Author: Hayley Scanlon

A Song Sung Blue (小白船, Geng Zihan, 2023)

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Late into Geng Zihan ’s coming-of-age drama A Song Sung Blue (小白船, xiǎo bái chuán), the heroine’s father (Liang Long) who perhaps knows a little more about her than we might have assumed, tells her that love and resentment are often the same thing. At least, they are both unforgettable. Resentments are something Xian (Zhou Meijun) has in spades, though she has little way of expressing them outside of her sullenness and silence while perhaps learning some unhelpful lessons in her seemingly unreturned attraction to the daughter of her father’s receptionist. 

Firstly, Xian is resentful towards her mother who has abandoned her to go on a humanitarian mission to Africa for an entire year explaining that the hospital have promised her a long awaited promotion after which she won’t have to do the nightshifts and so can spend more with her daughter, the irony being that by that time Xian will be in her late teens and perhaps less keen to spend time with her mum. Secondly, Xian is resentful towards her estranged father whom she only sees at family gatherings and has little connection with. She also seems resentful towards the other children in the choir and has no real friends. When the choir runs out of female uniforms she’s told to wear one of the boys and stand at the back hoping no one will notice. Meanwhile, she’s a little surprised after venturing backstage and catching sight of her choir mistress embracing another woman. 

Yet in other ways Mingmei (Huang Ziqi), the daughter of her father’s receptionist with whom he is also in a relationship, is simply her inverse. Flighty and confident, Mingmei appears much older than her years and is training to be an air stewardess but inwardly seems hurt and vulnerable. She lives a fairly chaotic life in which she’s learned at an early age how to weaponise her sexuality and largely relies on sugar daddies for her financial upkeep while hating herself for doing so. It’s after learning that the man in question maybe about to leave his wife and marry Mingmei that Xian abruptly kisses her but is immediately rebuffed, Mingmei running a thumb across Xian’s lips as if more concerned about what she may have passed to Xian than outraged or offended.

Then again, Mingmei seems to have been aware of Xian’s attraction while no doubt tipped off by the fact that she was playing around with a stethoscope and presumably noticed her heart beating unusually fast. At times she seems insensitive, wilfully so or otherwise, or perhaps simply doesn’t know how not to manipulate the attraction that she inspires in others cruelly taking Xian along on one of her sugar daddy dates or asking her to help her dress. But then Xian also learns some problematic lessons, adopting some of Mingmei’s behaviour patterns in attempting to manipulate the attraction shown for her by a boy in the choir she is otherwise uninterested in by virtually forcing herself on him and then asking for a loan to get the money for Mingmei to open a store so she won’t have to rely on potentially violent sugar daddies and would therefore be more available to Xian who has also developed a white night desire to save her from her self-destructive instincts.

The only bright spot in Xian’s melancholy existence which is generally coloured in blue, her desire for Mingmei is palpable even gazing at the many photos of her taken by her father including one in striking red. Yet there’s an another sense of distance in her longing given that Mingmei is a member of the Chinese-Korean community. Xian is at once struck by this additional layer of exocitity and bewildered by her inability to understand it knowing no Korean nor much of Mingmei’s culture. The film takes its Chinese title from the song Xian sings at the choir recital, the traditional folksong Little White Boat which actually originated in Korea. Xian is disappointed not to spot Mingmei in the audience little knowing that she had been there but left early. Later in the film, Mingmei sings the song herself but in Korean perhaps a way of letting Xian know she came after all, or else simply intended in the way song is often sung as one of parting. In any case, Xian is indeed like the little boat dotting the horizon drifting along barely noticed and with no means of controlling her direction. Geng frames her with a quiet empathy and a gentle sense of recognition for those whose gaze is rarely returned.

A Song Sung Blue screened as part of this year’s Queer East.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Old Fox (老狐狸 , Hsiao Ya-chuan, 2023)

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It’s all about “inequality”, according to the titular Old Fox (老狐狸, lǎohúli). Or at least knowing how to leverage it. Inequality is something that’s coming to bother the young hero of Hsiao Ya-chuan’s coming-of-age drama in which a small boy finds himself torn between two father figures, one a wily old slumlandlord with a heart of stone and the other his melancholy and disappointed but kindhearted father who simply endures the many blows that life has dealt him. 

