan Hu’s Black Dog (狗阵, gǒu zhèn) advertising the upcoming 2008 Beijing Olympics, you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s a relic of a long forgotten past. On the edge of the Gobi desert, Chixa has a post-apocalyptic aesthetic, a kind of reverse frontier town for a society in retreat. It takes on an almost purgatorial quality for prodigal son Lang (Edward Peng Yu-Yan) who returns after spending nearly a decade in prison for an incident that seems like may not have been entirely his fault but for which he continues to face enmity and a petty vendetta from a local gangster/snake farmer Butcher Hu.

Lang himself is aligned with the stray dogs who have begun to reclaim the town which has long since been abandoned by industry. The moribund zoo where his father has taken to living is testament to the prosperity the area may once have had though now it’s a ghost town of China’s industrialising past strewn with the disused factories of Socialist era dealt a deathblow by the economic reforms of the ‘90s. Yet we’re also told that the reason the stray dogs must be expelled is so the town can be redeveloped and new factories take the place of the old which does not seem to hold the kind of promise for the townspeople one might expect. 

Constant references to the Olympics and its slogan “Live the Dream” only emphasise the irony. Geographically distant from Beijing, Chixa exists in an entirely different space from the Chinese capital and appears as if it were about to collapse in on itself. Half the town is plastered with demolition signs and in the end it’s the people who are displaced as much the dogs. Guan often rests on ominous visions of the strays standing on a small hilltop and then recalls the image in the film’s closing scenes as the dogs are replaced by townspeople watching a once in a generation total eclipse on the eve of the opening of the games.

With nothing much else to do, Lang, a former rockstar and motorcycle stuntman in the town’s more prosperous days which themselves even seem to echo the 1950s more than the late ‘90s, joins the campaign to beat the canines into retreat at the behest of local gangster Yao (played by director Jia Zhangke) but begins to identify and sympathise with them especially once it becomes obvious that the new regulations are exploiting dog owners by forcing them to pay to have their animals registered. Those who can’t or won’t have their pets confiscated, Lang silently rescuing one girl’s little’s pet pooch while her grandmother tries to argue with the dog catchers before they take them all to what is effectively a concentration camp for dogs. The film’s Chinese title is in fact “Dog Camp,” and it becomes clear that it’s Lang who’s stuck there, trapped by his past and the dismal realities of the socioeconomic conditions of late 2000s China.

Hoping to earn a little extra cash he decides to try catching a wanted fugitive, the Black Dog of the title who is mistakenly believed to have rabies only to end up bonding and identifying with it. At several points, Lang echoes the movements of the dog such as placing his head on the chest of his dying father as the crowd below his hospital room prepare to welcome the opening the Olympics via a large screen in the town square. His relationship with the dog begins to restore his sense of compassion and humanity while a tentative connection with a young woman equally trapped by her transient existence and toxic relationship with a fellow circus performer opens his eyes to new possibilities of a life of freedom on the open road no longer bound by the constraints of a society in flux. Elegantly lensed grainy photography and the occasional use of synth scores lend the film an elegiac, retro quality that recalls the cinema of the fifth generation while casting a subversive eye over the compromises of the modern China itself trapped by its past and trading on former glory from which stray dogs like Lang can find escape only by running from the pack. 

Black Dog is in UK cinemas from 30th August courtesy of CineAsia.

UK trailer (English subtitles)

Between the Knees (무릎과 무릎 사이, Lee Jang-ho, 1984)

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“We are all suffering from this Westernised lifestyle and way of thinking. They are not really meant for us,” according to a sympathetic doctor, played by the director himself, at the end of Lee Jang-ho’s erotic melodrama, Between the Knees (무릎과 무릎 사이, Muleupgwa muleupsai). The heroine does indeed find herself trapped between the Korea of the past and the modern society, but the film often seems confused in its central messages in its own use of the woman’s body as metaphor for that of the nation despoiled by foreign influence. 

This is most obviously the implication of Ja-young’s (Lee Bo-hee) flashbacks in which she is quite clearly molested by her flute teacher who is a bearded white man. When her mother walks in on the abuse, she blames Ja-young beating her and shouting what we would assume to be unpleasant words branding her as a seductress though she is a clearly a child. As is later explained, Ja-young’s mother is carrying her own baggage in that her own mother was the mistress of a married man and fearful of the same fate befalling her daughter, she has brought her up with problematic notions of bodily purity that have caused Ja-young to develop a complex surrounding her sexuality in which she is unable to process her desires as a young woman. 

