Category: Fantasia International Film Festival 2019

The Gangster, The Cop, The Devil (악인전, Lee Won-tae, 2019) [Fantasia 2019]

July 29, 2019by Hayley Scanlon

“Two bad guys will catch the worst man” according to irritated gangster Jang Dong-su (Ma Dong-seok) in Lee Won-tae’s The Gangster, The Cop, The Devil (악인전, Akinjeon). He doesn’t quite know how right he is, even as he forms an unlikely alliance with a maverick cop himself highly irritated because his lazy colleagues won’t listen to his theory that a spate of unsolved murders are the work of a serial killer. More alike than they’d care to admit, the two “bad guys” team up to do what they have to do in order to make the killing stop but at what price?

A vicious killer (Kim Sung-kyu) has developed a habit of rear-ending solo drivers on lonely roads, stabbing them repeatedly and then leaving them for dead. Maverick cop Tae-seok (Kim Mu-yeol) has become convinced that the killings were carried out by the same perpetrator and that they have not yet been identified as a “serial killer” partly because the crimes took place in different districts and there is insufficient co-operation between precincts, and partly because his colleagues think serial killers are something you see in American movies. His superiors just want to close cases, they aren’t particularly concerned with upholding justice or protecting the innocent and so Tae-seok starts thinking outside of the box when he hears that the killer’s latest target was none other than top mob boss Jang Dong-su.

Dong-su got rear-ended after running an errand to have a word with a wayward underling, Hur (Yoo Jae-myung), who has forgotten his place. The killer made a serious mistake going after Dong-su who is a big, handy kind of guy and therefore manages to fend him off, even wounding him in the shoulder despite being badly injured himself. Though the obvious conclusion is that Hur sent someone after him, Dong-su is unconvinced seeing as he had never seen his assailant before and is pretty sure he’s not a member of the gangster underworld. Still, he’s very annoying because a gangster only has power in being respected and right now Dong-su looks a fool. If he wants to get his “professional” life back on track, he needs to get his revenge but to do that he’ll have to cross the floor and work with law enforcement, temporarily teaming up with rogue cop Tae-seok whose heart is in the right place even if he’s not averse to bending the rules.

One of the things which most bothers Tae-seok about amoral killer “K” is that, unlike most serial killers, he kills indiscriminately and purely for pleasure. He has no “type” and generally goes up against those most likely to fight back, unlike your average pattern killer who targets the vulnerable. Like Tae-seok and Dong-su, he is however quite annoyed – this time because someone has “framed” him for a murder he didn’t commit in order to further their own ends. Hugely overconfident and cooly psychopathic, he sits in the dock and asks what makes his crimes different than the state’s if the state is fixing to execute him without proper evidence. Pointedly looking at law enforcement, he affirms that the real villains are those who commit crime with kind faces (say what you like, but at least K looks the part).

When it comes to Tae-seok he might have a point. Conspiring with Dong-su to “kill him with law”, Tae-seok gleefully manipulates the system while giving Dong-su tacit permission to take his revenge as long as “justice” has been properly served. K doesn’t believe in anything, Tae-seok believes in a particular kind of “justice” if not quite in the law, while Dong-su mourns the sense of self-belief that allows you to rule the roost as an all powerful gangster. The three men are a perfect storm, each angry, each resentful, each vowing a particular kind of revenge against the forces which constrain them be they corrupt and lazy superiors, gangsterland disrespect, or the “injustice” of being accused of a crime you did not commit but not being properly credited for the ones you did. Bathed in a garish neon, Lee’s anti-buddy-cop drama embraces its noirish sense of fractured morality with barely suppressed glee as its similarly conflicted heroes pursue their violent destinies, true to their own but dragged to hell all the same.

The Gangster, The Cop, The Devil was screened as part of the 2019 Fantasia International Film Festival.

International trailer (English subtitles)

House of Hummingbird (벌새, Kim Bora, 2019) [Fantasia 2019]

July 27, 2019October 14, 2019by Hayley Scanlon

“The world is fascinating and beautiful” the teenage protagonist of Kim Bora’s House of Hummingbird (벌새, Beolsae) is told in an especially poignant letter recited in the film’s closing moments. It’s a lesson that she’s longing to learn, but finds few willing to teach her in a society whipping itself up into a frenzy of aspiration perhaps at the cost of true human connection. A chronicle of one surprisingly traumatic summer in the newly democratised Korea of 1994, Kim’s film charts its heroine’s gradual progress towards a kind of self acceptance with a melancholy ease as she begins to find her own way despite the toxicity of the world all around her.