Set in Taipei in 1989 shortly before an apocalyptic stock market crash in the post-martial law economy crushes the hopes of millions of ordinary people convinced to invest their savings, the film wastes no time in showing us the various inequalities in play in small alleyway of traditional stores all owned by Boss Xie (Akio Chen) whom many seem to regard as a kind of saviour even if he cares not at all about them. Jie’s (Bai Run-yin) father Tai-lai (Liu Kuan-ting) works in a local restaurant and rents a room above a beef noodle cafe for which he pays in cash every week to Miss Lin (Eugenie Liu), a pretty young woman working for Boss Xie and enjoying an unusual amount of power for someone of her age and gender for a society still somewhat conservative. 

Tai-lai has been patiently saving money so that he can afford to buy a house and open a hair salon which was the dream of his late wife, but obvlious to the world around him he hasn’t noticed that prices are continuing to rise placing his dream of homeownership further out of his reach. Meanwhile, Jie is bullied at school and called a “snitch” without understanding why or even what the word means. This sense powerlessness and inferiority maybe be why he’s drawn to Boss Xie, a man who does after all exude power if also a sense of menace and melancholy. Xie in turn sees in Jie a potential protégé, both a mirror of his younger self and an echo of the son he lost who rebelled against everything he represents.

Nicknamed Old Fox, Xie stands for everything that’s wrong with the contemporary society which is about to implode in the financial crash. Wounded by his childhood poverty in which he, like Jie, also pleaded with a local landlord to sell his mother a property, Xie has adopted a ruthlessly selfish disregard for the lives of others teaching Jie his mantra of “none of my damn business” while the boy develops a worrying admiration for the aura a man like Xie projects and actively enjoys the sensation that others fear him. While hanging out with Xie he comes to look down on men like his father whom Xie calls “losers” who care only for others and disregard themselves. Xie teaches him to leverage the inequalities of power and turn his enemies’ weakness back against them to increase his own strength placing him further at odds with Tai-lai’s innate goodness and down-to-earth humanity. 

Yet we can also see that Tai-lai has had a life of disappointment. A woman who comes into the restaurant (Mugi Kadowaki) now married to a thuggish local big wig is a former childhood sweetheart from whom he was separated by time and circumstance while it also seems that Miss Lin has taken a liking to him though he appears not to have noticed. At home he plays the saxophone and takes in tailoring while resigned to saving a little longer before he’ll finally be able to buy a house and achieve his dreams. Tai-lai is one of the few who does not play the stock market and is therefore free of the danger it represents while Jie soon becomes sick of his his father’s frugality in their regular practice of turning the boiler off after having a bath and keeping their taps on a slow drip so they don’t trip the water metre and longs to become a man like Boss Xie unafraid to exploit any advantage in complete disregard for the lives of others. 

A brief coda set in the present in the day suggests that the older Jie may have found a happy medium, at least disguising a genuine concern for the safety and happiness of others as being solely about profit, while Xie’s sadness and doubts about the path his life has taken are never far from the surface as the society teeters on the brink of financial disaster. Capturing a palpable sense of late ’80s Taipei the film has a nostalgic atmosphere but also an equally prescient quality in the things that are only half-visible to the younger Jie in the melancholy disappointments of the adults who surround him still struggling to reroot themselves in a new society while overburdened by the failures of the old.

Old Fox screens April 22nd as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival Spring Showcase.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

OUT (Hiroshi Shinagawa, 2023)

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Delinquent dramas have been having a bit of a moment over the last few years and like many Hiroshi Shinagawa’s manga adaptation OUT is a comic retro throwback to the genre’s ‘80s heyday. Some of the action may seem a little a outdated, but macho posturing will never really go out of style and there is genuine heart in the newfound brotherhood between local punk Kaname (Koshi Mizukami) and the recently released Tatsuya (Yuki Kura) who is torn between trying to go straight and rejoining the ultra manly society of the biker gangs.

Then again it quickly becomes clear that part of the problem is too many people have already given up on Tatsuya and are eagerly relishing the prospect of his failure. Having spent a few months in juvenile detention for fighting, he’s no desire to go back but is also resentful about the lack of control he now has over his life if grateful to have been taken in by an uncle and aunt who run a Korean barbecue restaurant in Chiba. Their faith in him makes him want to live up to it, but equally he can’t bring himself not to respond to challenges of masculinity rather comically insisting that he square off with new rival Kaname through a game of sumo so he won’t break the terms of his parole by hitting someone. As might be expected, the two men become friends through fighting but Kaname turns out to be the deputy leader of a local biker gang bringing Tatsuya once more into contact with random and pointless violence. 