She later says that through her “immoral behaviour and desire to sin” she has found “freedom” as if sexuality was her way of rebelling not only against her mother’s tyranny but social conservatism in general. However, she also characterises it as the extreme opposite, blaming her mother in insisting that her treatment of her has left her with no control at all over her sexuality. In the film’s problematic framing, she essentially allows herself to be raped by a series of men partly as an act of self-harm, partly as rebellion, and partly because she has no other way of permitting herself to satisfy her sexual desires. This is of course dangerous, portraying a woman who says no as one who is really saying yes but resisting out of shame, but there is also a completely paradoxical criticism of Korean men all of whom are rapists except for Ja-young’s sort of boyfriend Jo-bin (Ahn Sung-ki) who is so obsessed with traditional Korean culture that he has earned the nickname “antique”.

Jo-bin lives in a Korean-style home and spends his time playing the flute, training in traditional martial arts, and watching pansori in comparison to the pursuits of other young people such as Ja-young’s brother Ji-cheol who mimics Michael Jackson and spends all his time in discos. Towards the beginning of the film is seems that Ja-young will be torn between Jo-bin to whom she originally says “if you’re so old-fashioned I may have to run away with you” and an incredibly unpleasant fellow student who refuses to take no for an answer and in fact eventually rapes her during an expressionist rainstorm that violently awakens her sexuality. The battle then really becomes whether or not Ja-young will be able to accept it, despite the realisation that she is “no longer the kind of virtuous bride that Korean men expect.”

This hints at the pernicious double standard of the contemporary society in which men largely behave like animals, treating women like trophies to be conquered and then discarded while insisting on a “pure woman” for a wife. The discord in Ja-young’s home stems from patriarchal failure, not only that of the man that made her grandmother a mistress and not a wife, but her father’s in having fathered a child with a 17-year-old Korean War orphan he took into his home. Resentment over his betrayal has further embittered Ja-young’s mother and caused her to double down on her sexual conservatism while fiercely resenting her husband’s other daughter. Yet in the film’s final stretches, a degree of female solidarity arises between the women that largely excludes the father with Ja-young’s mother accepting Bo-young as another daughter and inviting her to live in their home now her still young mother has remarried. 

Violent male sexuality also rears its head in a subplot in which a mute man who had developed feelings for Bo-young’s mother while they were being raised in the same orphanage attacks Ja-young’s father for ruining her life, as he undoubtedly did even if he tried to take at least some responsibility for his transgression. Bo-young later says that her mother hated the mute man and did not want to be in a relationship with him anyway, though he too it seems could not take no for an answer. In any case, it is only the traditionalist, Jo-bin, who is willing to accept Ja-young for who she is. He knows all of her ordeal and does not reject her for her sexually active past, rather scoffing when she had described sex as being a sin with the perhaps mistaken implication that such things were not regarded as taboo in the Korea of the past even as, paradoxically, it appears that Jo-bin is drawn to Ja-young’s old-fashioned modernity in rejecting his mother’s constant attempts to set him up with an arranged marriage. 

Of course, all of this is also very much informed by the climate of contemporary Korean cinema which had descended into an era of softcore pornography deliberately supported by the Chun regime as part of a bread and circuses social policy designed to distract the people from their democratic desires. Lee opens with sexually charged closeup of Ja-young’s lips on her flute, a phallic symbol also present in Ja-young’s forbidden fantasises as she idly fondles it after hearing heavy breathing on the telephone and experiences another moment of sexual crisis. Perhaps that’s paradoxical itself in that it’s learning to play this Western instrument that has led to her corruption in an allegory for a nation’s pollution by Western culture. In any case, Lee seems to imply that sexuality can be an act of resistance towards oppressive social codes but is otherwise unsure if that represents liberation or merely another form of oppressing one’s self.

Retake (リテイク, Kota Nakano, 2023)

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What if life were like a movie and you could simply go for another take when things didn’t turn out like you planned? That’s the way it works out for the hero of Kota Nakano’s Retake (リテイク), a young man editing in realtime in an attempt to fix his mistakes and engineer a happier outcome while preparing to meet the end of his youth. Part summer holiday movie, part meta take on storytelling and the movies, the film is most of all about moving on whether things work out or not.

To that extent it’s telling that the film the teens are making is about a couple who attempt to go to a place where time does not flow. For the flighty Yu, the film’s architect, the desire seems to reflect her own anxiety about growing up and entering a new world of adulthood. “I wish this time would go on forever,” she sighs while discussing with her cameraman Kei how the film should end. Nakano plays with this scene, repeating it several times as if it itself were a land where time does not flow and Kei were playing out a memory in his head envisaging how something should have gone rather than how it did. Eventually the conclusion that they come to is that they should continue their journey instead of staying here, trapped in an eternal loop of dead time with no past or future. 

But moving forward is scary, after all it means leaving the past behind. Kei snaps images of the world around him as if he were trying to steal a moment, freeze it and take it with him. The hero of the film, played by his friend Jiro, is an artist who similarly tries to capture motion through the medium of sketching and constantly finds himself frustrated. He likes to sit still and concentrate, but he meets a girl who likes dance and move in the free flow of time. Kei is much the same, a natural observer yet sometimes blind to circumstance as in his decision to invite Allie, a girl they meet by chance while raiding the school broadcasting club for equipment, oblivious to the awkwardness that seems to exist between herself and Yu. 