14-year-old Eun-hee (Park Ji-hu) is one of three siblings living in a cramped apartment with her harried, emotionally distant parents who run a small rice cake shop. A mediocre, disinterested student she falls asleep at school where the other kids cruelly exclaim that dozy girls like her never make it to college and are destined only to become housemaids to the “successful” adults they assume they’ll be. Meanwhile, Eun-hee’s hardline dad (Jung In-gi) makes her go to Chinese cram school where she “studies” along with her best friend, Ji-suk (Park Seo-yun), spending most of their lesson time making fun of the teacher in hastily written notes.

Previously purposeless, her world begins to widen when the Chinese teacher abruptly quits and is replaced by the infinitely cool, enigmatic university student Young-ji (Kim Sae-byuk) whom she first glimpsed smoking a melancholy cigarette by an open window on the stairs. Strangely captivated by this “odd” young woman, Eun-hee suddenly has the urge to study, especially as Young-ji turns out to be unique among the adults that she knows in that she seems to genuinely care about her and is interested in hearing all about her troubles, which, as we will find out are many.

In the mid-90s, Korea was a newly democratised and rapidly modernising society keen to claim its place on the economic world stage. Where Eun-hee’s parents are defeated, disappointed figures, they want better for their children in the new society but struggle as to how to get it for them. Eun-hee’s mother (Lee Seung-yeon), as we find out from her dejected brother, was bright but had to leave school to pay for his tuition (a promise he seems to think he has not fulfilled). Consequently, the parents are convinced “education” is the way out but fail to realise that their obsession with academic grades is slowly destroying their family home. While Eun-hee is sullen and withdrawn, pushed out by her rowdy family, her older brother’s exam stress often turns violent and her sister skips school to go clubbing in an attempt to escape adolescent anxiety.

Even when Eun-hee discovers a lump on the side of her neck, her mother sends her off to the doctor’s alone though he can’t actually treat her without parental consent which Eun-hee fears they won’t get round to giving. Though they visit her once, they don’t bother to pick her up from an extended stay in hospital and are not home when she returns. Not even an accusation of shoplifting rouses them from their busyness. Eun-hee’s father rudely tells the shopkeeper to stop bothering him and call the police, causing the shopkeeper to feel so sorry for her that he lets her go.

Meanwhile, Eun-hee looks for intimacy in other places. She tries innocent teenage romance with a feckless but good-looking boy, Ji-wan (Jeong Yun-seo), whom truth be told she perhaps likes more as an abstract idea than in himself. The unexpected gift of a bright red rose from a bashful girl (Seol Hye-in) sends her thoughts in another direction but leaves her more confused than ever when that too betrays. Through it all she idolises the mysterious figure of Young-ji with whom she seems to share some kind of affinity and the sense of connection so painfully absent in her frenetic family home.

Eun-hee’s difficult path towards an acceptance of adulthood mirrors that of her nation, finding itself in one particularly traumatic summer marked by a dangerous sense of anxiety in the end of eras as the North’s Kim Il-sung passes away, provoking fears of a disturbance in carefully won political equilibrium. Meanwhile, a literal bridge collapse threatens to destroy Eun-hee’s new path towards maturity once and for all, taking her only source of solace with it. Yet what she learns is that though bad things happen, good things happen too and there are always new people to share them with. She may feel herself to be alone, lost in a confusing landscape and uniquely indifferent to her nation’s relentless pursuit of consumerist success, but she does finally perhaps have herself and new hope for the future found in the security of her own hands.

House of Hummingbird was screened as part of the 2019 Fantasia International Film Festival.

Festival trailer (English subtitles)

Stare (シライサン, Hirotaka Adachi, 2019) [Fantasia 2019]

July 25, 2019by Hayley Scanlon

If you’re attacked by a bear, the advice is not to run, but to stand your ground before backing away slowly while calmly explaining to the bear that you mean it no harm and would like to go home now. Similar advice will serve you well if you’re unlucky enough to be cursed by “Shirai-san” (シライサン), the vengeful ghost of an all-powerful shamaness who, for some reason, really doesn’t like for people to know her name. One crucial difference, however, is that Shirai-san demands a different kind of respect. She can’t abide deference, and will kill all those who look away from her extremely large eyes.