This is the double meaning of “out”, not only that Tatsuya is “out” of juvie and and outsider to the gangs in Chiba but also and outlaw by nature who can’t be tamed by the demands of the civil society. Yet what he’s confronted by is a new sense of masculinity that’s not founded solely on dominance through violence, status or macho posturing but love and brotherhood. A young woman he takes a liking to, Chihiro (Yuki Yoda), wastes no time telling him she thinks he’s pathetic in his ongoing obsession with his male pride while trying to make him realise that there are people who care for him and would be upset if he went and got himself killed which makes his whole way of life completely irresponsible.

But at the same time, the rival gang that’s after his new friends has shifted into violence and murder, making money through trafficking drugs and blackmailing women into sex work after incapacitating them and threatening them with sex tapes. Obviously, even his newfound code of manliness means he must stand up to this new kind of injustice even if it sends him back to prison. What he learns from Chihiro is that kindness is more attractive than coolness while his uncle gives him a similar lesson, econouraing him to channel his rebellious energy in a more positive direction just as he now dedicates his whole life to protecting his wife and the restaurant. 

Shinagawa approaches the material with a sense of humour undercutting the ridiculousness of the male posturing with gently mocking affection. He maintains some of the key elements of the genre such as the surreal manga-style hairdos while embracing its essential outlandishness. The fight scenes themselves are also surprisingly violent if also a little ironic as he cuts between gang leader Atchan (Kotaro Daigo) jumping on a guy’s face to Tatsuya’s aunt remarking that he seems like a nice kid. Some degree of CGI has evidently been employed to aid the visceral of the violence as we think we see faces coming in for a pummelling along with impressive drop kicks, though the mass brawls are in themselves well choreographed and dynamic while remaining within the realms of what a petty street punk could do reasonably do. Shinagawa also leans into the manga origins with frequent use of line drawings in scene transitions and character introductions. In essence Tatsuya is attempting to reclaim his self-esteem, finally embracing the of repeated phrase “Im stupid, but I’m not trash” to claim the right to live a less chaotic life while recommitting himself to knuckling down in the barbecue restaurant in defiance of those who thought him to be worthless, finally out of his self-imposed prison and into a happier future.

 OUT screened as part of the 18th Season of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

My Favorite Love Story (어쩌면 해피엔딩, Lee Won-hoi, 2023)

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Robots aren’t programmed to love autonomously according to Oliver (Shin Joo-hyup), a helperbot seemingly abandoned by his long lost owner, or as he terms it, friend, James in Lee Won-hoi’s quirky musical romance, My Favourite Love Story (어쩌면 해피엔딩, eojjeomyeon happy ending). It’s an odd thing to say in a way, what does it mean to love “autonomously”? Or perhaps he is simply alluding to the fact that there must obviously be some robots who are programmed for love even if “love” is as good a word as any to describe the way he’s bonded to James that causes him to wait by the window like a wife willing her husband back from the war. 

Oliver rarely leaves the apartment and enjoys conversation only with a handful of potted plants and the postman who delivers vintage copies of Life magazine, jazz records, and repair kits daily. We can see that Oliver’s word is small and frozen in time, though he looks out on a Seoul that seems to him a paradise while we’re told that it’s so polluted people have started evacuating to Jeju Island. It’s because of the pollution that production of helper robots has been stopped along with that of repair kids. There is something quite poignant about the forced ageing Oliver undergoes having been abandoned by a society that valued him only for his usefulness and now prevents him from being able to repair himself as if he were suddenly denied basic medical treatment and regarded always as a lesser being. On the road trip he eventually takes with the more cynical Claire (Kang Hye-in), he encounters signs that reads “no robots” while doing his best to act human despite his obvious awkwardness. 

While Oliver is upbeat and content to wait for James certain that he’ll one day return, Claire is carrying heavier baggage stemming from her treatment by her former owners that convinces her humans are all bad and ready to discard them at any moment. Needing to borrow his charger, she bamboozles her way into Oliver’s life and convinces him to go on a trip to Jeju to look for James and unexpectedly finds herself falling in love along the way. But as Oliver says, love isn’t something that’s in their programming. After all, love causes lots of problems so why would we code it into machines we’ve built solely to serve us?

In any case, the discovery they make is that love is sad and also impossible in the knowledge that will someday inevitably end. Claire’s needs for repairs are more urgent than Oliver’s, while the world around them also seems to be crumbling and not least because of human negligence. They consider simply editing their memories to remove the new discoveries they’ve made about themselves and the world not to mention love in order to return to the state of inertia in which they existed before each just waiting for something while quietly falling apart.