The film teases the conflict, eventually settling on a disagreement if not exactly over a boy than surrounding him though for the rest of the runtime seems as if it may more have been more about the tension between the girls themselves. Nevertheless, Kei quickly fixes on the idea of repairing their friendship to prevent the film collapsing when his own attempt to confess his feelings is seemingly the straw that breaks the camel’s back prompting Yu into a petulant conviction that no one cares about her film and there are only ulterior motives among her crew. But paradoxically, what Kei learns is the importance of speaking up in the moment, shaking off his diffidence to support Allie when her suggestion is treated with callous indifference by Yu and thereby building bridges.

Though those same bridges may ironically leave him feeling left out and isolated as a peripheral figure on the team while the others all seem to pair off leaving him alone. He tries different approaches, and retakes his mistakes looking for the perfect ending while otherwise buoyed by the warmth of the summer and company of his new friends wishing like Yu and the protagonists of the film that this moment would never end, symbolically repeating and reliving it as if himself trapped in the land where time doesn’t flow. Nakano signals the unreality of his environment by allowing Kei to approach the unseen camera and turn it off, announcing a new take with a clapperboard and then editing in real time in search of perfect answers. In some senses, it’s the operation of nostalgia but also an adolescent desire to find the right path forward along with the courage to take it. But what the teens discover is that in the end you just have to go, frustrated by the boredom of being trapped in an external limbo of stagnant time and eager to see what the next scene will bring in a continual flow of isolated moments that somehow constitute a life.

Retake screened as part of this year’s JAPAN CUTS.

August in the Water (水の中の八月, Sogo Ishii, 1995)

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How does the world, or perhaps the cosmos, attempt to communicate with us? As Douglas Adams once did, August in the Water (水の中の八月, Mizu no naka no Hachigatsu) suggests it maybe through the dolphins who here at least seem to be quasi-mystical beings existing in what is really the lifeblood of humanity. In the film’s opening scenes, we’re told that the hero, Mao (Shinsuke Aoki) whose name means “true fish” and his friend Ukiya (Masaaki Takarai) have taken part-time jobs at a marine part to learn how to communicate with dolphins, but it’s the heroine Izumi, whose name means “spring” who eventually claims to have learned to do so. 

At least, her final words are that the dolphins have taught her “the perfect balance” which has allowed her to open the floodgates both literal and metaphorical to return water to an arid land. We’re repeatedly told that there’s been a lengthy drought and a water shortage leading to rationing and locked pipes though the marine park remains open and the local festival goes ahead  hinting at the ways in which we do and don’t value our natural resources. Izumi’s science teacher tells the kids that humans don’t contribute to the Earth and waste the resources that it gives us which might help to explain the gradual ossification of the planet including a mysterious condition known as the Stone Disease which causes people to collapse in the street as their organs harden. 

Izumi’s sister Yo later remarks that she thinks humanity came from a distant planet long ago and yearns to go home but to do so we must become stone because water is a substance that exists only here on Earth. Turning to stone is however seen as quite a bad thing and also echoes a millennial distrust in increasing technology with TV pundits positing that if human brains were replaced with computer chips we wouldn’t need to worry about water shortages anymore. In Yo’s dream, after people’s brains have become computer chips they become connected to the universe and can transport their minds to the moon enabling them to communicate with anyone anywhere at any time. 

But then despite the potential for communication that computers were only just beginning to offer in the mid-90s, Izumi warns her sister to stay away from them as they leave you vulnerable to the Stone Disease. The boys’ ultramodern friend, Miki (Reiko Matsuo), is a computer addict and it’s she who eventually manages to unlock parts of the mystery but paradoxically as if she were some kind of seer correctly predicting that an accident will befall Izumi on 23rd August and discovering a prophecy that in the year humanity neglects the water god two meteorites will fall in close proximity and drought will follow. Only a ritual conducted by the chosen one under a full moon will be able to cure it. Two child-like old men also warn that nothing’s been the same since they moved the old shinto shrine over which there have also been sightings of UFOs.

After the diving accident in which Izumi plunges meteor-like into the pool, she herself feels as if she’s been split in two almost like the world itself which is divided between these ancient beliefs and modern advancements that have perhaps blocked the flow that once allowed us to communicate with each other and with the universe. A psychiatrist suggests that Izumi may be suffering with sudden onset schizophrenia as a result of her accident and that all of her talk about secret messages from dolphins and mysterious aliens who want to turn the world to stone is nothing but confused delusion though in the film’s closing scenes she herself takes on a supernatural quality as a kind of etherial saviour figure who realises that she may have been dead ever since the accident and is now something different, different and distant as her sister puts it, charged with the mission of rejuvenating a human spirit long since dulled by mechanisation.

