Author: Hayley Scanlon

Snow in Midsummer (五月雪, Chong Keat-Aun, 2023)

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How should you deal with the traumatic past? In Chong Keat-Aun’s Snow in Midsummer (五月雪) it becomes clear that this past has not been dealt with and that its heroine has been living in a kind of limbo unable to move fully forward with her life in the constant search to discover what happened to her father and brother during the 513 Incident in 1969. The first act devotes itself to the slowly unfolding horror of the massacre which erupted shortly after a general election during which a number of smaller parties affiliated with the Chinese community had begun to gain ground from the Malay-dominated Alliance Party. 

Bullied by her classmates as a Chinese student in a Malay school, Ah Eng spends the night of the massacre hiding in the backstage area of a Cantonese opera troupe as if in a literal act of taking refuge in fantasy. The film’s title alludes to the famous Cantonese opera Snow in Midsummer, actually “Snow in June” here retitled as “Snow in May”. The play’s theme is injustice as its heroine is condemned to die for a crime she didn’t commit, someone remarking that the gods must be outraged to provoke such an aberration of the natural order as snow in the height of summer. The ageing leader of the opera troupe ventures out during the incident in search her friends and relatives who had gone to the local cinema. Unable to open the door, she climbs onto the roof and sings a lament decrying the bloodshed and her own cruel fate as she watches the city burn beneath her. 

A similar lament is sung 49 years later in a graveyard we’re told is set to be “redeveloped”. The opera troupe had performed here for the dead during the intervening years, but in an event echoing that of 1969 are challenged by authorities asking if they have permits. That was in the past, they’re told, this is now and their performance causes a disturbance to a mosque which has recently been built close to the site. In a touch of irony, the taxi driver who brings the middle-aged Ah Eng to the cemetery asks her if she’s going to the leprosy hospital remarking that the Chinese community usually refuse to go anywhere near it. Each of the headstones, many of which read simply “unknown Chinese”, is marked “courtesy of the Malaysian government”, but it’s clear that this site was chosen because of its remoteness for similar reasons to the leper colony because they did not really want to address what had happened in any meaningful way.

That Ah Eng returns 49 years later hints at spiritual echoes of cycles of rebirth, but Ah Eng has lives her whole life in limbo haunted by the impossibility of discovering the resting place of her father and brother. Her father had refused to take her to the cinema, leaving her and her mother to watch the opera alone in echoes of the patriarchal oppression she continues to face as a middle-aged woman whose husband reacts with violence and anger simply because he suspects she intends to return to Kuala Lumpur to mourn her loss. Her sister-in-law gives her a lift to the station, but insists on being called by her Chinese name revealing that’s divorced her Muslim husband and intends to move to Australia with her child. On her arrival in the city, Ah Eng passes by the former sit of the Majestic Theatre which is now a fancy hotel with the same name in a very changed city. Her former Malay school is now Chinese but has a stand outside it selling Islamic food where the Cantonese opera troupe discuss their visit to the cemetery. 

“The past is dream,” the old woman sings to the grave echoing the surreality that runs through Chong Keat-Aun’s vision of the past as a man rides his elephant through the streets and lives the tale of a king forced to drink the Sultan’s foot water as a symbol of his subjugation, while others at the theatre are sold of a tale of a king with a quite literal bloodlust sustaining himself on the suffering of his subjects. A melancholy contemplation on lingering trauma, loss, and memory Chong Keat-Aun ends with a poignant image of comfort and catharsis but one is which is forever haunted by an intangible past and the wandering, unseen ghosts of buried injustice. 

Snow in Midsummer screens as part of this year’s Taiwan Film Festival in Australia.

Trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Motion Picture: Choke (映画（窒息）, Gen Nagao, 2023)

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Humans place themselves above animals precisely because of their ability to communicate and work together to create complex plans that allow them to overcome their circumstances. Robbed of our speech, would we still say the same? Gen Nagao’s dialogue-free drama Choke (映画（窒息）, Eiga Chissoku) takes place in a world in which language appears to have disappeared. Humans communicate only through gesture and are therefore prevented from explaining themselves fully, able to rely only on the vagueness of feeling to convey their thoughts and intentions. 

Yet we might not quite grasp this at first, because the heroine (Misa Wada) lives a solitary life in which she rarely needs to talk to anyone anyway. Shot in a crisp black and white, this appears to be some kind of near future, post-apocalyptic world in which even ancient technologies have largely been forgotten. The woman lives in a concrete structure, presumably a disused factory which is dotted with broken machinery that the woman largely ignores as she lives her simple and repetitive life of waking, fetching water, hunting, cooking and eating. We have no reason to think that she is unhappy for besides the occasional sigh, she simply gets on with her daily tasks and then goes to sleep seemingly unafraid of external threats.