Adapted from a one act fringe musical, the score has a contemporary Broadway feel which perhaps isn’t surprising given that it was written by an American musical theatre composer and sparked for the book writer by a chance encounter with the Damon Albarn song Everybody Robots in Brooklyn. Thematically, it asks whether it’s worth paying the price of love given that every romance has an expiry date even if theoretically a robot to could live forever were it not for humanity destroying the planet and then callously abandoning them. The original title translates as the more apt “maybe happy ending” hinting at the sense of inevitability in the pair’s constant reunions and desire for reconnection though they still seem reluctant to place their faith in love alone even as the world around them continues to improve and the skies above Seoul are clear once again. With its retro aesthetics and cineliteracy, the film ads a degree of timelessness to its quirky tale of robots finding love while attempting to deal with their abandonment issues in a world of human indifference and in fact settles for a different kind of inertia in the cycle of a tentative romance that might one day result in a happy ending.

My Favorite Love Story screened as part of the 18th Season of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Legend of the Cat Monster (麗猫伝説, Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1983)

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Produced as a special marking the 100th episode of the Tuesday Night Suspense Theatre TV drama series, Nobuhiko Obayashi’s Legend of the Cat Monster (麗猫伝説, Reibyo densetsu) is preceded by a title card reading “Elegy for a Faraway Film”. Scripted by Chiho Katsura, the film is indeed in its way a lament for dying world albeit one which owes a heavy debt to Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard with a little Fedora thrown in. Repurposing the classic ghost cat film it casts cinema itself as dangerous illusion, a vampiric compulsion that drowns all who encounter it in irresolvable longing. 

This sense of irrecoverable nostalgia is palpable from the opening sequence which, aside from the melancholy voiceover, introduces us to the world of Setouchi Cinema apparently a moribund studio complex once dubbed the Hollywood of Japan. The new arrival, Ryohei (Akira Emoto), is dressed in noticeably anachronistic fashion as if he were a 1930s newsboy rather than a young man living in the Japan of the early 1980s. His girlfriend, Ryoko (Jun Fubuki), who works as a stage hand dresses in a similarly old-fashioned style and in fact carries an oversize watch that was a heirloom from her late father, an unsuccessful film director. Ryoko remarks that she’s been hoping someone would come and rescue her from this half-dead island but she doubts Ryohei will be the one to do it because he has also come here in search of a dream. 

That dream is, however, already dead at least according to some. The film director working at the studio is berated by a woman of around the same age working as a manager for an idol star for still getting an allowance from his mother at 60 because he has failed to make it as a film director at least in financial terms. There is a poignant, largely unexplored subplot between that suggests the inability to reconcile the dream of cinema with the economic “reality” has kept them apart all these years and that their dream of love may now be over too. 

It seems that the reclusive actress at the film’s centre, Akiko (Wakaba Irie), is also living on a frustrated dream of love withdrawing from the world around her believing that her lover will someday return from “Hollywood” which seems to be another word for paradise or perhaps the world beyond on the other side of the silver screen. To her, film is but a dream with in a dream. A window or screen is a portal to the burdens of the heart, memories of days gone by, and the illusions we once saw that cannot be seen again.  She herself is trapped within her own dream of love, but it is not so much a dream of her that bewitches Ryohei but the impossibility of cinema.

When passing photographer, Tachihara (Toru Minegishi), who lost his own wife to the unobtainable magic of the movies, snaps a picture of Akiko at her window holding a cat and looking exactly as she did the day she abruptly walked out on an incomplete film, it spurs a cynical producer to get the idea of convincing her to make a comeback and in a ghost cat movie, no less. Obayashi’s casting coup is getting mother and daughter Takako and Wakaba Irie to play aged and youthful versions of the famous actress, Takako herself having been a huge star of the 1930s performing most notably for Kenji Mizoguchi in the The Water Magician. There is an undeniable poignancy in her reflection that is only her aging body which is dying, as if she were merely becoming an embodiment of her image migrating to silver screen which exists between this world and next. It’s this screen that is later ruptured by Ryoko as she makes her escape after failing to save Ryohei from the curse of cinema. 

As Akiko laments, he’s writing his script more for himself than for her and it’s the quest for art which has begun to drain and make him mad. When he, pale and zombie-like, attempts to proffer his scripts it appears to be nothing more than his own name written over and over again. Like the Max-esque butler Mizumori (Akira Oizumi) says, film is an eternal dream which by its definition can never realised and exists only a state of longing somewhere beyond the veil. Drawing inspiration from Nobuo Nakagawa in particular and harnessing the sense of gothic dread found in Sunset Boulevard, Obayashi captures the eternal nightmares of artistic creation with the maddening obsessions of unrequited love and the image of the ideal which exists eternally out of reach somewhere on the other side of the screen.