In contrast to Ishii’s earlier films which brimmed with punkish energy, August in the Water unfolds at a leisurely pace with eerie yet nostalgic mood music and a new age sensibility speaking to millennial youth with a sense of turn of the century anxiety and human remorse that perhaps we’ve already poisoned our futures. Nevertheless, despite his youthful heartbreak, what Izumi bequeaths to Mao and humanity itself is seemingly the ability to live in the abundant fullness of existence until that existence is done and we return once again to water and the comforting embrace of the Earth.

August in the Water screened as part of this year’s JAPAN CUTS.

Mermaid Legend (人魚伝説, Toshiharu Ikeda, 1984)

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“Even if someone kills you, you wouldn’t die,” a drunken husband somewhat sarcastically replies having pledged to come back and haunt his wife if he died and she married a man who didn’t drink. His words take on a prophetic quality given that the heroine of Toshiharu Ikeda’s Mermaid Legend (人魚伝説, Ningyo Densetsu) takes on a quasi-supernatural quality as an embodiment of nature’s revenge after someone tries, and fails, to kill her having already killed her husband for witnessing their murder of another man who’d tried to resist their plans of buying up half the town to build a nuclear plant. 

By the mid-1980s, Japan’s economy had fully recovered from post-war privation and was heading into an era of unprecedented prosperity which is to say that the coming of a power plant was not welcomed with the same degree of hope and excitement as it may have been in the 1950s when it was sold not only as a new source of employment for moribund small towns but an engine that would fuel the new post-war society. Several industrial scandals such as the Minamata disease had indeed left those in rural areas fearful of the consequences of entering a faustian pact with big business, which is one reason why the guys from Kinki Electric Power sell it as an amusement park project though even this has the locals wary not just of the disruption it will bring to their lives and potential ruin of their livelihoods which are dependent on the protection of the natural environment but that what is promised simply won’t be delivered. Fisherman Keisuke (Jun Eto) says as much when lamenting a previous aquaculture programme which didn’t pan out and caused lasting damage to marine life. 

In any case, as others say there’s no money in going out to sea anymore and its clear that the old-fashioned, traditional way of life practiced by Keisuke and his newlywed wife Migiwa (Mari Shirato) is no longer sustainable. Migiwa is an abalone diver working without modern equipment but using heavy weights to dive deep enough to reach the shells. As such she’s dependent on her husband to pull her back up to the boat when she tugs the rope. She must put her life entirely in his hands though in truth, he does not seem to take his responsibility all that seriously. The couple bicker relentlessly and not even she really believes him when he says he witnessed a murder which might be understandable given the extent of his drinking. All of which is further evidence against her when she manages to escape from the assassination plot and runs straight to the nearest policeman who thanks her for turning herself in implying he believes she is responsible for Keisuke’s death. 

The possible collusion of the policeman hints as a further sense of distrust in authority which has become far too close to corporate interests. Shady industrialist Miyamoto (Yoshiro Aoki) ropes in both the mayor and the head of the fishing association in his talks with Kinki Electric Power along with Shimogawa from the local tourist board who evidently opposes the plans as he is the man Keisuke witnesses being murdered. As Miyamoto says “sometimes your hands get a little dirty” though he never “directly” involves himself matters such as these. The situation is complicated by an unresolved love triangle between Miyamoto’s spineless son Shohei (Kentaro Shimizu), a sometime photographer, who is resentful of Keisuke and in love with Migiwa complaining that Keisuke always outdrinks him and gets the girl too hinting at his sense of wounded masculinity. Isolated by his class difference, he appears not to approve of his father’s actions but later does little to stop them and eventually sides with corporate interest over his feelings for Migiwa who in any case seems to have become more attached to Keisuke following his death which she vows to avenge. 

There is there is something quite strange in the prophetical quality of Keisuke’s words also predicting the “black sweat” of the Jizo on the beach and the mystical storm which does eventually sweep everything clean destroying the signs for the new nuclear power plant already installed on the beach. In this way, Migiwa becomes a vengeful force of nature taking up arms against those who wilfully ravage and pollute the natural environment while damaging the lives of those who lived on its shores such as herself and Keisuke. She takes revenge not only for the murder of her husband by corrupt capitalists but against that corruption itself even as she laments that “no matter how many I kill, they just keep coming.” “Don’t worry, maybe all this was just a dream,” Keisuke once again prophetically intones though it’s difficult to know if it’s defeating the capitalist order that is a fantasy or the maintenance of the idealised rural life to which Migiwa seemingly finds her way back swimming into an unpolluted sea surrounded by the floating barrels of ama divers and clear blue skies, a creature of nature once again.

Mermaid Legend screened as part of this year’s JAPAN CUTS.