But it is indeed male violence that punctures her world when she’s set upon by three men, seemingly an older man and his grown-up sons one of whom holds her still while the middle-aged man rapes her after breaking the magnifying glass she’d bought off a cheerful pedlar enraptured by the wonder of instant fire (well, while the sun shines at least). Her world becomes darker and she finds herself haunted by a shadowy figure that hovers over her as she sleeps. But then, her trap catches a young man (Daiki Hiba) whom she at first seems as if she’s going to kill and eat but later reconsiders and lets him go presumably calculating he poses no threat to her. The young man has a goofy grin and cheerful disposition, returning to bring the woman gifts and follow her around doing odd jobs before the pair develop a relationship and start living as a couple. The young man even devises a system of bamboo pipes to bring water from the brook so the woman won’t need to carry buckets back and forth anymore in a seeming rediscovery of technology born of his desire to make her life easier.

This more nurturing, protective kind of masculinity brings a new a dimension to her life but their harmonious days do not last long before male violence intrudes once again and proves a corrupting influence for the young man who seemingly becomes cruel and vengeful, though not toward the woman even as she begins to reconsider her relationship with him and if this kind of inhumanity is something she can tolerate in the idyll she’d crafted for herself before he arrived. Then again, in trying to deal with it is there something that becomes cruel or violent in herself in that wasn’t that way before even if doing so also makes her sad and leaves her lonely?

Until then she’d found only wonder in the natural world, repurposing the disused, man-made structures of the factory to make music in the rain and more problematically filled with childish glee when something wanders into her trap. But nature holds its dangers too even if there don’t appear to be any predators here besides man in the form of poisonous mushrooms easily mistaken for the edible kind. Even so, it’s violence that finally poisons her world. A senseless kind of violence that doesn’t seem to be about competition for resources, but only an animal lust and craving for dominance. If only they could communicate in a more concrete way perhaps it could be avoided, but then that doesn’t seem to have worked out that way for us who face such threats every day with words often ignored. 

In any case, Nagao finally heads into a more abstract space as the woman seems to react to the abrupt halt of the film’s soundtrack followed by the removal not only of speech but sound from her world as is if she had lost her hearing. Her reality fractures and we can’t be sure she hasn’t just imagined anything that went before or that she has been targeted by some unseen supernatural or spiritual force for her transgressions leading to her exile from a disintegrating paradise. Obscure and haunting, the film nevertheless has a kind of cheerfulness in its innate absurdity captured in the lunking physicality of the actors who move with a cartoonish strangeness and exaggerate their facial expressions in a strenuous attempt to communicate in the absence of words. The message seems to be that in the end we ruin things for ourselves, either through violence or simply doing what we think is right but in the end may really be no different nor any better.

Motion Picture: Choke screened as part of this year’s JAPAN CUTS.

Original trailer (dialogue free)

Brave: Gunjo Senki (ブレイブ -群青戦記-, Katsuyuki Motohiro, 2021)

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A young man with a total lack of confidence in himself begins discover his inner strength after being sent back to the Sengoku era in Katsuyuki Motohiro’s timeslip drama adapted from the manga by Masaki Kasahara, Brave: Gunjo Senki (ブレイブ -群青戦記-). Fighting a battle for the future, the kids finds themselves at a moment of historical change and caught between the titanic forces of clashing armies but paradoxically discover that they want the same thing, something the kids have always taken for granted, an age of peace in which all are free to live together happily. 

For all those reasons it’s a just as well that Aoi (Mackenyu), a diffident member of the archery club, is a keen history buff even if he declares himself uninterested in winning competitions or becoming a champion. When warriors in 16th century armour begin assaulting the school, he’s well placed to guess what might be going on inferring from some of the names involved that they must have been thrown back to the year 1560 which was something of a turning point in Japanese history marked by the battle of Okehazama in which the outnumbered forces of Oda Nobunaga (Kenichi Matsuyama) scored a significant victory against those of Imagawa Yoshimoto setting Nobunaga on a path towards the unification of Japan. 

Though armed with foreknowledge, the kids are obviously ill-equipped to cope with the demands of life in the Sengoku era having no combat experience yet this institution happens to be one of the most prominent sporting schools in the nation boasting a host of national champions all of whom discover that their athletic skills can easily be repurposed for warfare from the archers and kendo enthusiasts to the baseball and American football players while those in the various science clubs set about investigating how they got here and how they might get back. 

Despite being thrust into a leadership role after impressing warlord Motoyasu (Haruma Miura) who will one day become Tokugawa Ieyasu and oust Nobunaga as ruler of a unified Japan, Aoi remains diffident and fearful unable to fire his bow often walking away from the fight despite his friends’ encouragement. His problem, as is repeatedly pointed out, is that he has no self-confidence and cannot believe in himself sufficiently to act when the occasion calls. Yet through his gentle mentoring at the hands of Motoyasu, he begins to come into his own as a Sengoku era strategist realising that he has something to spur him on in the desire to protect those close to him.