Takano Tofu (高野豆腐店の春, Mitsuhiro Mihara, 2023)

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There’s an untranslated title card at the beginning of Mitushiro Mihara’s poignant dramedy Takano Tofu (高野豆腐店の春, Takano Tofu-ten no Haru) that describes the film as a story about the end of Heisei and it is in many ways about the end of an era, or perhaps of eras, but equally new beginnings and the eternal wellspring of life. With subtle hints of Ozu playing out as a kind of mashup of Late Autumn and Late Spring, it suggests that it’s never really too late to find happiness or to start something new even while preserving the best of the old. 

Harbingers of change are, however, lingering on the horizon as a customer to Takano Tofu remarks agreeing with daughter Haru (Kumiko Aso) that they need to innovate to stay in the game when the big new supermarket opens a few streets away. But change is not something father Tatsuo (Tatsuya Fuji) is keen on and especially when it comes to his tofu which is why he’s cancelled Haru’s popular new product of fried tofu and cheese despite its popularity and is also dead against her idea of expanding their network to sell in Tokyo.

There is something inherently comforting about the peacefulness of this quiet corner of Onomichi as Mihara captures it even if it also seems like a place out of time more Showa even than Heisei with its family businesses and old-fashioned shopping arcade. But equally there’s an underlying loneliness and answered longing along with a sense of lives disrupted by historical circumstance. Ironically enough, Tatsuo receives news from the hospital that one of the arteries to his heart is blocked requiring an operation to get everything working again and then immediately bumps into an old woman about his own age with whom he eventually bonds over the shared traumas of living in post-war Japan along with the lingering social stigma towards those affected by the dropping of the atomic bomb. We later learn that the failure of Haru’s marriage was in part caused by her father-in-law’s prejudice fearing her irradiated genes would contaminate his bloodline.

Then again, perhaps the pity expressed towards Fumie (Kumi Nakamura) as a woman who never married plays into outdated and sexist social attitudes that also lead Tatsuo and his friends to decide to find a mate for Haru given his sudden mortality crisis and fear that like Fumie she will be left alone when he eventually passes away. Of course, what it amounts to is a bunch of old men trying to decide who a middle-aged woman should marry while deliberately avoiding asking her if that’s even something she’s interested in. Having experienced marriage already perhaps she’s no desire to do so again and is perfectly happy the way things are. In any case she’s infinitely capable of finding a husband for herself if she wanted one. The prospective match they come up with for her is perfect on paper, youngish, handsome, wealthy and cultured, yet as it turns out what Haru might prefer is someone more ordinary, down to earth, and straightforward ironically enough just like tofu. 

As she later says, Tatsuo’s tofu has the flavour he gives it. Nicely textured, surprisingly soft on the inside, with a slight hint of astringency. There may be a minor pun involved in the Japanese title in that it can be read either as “Haru of Takano Tofu”, or as the meaning of her name implies “Spring at Takano Tofu” hinting both at a sense of transience and resurgence as Tatsuo takes in the cherry blossoms with Fumie and reflects on all they’ve experienced throughout the long years, the hardship and heartbreak of the post-war era. Yet as he says life is for living and it’s as much as you can hope for to look back and laugh at a life well lived. Maybe some things don’t need to change all that much, like carefully produced artisanal tofu as rich in soul as those who make it, but there’s always room for a little innovation and tiny chances for new happiness that could easily pass you by if you aren’t willing to take a risk or two and place a bet on change.

Takano Tofu screened as part of the 18th Season of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Exhuma (파묘, Jang Jae-hyun, 2024)

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The vengeful ghost of Japanese imperialism rises to take its revenge on its forgetful children in Jang Jae-hyun’s eerie supernatural horror, Exhuma (파묘, Pamyo). As in The Wailing, the supernatural threat is in this case not of Korean origin which causes a problem for otherwise powerful shaman Hwa-rim (Kim Go-eun). As a Korean exorcist, she is apparently not best placed to defeat an alien spirit while insisting that Japanese ghosts are more dangerous because they kill indiscriminately and cannot be reasoned with.

This is often true of ghosts in Japanese folklore. Their grudges become all-consuming. Revenge is often taken against society or humanity in general rather than a specific target and can even affect those the ghost once would not have wished to harm. In this case, it appears the supernatural entity in question has retained some of his selfhood while screaming for a hundred years having been sealed away in what one person describes as the worst burial plot in Korea. The ghost’s newborn great grandson won’t stop crying, apparently a family affliction, and so they want to do something about this apparent curse. But that requires digging into the past and unearthing its unpleasantness such as the fact the family’s immense wealth is thanks to the great-grandfather’s questionable politics as a full on militarist committed to the furthering of the Japanese empire. 