This is not, however, a wholly positive thing. Despite introducing Aoi’s childhood friend Haruka (Hirona Yamazaki) as a talented archer who is much more willing to step up to the fight, the film quickly relegates her to the role of damsel in distress as it does the majority of female students many of whom are also top athletes with useful skills while the assault squad venturing to rescue students taken hostage by evil retainer Yanada Matsuna is, aside from Haruka, exclusively male. Conversely, the guys are given an opportunity to express their fear and sadness each thinking of their mothers as they prepare to risk their lives to save their friends. 

For Aoi, his friends become the light that show him the way while he remains preoccupied with history realising that nefarious forces are trying to manipulate it so that their age of peace will never arrive and Japan will exist in a state of darkness for all eternity. Though often depicted as cruel dictator this Nobunaga seems to want end the darkness by bringing about an age of peace through the unification of Japan taking solace in the idea that these strange people in their weird castle wearing bizarre clothes are from an age in which war is a distant memory meaning at least that his dream came to pass. At heart, it’s a battle between an emo teen who wants to paint the world with the darkness inside him, and a diffident young man turning away from hate and violence while finding strength in the presence and support of his friends. Boasting some impressive effects and high octane battle sequences imbued with a quirky humour as the kids use their sport skills, kicking footballs armed with bombs or throwing fiery baseballs at the confused retainers, Brave: Gunjo Senki sees its diffident hero not only taking charge of his personal destiny but the national in believing that the best way to support his friends is to make sure the world of peace they’ve always enjoyed will again come to pass. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

All Shall Be Well (從今以後, Ray Yeung, 2024)

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There’s nothing that breaks a family apart as quickly as an inheritance. As a cynical lawyer points out, even mothers and sons fall out when it comes to money, so there’s nothing like it to to focus minds with an us and them mentality to clearly define who is and isn’t included under the umbrella of family. But why is it that meaningless pieces of paper hold so much sway over us when we ought to by be governed by the emotional truths that until a moment earlier ruled our lives?

Angie (Patra Au Ga Man) had been fond of saying “because we’re family.” She never doubted her place in that of her partner who all appear, at least outwardly, to love her and accept her relationship with Pat in the way they’d accept any other marriage. But when Pat (Maggie Li Lin Lin) suddenly passes away in her sleep after one last family celebration the situation changes. Well-meaning family members step in to help with the work that must be done when someone dies, but perhaps unwittingly begin to take over slowly erasing Angie from their lives as not really one of them after all.

Her problems are two-fold. The biggest being that Pat never got round to making a will, nor did she think to put Angie on the deeds to the apartment they shared together or leave her financially provided for seeing as she’d managed all the money they’d made when they owned a factory and ran it together. The secondary problem is that Hong Kong does not recognise same sex marriage and so their relationship was not legally recognised. Had Angie been legally married to Pat, she should have inherited everything anyway because she was her spouse even without a will but with things the way they are she’s at the mercy of Pat’s brother Shing (Tai Bo). She never thought this would be a problem, because they’re family, but slowly realises that perhaps they don’t actually see her that way and with Pat gone no longer feel the need to include her.

Her sister-in-law Mei (Hui So Ying) insists on using a feng shui expert to plan the funeral who quickly puts the kibosh on Angie’s desire to have Pat buried at sea as she’d requested. Leaving aside the possibility that the feng shui master is conning them and receiving financial incentives from the people who run the columbarium, the family quickly begin to ignore Angie’s concerns swayed by the claims that interring her ashes will be more beneficial for her descendants which are Mei and Shing’s children seeing as Angie and Pat had none of their own.

A little disappointed in her kids, Mei at one point insensitively remarks that Angie is lucky not to have any though we’re also told that she almost gave in to parental pressure to marry a man in order to become a mother. Daughter Fanny (Fish Liew) makes lowkey racist remarks about her Indian neighbours as a way of expressing her frustration with her moribund marriage and unsatisfying living arrangements, while son Vincent (Leung Chung Hang) struggled to find employment and now works as an Uber driver thanks to the gift of a car from Angie and Pat which allows him to earn a living. He’s originally upset with his family’s suggestion of kicking Angie out of the apartment, but is also in a difficult position himself when his girlfriend becomes pregnant and they can’t find anywhere habitable to live on the kind of salary an Uber driver can earn. Though in her 60s, Mei is still doing a physically strenuous job as a hotel maid while Shing has taken a position he finds degrading as a nightwatchman at a carpark following the closure of his restaurant some years previously. 

The implication is these socio-economic pressures encourage them the abandon their responsibility to Angie as the beloved aunt they’ve known all their lives. But then there’s also the mild homophobia that rears its head, introducing Angie as Pat’s “best friend” and not allowing her to stand in the front with family at Pat’s funeral as if their relationship wasn’t really real because they were both women. Of course they may have behaved the same way had Pat been a man, squeezing Angie out because she had no legal claim as a common-law spouse, but it certainly seems to make it easier for them to abandon her and take everything she worked so hard to build with Pat as if they were really entitled to it. Shing justifies himself that he has to look after “his” family, which doesn’t include Angie, while cruelly implying that it’s what Pat would have wanted. 

In the end, Angie is left with no other option than to sue for her “rightful” share as a ”dependent” in an effort to force the family to recognise the legitimacy of her relationship with Pat. Thankfully she has another family in her community, though her own still living parents only partially accepted her relationship with Pat again referring to her as a “best friend” and making cracks about how she never married. But her family was Pat, and Pat is gone. Yeung paints a touching picture of grief as Angie reacts all the things she did with Pat but now alone, accompanied only by a sense of absence and comforted by her memories while otherwise exiled from a world that had seemed until then filled with familial love.

All Shall Be Well screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Good Morning (お早よう, Yasujiro Ozu, 1959)

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Even the most casual viewer of Japanese cinema will be aware that something as simple as “lovely weather today” can mean quite a lot more than it at first seems. Small talk isn’t really so small after all and without it, as one quite perceptive yet perennially tongue-tied translator points out midway through Yasujiro Ozu’s charming late career comedy Good Morning (お早よう, Ohayo), our lives would be quite boring. Boring it is not, however, when two young boys decide to rebel against the pointless politeness of the adult world by taking a vow of silence after being told off for going on in their constant tantrums over the unfairness of being denied a TV set. 

As he often did, Ozu repurposes the plot of an earlier film, in this case I Was Born But… and subverts it. The two boys at the centre of the 1932 silent film ended up going on a hunger strike out of humiliation and despair on realising that their dad, who they’d idolised, was also a soulless corporate lackey forced to debase himself in deference to his boss. The father is ashamed, he doesn’t want his boys to end up living a meaningless worker drone existence, but the boys’ decision not to eat also carries much more weight considering they are in living in a time of economic depression during which many do not have the luxury of choice. 

The Hayashi boys, Minoru (Koji Shitara) and Isamu (Masahiko Shimazu), by contrast are also rebelling against the meaningless adult world but for the opposite reasons. They don’t seem to have a lot of respect for their father and probably don’t really care if he humiliates himself on a daily basis so long as they can watch sumo on TV without needing to go next door. These are consumerist kids, they want what they want and they want it now. Minoru is really too old for screaming tantrums, but still rolls around on the floor kicking his legs in frustration because it’s all just so unfair that mum and dad won’t get him a TV even though it’s not a matter of money. The parents, for their part, are trying their best to resist the onset of consumerism. Mr Hayashi (Chishu Ryu) is against the TV because he fears the boys will stop studying and hours of vacant staring will ruin their young minds. He might have a point, but you can’t hold back the tides forever. 

It’s his scolding of the boys which eventually leads to all the subsequent problems as his insistence that they are being far too noisy and talk much more than children have a right to leads them to declare an ironic vow of silence in protest against the “meaningless” chatter of adults filled with random pleasantries such as “good morning”, “where are you off to today?”, “what lovely weather we’re having!”, etc. Their decision, however, comes at a bad moment. There has recently been some unpleasantness over misplaced money for a local community group and gossip about Mrs Haraguchi’s (Haruko Sugimura) new washing machine. The other housewives on the block also seem to be resistant to consumerist desires and do not approve of the purchase, channeling their resentment into assuming that Mrs Haraguchi may have embezzled the money. Grown up chatter isn’t always meaningless and the frivolous local gossip has a profound bearing on the social politics of the block. So when the boys don’t reply to Mrs Haraguchi’s good morning, she assumes they are deliberately snubbing her on their mother’s instruction because of a petty grudge over harsh words exchanged on account of the misunderstanding surrounding the missing club dues.

Meanwhile, we can see the shadows of a lingering economic instability. These are all modest homes where families make an effort to appear frugal, hence the outrage over the washing machine, but the family friend who teaches the boys English and has a crush on their aunt, Heiichiro (Keiji Sada), has been laid off after his company went bust. He’s supported by his older sister who remains unmarried and works at a car dealership (more consumerism) while doing translation on the side for extra money. The neighbour across the way is technically “retired” but looking for work partly because his pension’s not enough to live on and partly because what’s a man supposed to do all day in a society which expects everyone to be productive? The new neighbours next-door to the Hayashis who’ve caused all this trouble because of their TV set are viewed as scandalous because they live in their pyjamas and she used to be a cabaret bar girl. The middle-aged gossips don’t think they’re respectable while she eventually decides to move because the neighbours are too “annoying”. 