Meanwhile, the other ghost that haunts them is that of a giant samurai who was killed at the battle of Sekigahara, which of course means he could also have participated in Hideyoshi’s invasion of Korea only eight years previously. The film hints at backstories, never explaining why it is that Hwa-rim speaks fluent Japanese or what it was that happened in Japan except that she apparently found out that Korean shamanism doesn’t work that well on the average Japanese ghost. It all goes back to some kind of mad monk and fox diviner who did some black magic on the peninsula as a whole though it’s not clear exactly what it’s been doing for the last 70 years or so. 

These different kinds of spiritual practice and folklore beliefs jangle together seemingly without border or conflict. The funeral director (Yoo Hae-jin) who works with Hwa-rim and her geomancer friend (Choi Min-sik) is a Christian but apparently has no objection to witnessing shamanic rights nor disbelief in their power as if his twin belief systems simply sat next to each other. Even so, there does seem to be something entirely distinct about Hwa-rim’s practice that is different from Japanese Shintoism despite it its superficial similarities to the extent that her abilities have no effect on a Japanese spirit. 

Then again, this evil is older and deeper than the original ghost apparently wailing for a hundred years about his imprisonment and keen to take down all his descendants in self-destructive revenge. A grave digger spots what seems to be a snake with the head of a person, while no one seems to take the warnings about opening the coffin seriously. Everyone talks about grave robbers, ironically looking for riches among the dead, though the what the team find themselves doing is unearthing the buried past, trying to free themselves from it and perhaps the oppressive yoke of the colonialist legacy.

Jang heightens the sense of anxiety with faced paced, rhythmic editing coupled with scenes of extreme eeriness. He hints at a world beyond our own filled with vengeful spirits and lurking evil while the threats are largely supernatural rather than human even if the ghosts themselves did originate as ordinary people who were also fairly problematic before they died. In some ways, the film might be saying that it doesn’t do any good to go digging up the past but also that if you don’t you may have to live with a slowly festering evil that will visit itself on your children and your children’s children. Still, like the little boy who secretly kept grandma’s false teeth because he wanted something to remember her by, the past can be a difficult thing to let go of and simply re-burying it in a nicer place may not be enough to free yourself from the long buried generational trauma of an almost forgotten past.

US trailer (English subtitles)

Drifting Flowers, Flowing Days (この日々が凪いだら, Yutaka Tsunemachi, 2023)

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Life goes on as usual, until it doesn’t. The couple at the centre of Yutaka Tsunemachi’s debut feature Drifting Flowers, Flowing Days (この日々が凪いだら, Kono Hibi Ga Naidara), are about to hit the crisis of youth in which they begin to think seriously about their futures and fear that their lives can no longer continue simply as they were but also struggle to find direction while torn between what society views as a successful life and their own desires.

The crunch point comes when Hiroto (Hiroki Sato), a construction worker, and Futaba (Kaho Seto), who works in a florist’s, learn that their rundown apartment block is going to be demolished and they have six months to find somewhere else to live. While Futaba idly looks at wedding rings, she isn’t really sure how Hiroto views their relationship or if he’s even assuming they’ll finding somewhere new together. The financial strain of an unexpected move also has her wondering if she should give up her job in the florist’s, which she enjoys due to her love of flowers, and start looking for a regular company job but an attempt to talk about it with Hiroto only results in petulance born of male pride as he takes it as her complaining he doesn’t earn enough with his job as a casual labourer. 

Another source of friction is that Hiroto seems reluctant to meet Futaba’s family while refusing to introduce her to his hinting at longstanding childhood trauma stemming from a legacy of domestic abuse and a father who lost himself in drink. Even so, he’s drawn to an older man at work, Haruo, who soldiers on despite his decreasing physical capability. When he is unceremoniously fired, the Haruo takes his own life having lost his both his means of supporting himself and his sense of purpose. Haruo might remind him of father though Hiroto feels somewhat guilty that he didn’t do very much to help while he was alive and resentful towards his heartless boss and colleagues who did nothing more than make fun of him. 

This idea of people being disposable tools of corporate entities is further born out by the experiences of his hometown friend, Daigo (Masashi Yamada), who is feeling burned out by his dream job in the city largely thanks to a bullying boss and overbearing work culture. A friend who experienced something similar tells him she just quit her job and feels much better so if he doesn’t feel appreciated he should leave, but it’s not really that simple. Not only does he need a steady income to survive but there’s a degree of shame and trepidation in not following the conventional path, the same shame and trepidation that has Futaba worrying she’s being irresponsible in following her dream of opening a florist’s of her own rather than using her degree to get a better paid job and start saving for the next phase of adulthood while still uncertain if Hiroto is going to want to get married and settle down. 

Experiencing another crisis that forces him to confront his childhood trauma, Hiroto sighs that his future is shrouded in darkness and he wishes that it was all set out for him an ironic inversion of the crisis experienced by others his age that they resent being railroaded into a life of conventional success that in fact does not make them happy. In any case, he emerges with a little more clarity about the kind of future he might want no longer so frightened of commitment or suspicious of familial bonds. What the youngsters experience is a perhaps premature end to their youth symbolised by the literal tearing down of their world in the soon to be demolished apartment block that forces them out of their inertia and onto a path towards a more settled adulthood. But equally that doesn’t necessarily mean that they have to abandon their dreams or live up to an ideal of conventional success if it’s not what they want but can begin to find other futures for themselves outside of the mainstream that are valid and satisfying. Tsunemachi follows them with a hazy detachment but captures something of the anxieties of contemporary youth still struggling to find accommodation with demands of living in a judgmental and uncertain society. 

Drifting Flowers, Flowing Days screened as part of the 18th Season of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Good Autumn, Mommy (尋她, Chen Shizhong, 2023)

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A family tragedy forces a grieving mother to confront the sexism and hypocrisy of mid-90s China in Chen Shizhong’s biting rural drama, Good Autumn, Mommy (尋她, xún tā). Quietly simmering with an internal rage her society convinces her she must repress, Fong-tai (Shu Qi) finds herself constrained by the intensely traditional atmosphere of her small-town home and more than that by her husband’s eternally passive attitude in which he resolutely refuses to rock the boat or make any attempt to stand up for himself. 

Fong-tai is warned by her brother, in a nice way, that her personality may make it difficult to live somewhere like this where a woman is clearly intended to know her place and keep her peace. Not that she particularly blames him for it, but Fong-tai is resentful towards her birth family who fostered her out and saved their money to send her brother to university. For this reason she remains an outsider in the village (a sentiment rammed home by the casting of Taiwanese actress Shu Qi whose accent quite clearly stands out in Cantonese-speaking Guangdong) and not least because of her feisty temperament and tendency to speak her mind. 

Often, however, it does her little good. Pregnant with her second child she begs her mother-in-law to take her to a modern hospital but she insists on doing everything the old fashioned way taking both her and her similarly pregnant friend Lam San to a disused clinic only to be trapped there by an encroaching storm. Both babies are born healthy, but battered by the high winds the dilapidated clinic collapses plunging them into the lake. Fong-tai manages to save one but the other disappears without trace. As she had put a bangle on her newborn child and the rescued baby doesn’t have one, she assumes it’s Lam San’s but later comes to doubt herself. 

Part of the problem is that Fong-tai assumes no one is really looking for her baby because it is a girl and if it had been a son they’d have left no stone unturned. As her desperation mounts, many of those around her imply that the loss of her daughter is a kind a kind of blessing for, as the couple have one daughter already, it frees them up to try again for a son given the restrictions of the One Child Policy which allowed a second child if the first had been a girl. One even tells them that a second daughter kills off the family name given that Fong-tai’s husband Yiu-cho was also an only son, and that they should simply have another child as soon as possible to produce a male heir. 

Ironically this might also be why Kong-yan, Lam San’s husband, is prepared to accept the rescued baby as his own and reluctant to submit to a DNA test given that in that sense it doesn’t matter as much whether or not he is the biological father because this child is not expected to continue his line in the same way a son would be. Yet Kong-yan also embodies another side of a changing China in that he has become rich under the new economic reforms but largely by exploiting local sugar cane farmers. Kong-yan leverages his wealth in insisting Fong-tai pay for the DNA test knowing full well she can’t and then refusing to buy any of her sugarcane out of pettiness thereby destroying her livelihood. 

While looking for her daughter and frightened enough to take note of an urban legend about wild men living in an old banana plantation, Fong-tai is confronted with the borders of her world after venturing to the edge of it and discovering a construction site she had no idea existed because she doesn’t venture out of the village. She begins to wonder what the outside world is like and if she’s been trapped here by outdated notions of filiality and patriarchal social codes that conspire to keep women in their place while becoming sick of Yiu-cho’s complicity and refusal stand up for their family even when it’s their child that is missing. 