Ironically enough, it’s sumo the boys most want to watch, about as traditionally Japanese a pastime as is possible even as they yearn for colourful consumerist modernity. They communicate by refusing to communicate. As Heiichiro points out, small talk is a social lubricant but meaningless things are easy to say while important things are not. Which is not to say you can’t communicate something important by saying something seemingly as meaningless as “that cloud has an interesting shape”, but that you won’t get anywhere unless you listen to what people are actually saying even when they’re saying nothing at all. They boys can’t win against the inherent meaninglessness of adult life with its superficial conformities, petty resentments, and wilful misunderstandings but perhaps we can all learn something from their straightforward earnestness in their refusal to submit themselves to empty pleasantries. 

Brave Citizen (용감한 시민, Park Jin-pyo, 2023) [Fantasia 2024]

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There’s an intentional irony in the mantra teacher Si-min (Shin Hae-Sun) is fond of repeating that “If you do nothing, nothing will happen,” in that on the one hand it means that until people decide to act a dissatisfying status quo will continue, but on the other it may also seem threatening implying that if only you keep quiet nothing will happen to you. The main thrust of Park Jin-pyo’s webtoon adaptation Brave Citizen (용감한 시민) does seem to be that abuses of power take place because so few people are willing to challenge them or indeed to stand up for those who cannot stand up for themselves.

That’s something Si-min discovers when a student comes to her and says he’s being harassed by notorious bully Su-kang (Lee Jun-Young). A former boxer/martial artist, Si-min is on a temp contract and evidently waited quite some time to be offered a position so takes it to heart when her boss, Mrs Lee (Cha Chung-Hwa), warns her not make waves and jeopardise her hopes of being hired full-time. Somewhat cynical she tries to talk herself out of standing up for him, talking herself into turning a blind eye to injustice as nothing to do with her but at the end of the day she isn’t someone who can just sit by and take it nor watch as others are harmed while Su-kang goes unchallenged. 

He’s unchallenged largely due to the socio-economic conditions of contemporary Korea in which the wealthy and well-connected are able to live above the law. When one of Su-kang’s victims tries to report him to the police, they are the ones who end up accused of making a false report while Su-kang gets off scot free because he counts judges and prosecutors among his relatives while his mother is a prominent lawyer. His family apparently also donate large amounts of money to the school, which has won a series of “anti-bullying awards,” which is why he can’t be expelled. Si-min’s predecessor took her own life because of Su-kang’s bullying while pretty much everyone is scared stiff of him.

It’s for these reasons that Si-min turns to violence in the hope of giving Su-kan a little “off-site education” and perhaps you can’t blame her when faced with such intransigence from compromised authority. Yet standing up for the students is also a way of learning to stand up for herself, not to succumb to turning a blind eye to injustice simply because it’s more convenient. It’s this wilful suppression of one’s rage towards the persistent injustices of society that ends up spreading them, a continuous chain of abuse in which people take out their frustrations on those unable to defend themselves like the drunk man who yells at Si-min in the street and comes to realise he’s picked on the wrong person. 

Then again, when questioned why he behaves this way Su-kang only answers that “it’s fun”. It’s difficult to believe he would be insecure in his status, yet he persistently mocks those he sees as socially inferior, “nobodies” and ”hobos”, as opposed to elites like himself. The suggestion is that he and his friends have become this way because of a lack of boundaries and a sense of invincibility, which is partly what annoys him so much about an intervention from an authoritarian figure such as Si-min over whom he has no authority because she has decided not to grant it to him. 

This might be what makes her a “brave citizen,” the name of an award granted to ordinary people working in favour of justice that her father had once won after otherwise ruining his life through unwisely guaranteeing a loan and being left on the hook for paying it back. Embracing the absurdity of the webtoon, Park goes big and bold painting the inequalities of the contemporary society in stark relief while injecting a sense of catharsis into Si-min’s attempts to smack some sense into the bullies while rediscovering her own desire to challenge injustice rather than remain complicit with it even if it is personally inconvenient. Her rebellion encourages others to do the same while robbing the bullies of their privileged position and exposing them to the consequences of their actions. Of course, fighting violence with violence may not be the best solution but does at least allow Si-min to make the most of what she has and to recover the self that had been beaten down and defeated but is now capable of fighting back both for herself and others.

Brave Citizen screened as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

International trailer (English subtitles)

The Sin (씬, Han Dong-seok, 2023)

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According to the opening title card of Han Dong-seok’s genre-hopping horror, sin is like a lost child that will one day come looking for its parents. The film’s ostensible heroine at times hears voices suggesting that someone or something will eventually come looking her, and later says that she is ready for their arrival, but before that we have to wonder what it is she means and what if anything that is happening is actually real or at least in keeping with our assumptions.

There are many reasons why we begin to feels we can’t trust Si-yeong’s (Kim Yoon-Hye) perspective. Not only is she already somewhat distant and preoccupied on her arrival at a disused university in the mountains but we also later learn that she’s taking a large amount of medication apparently for migraines and PTSD stemming from a barely remembered accident. She also seems less than pleased to encounter former colleague Chae-yoon (Song Yi-Jae) who brings up memories that seem unpleasant to her while there’s a kind of frostiness between them that’s only exacerbated by the fact Si-yeong was not even aware she’d have a co-star in this experimental dance movie directed by a man known for being “unkind” to actors. 

In any case, strange things do indeed begin befalling her from a body dropping right in front of her feet before she enters the building to the eventual murder and suicide of her colleagues who then return as zombie-like creatures. The film cycles rapidly through a series of genres beginning as a slasher with a Suspiria-like sense of eeriness as dancer Si-yeong’s mental state starts to unravel before drifting into the undead, cults, and shamanistic folk horror with the weird symbols dotted around the campus. 

Because things are very wrong on the outside too, Si-yeong even ends up running into a gang of murderous corrupt cops paranoid she’s found their stash of stolen drugs while otherwise pursued by riflemen apparently employed by a vengeful CEO. It’s true enough that we don’t know what’s going on for most of the film, and part of that may be that Si-yeong doesn’t know either because her mental state is unstable. We’re not even really sure if Chae-yoon is real or merely Si-yeong’s projection of her internal conflict, dressed as she is in the same outfit and with the same haircut to the point the two women are often barely distinguishable. Perhaps it’s this unpleasant memory that Si-yeong is trying to avoid, though it’s clear in very general terms that she’s running from something as much as she’s being chased and that her flight may be orchestrated to bring her to a specific location whether physical or spiritual.

What’s chasing her is the apparent “sin” of the title, though everyone might not see it as such or maybe believe their own sins were either justified or will be paid for later. For the purely evil, sin as a concept may not even exist if there’s no prospect of remorse though it’s hard to reconcile the docile, sweet and somewhat etherial Si-yeong with the fragmented memories of a past that may or may not be her own. “Thanks to you, we all became monsters,” she’s later told by someone about to something pretty monstrous but maybe they too were monstrous to begin with, or nobody was, and a well-meaning attempt to exorcise evil from the world has only produced more of it. 

Just when you think you have it all figured out, Han throws in a post-credits sequence pouring more fuel on the fire and hinting at even greater back story in a world ruled by dark and unseen supernatural forces. It doesn’t make sense, but wilfully so and frustrates in a positive way in our desperation to understand something that cannot be understood much as Si-yeong attempts to understand the rapidly disintegrating world around her. The concrete fact does seem to be that one must pay for ones sins, though those who do may not be the ones we’d expect. Gory and incredibly creepy, the film plays with our senses as much as Si-yeong’s, undermines our sense of reality, and finally leaves with the unsettling vision of a pervasive evil lurking in the mirror or the depths or the dark corners of a mind already shrouded in delusion. 

The Sin screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Kizumonogatari -Koyomi Vamp- (傷物語 -こよみヴァンプ-, Tatsuya Oishi, 2023) [Fantasia 2024]

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A young man walks into an empty subway station already ominously strewn with blood and finds there the corpse of a woman shorn of her limbs. The corpse rises and begs him to have her life by sacrificing his own in allowing her to suck his blood and surprisingly the young man agrees. He does not, however, die but is brought back as something else, not quite human and definitely subservient to the creature he has saved. 

Running 2.5 hours, Tatsuya Oishi’s Kizumonogatari -Koyomi Vamp- (傷物語 -こよみヴァンプ-) is in fact a compilation of three films released in 2016 and a part of the long running Kizumonogatari series which originated with Nisio Isin’s light novels and has gone to spawn an expansive universe of interconnecting spin-offs. This is technically a prequel, and in that sense begins with a black slate but also deliberately drops us into confusion with breakneck pace through the hero’s quest to recover himself and his place in the world after this rude awakening to the supernatural. 

Rude is in many ways a defining characteristic of Kiss-shot, the 500-year old vampire Araragi finds bleeding in the subway station at that point a blonde and alluring figure of forbidden desire. Araragi is drawn to her in an unconscious death wish linked with the sexual desire he struggles to understand, running into the subway minutes after buying a pornographic magazine from a convenience store after striking up a friendship with fellow student Hanekawa. But once he saves her life, Kiss-shot is transformed into a cheeky little girl who now tells him that he is her minion and he must recover her severed limbs from a trio of vampire in order to be restored to humanity even as the power dynamic between them becomes confused and distorted.