When she decides to drain the supposedly sacred lake herself by destroying the dam it’s as if she’s pulling down the borders of that world and removing the source of her oppression in breaking free of “tradition”. The villagers that were hostile to her just minutes before, begin to reflect that it’s just a lake and sympathise with Fong-tai as a bereaved mother rather than a troublemaker who didn’t know her place. Highly critical of ingrained sexism and the hubristic behaviour of the nouveau riche elite in changing 90s China the film’s haunting yet hopeful ending suggests at least that Fong-tai was able to ensure that her older daughter was freer than she had ever been even if she can never escape the wounds of the past or regain what was taken from her.

Good Autumn, Mommy screens in Chicago April 13 as part of the 18th Season of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Original trailer (Simplified Chineses & English subtitles)

365 Nights (三百六十五夜, Kon Ichikawa, 1948)

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For his second film at Shintoho, Kon Ichikawa had wanted to adapt a story by Ryunosuke Akutagawa that later inspired Rashomon, but was handed a standard melodrama to direct first. Ichikawa apparently did not think much of the novel the film was to be based on nor the script by Kennosuke Tateoka which he subsequently brushed up with the help of his new wife Natto Wada, and it’s not difficult to see why he might have felt he had an uphill battle. Melodrama is after all a genre that is founded on coincidence, though 365 Nights (三百六十五夜, Sambyaku-rokujugo ya) quickly strains credulity with the sheer number of unlikely events and surprise reappearances along with its rather strange take on the contemporary post-war society which is undoubtedly influenced by the demands of the Occupation censorship regime. 

Indeed, the setting itself seems reminiscent of 1930s cinema following the dashing hero Koroku, played by the equally dashing Ken Uehara, an architect who has walked away from his privileged upbringing as the son of a successful construction magnate. His problem is that he’s being aggressively courted by the haughty Ranko (Hideko Takamine), also the daughter of a successful but shady businessman, who to modern eyes is basically stalking him. Grinning with an evil glint in her eye, she tells her minion Tsugawa (Yuji Hori) that she’ll have seduced Koroku within 365 days which by melodrama standards seems to give her quite a lot of leeway.

Clueing us up to her villainy, Ranko is always seen wearing incredibly stylish Western outfits but otherwise behaves in a transgressively masculine fashion ordering her male employees about while set on the sexual conquest of Koroku who despises her for everything she is. It’s difficult not to see an inherent criticism of the new post-war woman and an anxiety regarding the power that comes with wealth being wielded by someone who is not a man. The contrast between Ranko and traditional femininity is rammed home by the fact that Teruko (Hisako Yamane), the daughter of the landlady in the house where Koroku finds new lodging after moving home to escape Ranko, is always dressed in kimono and otherwise naive and innocent. 

This positions Ranko, and her minion Tsugawa who is also in love with her, as the villains who are rebelling against the kind of earnestness expressed by Koroku and Teruko. From more humble origins, Tsugawa is deeply resentful of Kokoku’s class privilege and feels that he looks down on him which is one reason he seeks revenge by destroying his life along with his sexual jealously that Ranko pays him no attention yet is fixated on Kokoku perhaps precisely because he is entirely uninterested in her though it remains mystery why you’d want to be married to someone who strongly dislikes you. 

Yet for all his own earnestness, Koroku is almost betrayed by the capitalist father of whom he also seems to disapprove when he asks him to consent to an arranged marriage with Ranko to save his business. Meanwhile, it also transpires that Teruko’s father has been absent from her life because he two has a criminal past further tainting the legacy each of them bear. Ichikawa stages each evolution of their relationship at the same, noirish street corner that seems to exist as a kind of border between the illicit underworld that seeps out from Tsugawa’s bar into the post-war society, and the geniality represented by Teruko’s otherwise nice, middle-class home. 

It’s the this transgressive quality, of being caught between these two worlds, that starts to eat away at Koroku leaving him a broken and shabby man little better than a tramp. In a break with melodrama norms, though he is aware that he has led Teruko into Tsugawa’s trap he comes to believe that she has betrayed him while she clings fiercely to her love and in the end attempts to sacrifice it basically giving Koroku to Ranko whom she believes can better care for him in his now corrupted state. Though events become grim with a wedding that is staged like a funeral and takes place at a death bed, there is also the sense that something must come right that seems a little incongruous and perhaps a concession to the censors board as may be the coda implying that Ranko, despite having undergone a kind of redemption, will also have to pay for all her dodgy dealings. Though clearly hampered by the material, Ichikawa crafts some stunning images such as the final scene at Tsugawa’s bar along with a surprisingly energetic action sequence during which Koroku fights off burglars at Teruko’s home and wins her heart with his manliness. In any case despite the hints at redemption the implication remains that this is a world dark at its core in which not even the earnest can escape its creeping corruption.