In his vampire state, Araragi becomes immortal, powerful and free of mortal jeopardy yet he remains uncertain and insecure while reliant on the support of Hanekawa who encourages him to reject his desire for death and remain alive. But this also presents a problem to Araragi who sees himself as self-sacrificing and is unwilling to accept the what he sees as a self-sacrifice from Hanekawa for whom he feels unworthy and inadequate. In some senses it’s a typically self-centred, adolescent male perspective that rejects any idea of her own agency and assumes Hanekawa performs these actions for him rather than considering that she performs them for herself and is simply doing what she wants to do which in the end is not really about him at all. He declares it a burden he’s too weak to carry, which might in some senses be fair but also again a mischaracterisation that is further evidence of his lack of self-worth.

It’s this sense of inadequacy that lies behind his desire to reclaim his humanity along with the concurrent disgust he feels in the degradations of vampirism. It genuinely comes as a surprise to him that Kiss-shot feeds on human beings and lost her own humanity so long ago that she no longer gives it a second thought. She is after all only being what she is, but like Araragi is drawn to death partly out of frustrated longing and lingering boredom with a relentless yet apparently uneventful 500 years behind her in which the only other highlight was her previous minion who rejected this life much more quickly than she ever expected.

Even so, Oishi lends their mutual dilemma a degree of absurdity in the expectedly comic sight of severed heads littering a sports filed or launching themselves in toothy attacks. Heavily inspired by the French New Wave, he breaks the action with sometimes barely legible title cards often reading a single world while his composition has a kind of jauntiness that is also bleak and melancholy. The world surrounding Araragi veers between the pristine entrance to the high school, and post apocalyptic devastation littered with crows emblematised by the depilated cram school in which Kiss-shot keeps him. Backgrounds often have a photo realistic quality that further sets the world at a kilter when matched with the more conventional character designs of the central players. The conclusion that Araragi is presented with amounts a sharing of the misery which is also akin the burden he didn’t want to carry but also perhaps symbolic of his path towards adulthood in acceptance of compromise and selflessness in being willing to carry a small part of others’ pain and despair and allowing them to carry a part of his own.

Kizumonogatari -Koyomi Vamp- screened as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Pierce (刺心切骨, Nelicia Low, 2023)

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What are the limits of unconditional love and is it always a good thing? The hero of Nelica Low’s intense fraternal drama Pierce (刺心切骨, cì xīnqiè gǔ) is desperate to believe that his older brother is innocent of a crime he’s been imprisoned for for the last seven years, but in another sense it seems like the fact itself doesn’t matter to him. What he wants is the emotional intimacy of authenticity which is something he doesn’t seem to get from his steely mother intent on crafting a protective bubble of fantasy that may be as much for herself as her son.

In any case, Ai Ling (Ding Ning) is convinced that Zihan (Tsao Yu-ning) was born bad. She needs no convincing that when he stabbed his opponent with a broken blade during a fencing competition he did so knowingly and it was an act of murder rather than an accident as he claims. Zijie (Liu Hsui-fu), her sensitive younger son, is not so sure and feels that his mother’s total rejection of his brother is unfair. He needs to believe in part that Zihan is innocent because he once saved him from drowning though according to his mother if she had not arrived when she did Zihan would happily have watched him die. Ai Ling also says that she suspected Zihan had harmed Zijie during their childhood, but if this is true then Zijie appears not to remember it or perhaps willingly suppresses his memories of cruelty because it would be too difficult for him to accept that his own brother tried to kill him. 

But objectively speaking, there is something not quite right about Zihan who seems to be a charmer with manipulative tendencies. He was once a three time national fencing champion, and as he says fencing is all about figuring out your opponent’s intentions without letting them see your own. Of course, the way he behaves could equally be because of the way his mother behaves towards him. In some senses he too is a broken blade, apparently craving his mother’s approval and affection and perhaps becoming what she believed him to be out of frustration and resentment. He lies all too easily, crashing a dinner party with Ai Ling’s wealthy suitor Zhuang and his family and leaning into her cover story that he had been away studying medicine in the US while adding a touch of his own in a tearful story of wanting to specialise in radiology having watched his father painfully pass away of cancer. 

Of course, even if he is a raging sociopath, that doesn’t necessarily mean he committed an apparently motiveless murder or that he has no feelings at all for his brother who dotes on and idolises him with almost incestuous intensity. Zihan instantly picks up on the fact his brother is gay and that a boy in the fencing club has a crush on him, offering nothing other than support and reassurance of the kind he’d never get from Ai Ling. When Zhuang tries to set Zijie up with a girl and he declines, he broaches the idea he might not be straight but Ai Ling immediately changes the subject implying that probably she already knows but it’s another thing she’s papered over perhaps afraid that it might damage her relationship with Zhuang who appears to come from a wealthy family though they may not be as conservative as she fears them to be. 

In contract to the intimacy Zijie craves, beginning to confess himself, Ai Ling protects and distances herself from others through deliberate misrepresentation. Zhuang seems at least that he would be more upset about the deceit than that Ai Ling has a son who involved in a high profile, violent crime and also appears not to care that Zijie maybe gay while otherwise attempting to bond with him and be a sincere father figure. His love may in fact be unconditional in a way Ai Ling’s clearly is not whereas Zijie finds himself wavering, confronted by contradictory evidence that suggests his brother may not be so innocent after all. Deciding into a Grand Guignol fantasy in its final stretches, Low fills the screen with an ominous red, the billowing curtains creating an artificial dreamscape of ambiguous reality in which the brothers, each of them, discover at least their own truth and the answers they were seeking which may in its way be all they really needed.

Pierce screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival

Original trailer (English subtitles)

A Samurai in Time (侍タイムスリッパー, Junichi Yasuda, 2024) [Fantasia 2024]

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Is there something a little sad about being forced to reenact your reality as theatre, or is it something to be proud of in adapting to the times and bringing the essence of what you once were with you? Junichi Yasuda’s A Samurai in Time (侍タイムスリッパー, Samurai Time Slip) like A Boy and His Samurai sees an Edo-era retainer transported to the present day but is less about contrast with the feudal past than how to carry on or start again when your time has ended.

At least that’s how it is for Kosaka Shinzaemon (Makiya Yamaguchi), a member of the Aizu Clan loyal to the Tokugawa Shogunate in the twilight of the feudal era. In arriving in our present, he’s forced to admit that days of the samurai are long over, and finds himself a man with out a place, adrift in a classless society in which the only skill he possesses, swordsmanship, is all but obsolete. The irony is that, after being transported by a Terminator-style lightening strike, Shin arrives on the set of a jidaigeki, or samurai-themed television drama which is to say an artificial recreation of his reality. Thus he’s confused when he tries to ask passers-by for directions and they seem alarmed and ignore him while his attempt to intervene when a young lady is bullied by rogue samurai earns him a dressing down from a man in strange dress we obviously know is the director. When he’s knocked out from a bump on the head, everyone assumes he’s got amnesia and has become confused between his role as an extra on a samurai drama in which he may have overinvested and his “real” life, which in a way maybe true.

Just as he’d come from the end of the feudal era, so he’s arrived in the dying days of the jidaigeki. Once a mainstay of the entertainment industry in its heyday of the ’50s and ‘60s when historical dramas ruled the airwaves, the genre has long been in decline and somewhat out of favour with both filmmakers, seeing as they’re much more expensive to make, and audiences. In fact, the place where Shin arrives is a former shooting set that’s been turned into a theme park recreating the reality of the jidaigeki serial rather than that of the feudal era.

In an analogy which might prove slightly awkward, Shin’s fate is aligned with that of the jidageki itself but by accident of birth he is also on the wrong side of history both literally and metaphorically. As he later learns, his Aizu clan and the shogunate it served would not prevail. Yet ultimately he likes this new Japan, a place of prosperity where anyone and everyone is free to eat what to him seems like the food of the elite. Embarking on a career as a jidaigeki stuntman, a kiriyaku or extra who dies on screen, he becomes committed to protecting the jidaigeki in the same way he protected the shogunate even as everyone around him says he must be mad to take up this sort of work now when jobs are few and far between. 

To that extent, it’s really about learning to adapt to another reality preserving what you can (and wish to) about the past but continuing to move forward like a samurai living life fully in service of an ideal. In a sense, this is something the Aizu could not do for they were defeated during in the Boshin War which solidified the victory of progressive revolutionaries who believed that modernisation and Westernisation were the only ways to save Japan bringing the age of the samurai to a close. In strange ways, Shin finds himself re-enacting this internal dilemma through his meta performance, bringing a note of authenticity to the jidaigeki genre which as we can see from that being filmed is not always terribly serious or earnest about historical accuracy. 

There is though an earnest desire to preserve it, if also to modernise for a contemporary era accepting that the days of classic jidaigeki are over but the genre may live again if in different ways. Through roleplaying his internal conflict, Shin is able to overcome his lingering feelings of guilt towards the clan and attachment to the more destructive sides of the samurai code, rejecting his opportunity for revenge and deciding to live well instead in this brave new world seemingly filled with potential for reinvention and recreation in which the past need not be cast away or overwritten but carried forward into new futures of its own.

A Samurai in Time screened as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)