This three young people learn to their cost after indulging in an ill-advised scary story session in a quiet inn. An oft repeated piece about a creepy wedding photo invites a visiting liquor store delivery boy, Watanabe (Shota Sometani), to recount a tale of pure horror he was told as a boy about a man chased by a strange woman who claimed to know him and wanted to take her revenge for his supposedly knowing her name (which he apparently didn’t until she told it to him). The man tells her to pick on someone else who knows her as “Shirai-san” which is how the story ends, with fingers pointing at the horrified listeners. Of course, it’s just a silly campfire story, but before long all three of the students are dead of supposed heart attacks of such magnitude that they caused their eyes to explode.

Meanwhile, the left behind – friend Mizuki (Marie Iitoyo), and brother Haruo (Yu Inaba), begin an investigation which will eventually see them too cursed by the figure of Shirai-san. Later they are joined by equally dejected reporter Mamiya (Shugo Oshinari), still grieving for his young daughter killed in a traffic accident some time ago. All modern people, none of the three really believes that their loved ones died because of an ancient curse, but their investigation leads them to just that conclusion, leaving them to ponder how exactly they might be able to survive if not actually break it.

In any case, Shirai-san’s wrath is directed at all those who know her name no matter how they came to learn it. Like many a J-horror ghost, what she feeds on is fear. As Haruo’s father told him, perhaps in cold comfort, there is one upside to death – that by dying you lose your fear of it. Thereby you can come to accept the idea of death and pass peacefully with no need for further anxiety about the end. It’s an ironic statement, but not without its truth. Picking apart the mystery, Mizuki wonders how exactly you might write the name “Shirai”, working under the assumption that it’s the most normal way which means “white well” (白井) only to wonder if it’s not a way of saying “death coming” (死来) rather than actually her name.

Shirai-san might be, in that sense, merely the evocation of mortality, stalking dark corners and striking seemingly at random. One victim thinks they find a way to placate her, that if you can bear to stare her in the eye long enough she will eventually disappear, but you cannot escape “death” by facing it down only meet it with dignity. Our heroes are plagued by visions of the people they’ve lost, haunted by possibly imagined grudges and irresolvable guilt over human failings, the way they fear they may have made people feel or otherwise let them down. Shirai-san plays on their mortal insecurities, luring them to their doom with a mix of relief from suffering and guilt-ridden atonement.

Well known horror maestro Hirotaka Adachi (AKA Otsuichi) injects new vigour into the classic J-horror ghost with Shirai-san seemingly unafraid to strike in broad daylight and public places while her presence is eerily felt in the most tranquil of locations, echoed in the innocent tinkle of bicycle bells. A cruel curse spread by resentment and negativity, Shirai-san’s revenge is one which offers only an ironic escape and remains frustratingly inscrutable even at the very end. Nevertheless, she does, perhaps, come for us all in one way or another. The least you can do is look her in the eye.

Stare was screened as part of the 2019 Fantasia International Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Ode to Nothing (Oda Sa Wala, Dwein Ruedas Baltazar, 2018) [Fantasia 2019]

July 21, 2019by Hayley Scanlon

“Maybe it would be better if I just disappeared rather than physically be here but feel invisible all the time” the lonely heroine of Dwein Ruedas Baltazar’s Ode to Nothing (Oda sa wala) sadly laments to her only source of comfort, a semi-embalmed corpse. A melancholy meditation on the living death that is existential loneliness, Ode to Nothing takes its alienated heroine on a journey of hope and disappointment as she rediscovers a sense of joy in living only through befriending death.

43-year-old Sonya (Marietta Subong, AKA Pokwang) lives alone with her elderly father (Joonee Gamboa) to whom she barely speaks in a large Spanish-style house which doubles as a moribund funeral home. Short on custom, Sonya’s only frequent visitor is sinister loanshark Theodore (Dido de la Paz) who currently holds the deeds to the house while she struggles to make the interest payments. Meanwhile, she spends her days gazing out of open windows, waiting for the handsome young taho seller to arrive, and listening to an ancient cassette tape of Chinese folksong Mo Li Hua.

The stillness of her life is ruptured late one night when a couple of men arrive with the fresh corpse of an old woman, seemingly having run her over and not wanting the bother of taking her to a hospital seeing as she is already dead. Sonya is dubious. She doesn’t want any trouble either, but needs the money and the custom and so she agrees to take the woman in and see if anyone claims her. No one does, and soon enough the corpse has become a new presence in Sonya’s life and home. She begins to confide in it, dresses it in her mother’s old clothes, and sits it at the dinner table where her father too indulges the illusion, finally talking to her once again as if the family had really been restored.

In an odd way, the corpse guides Sonya back to life. No longer so sullen, her funeral parlour finally attracts some customers while she begins to dress more cheerfully, even dancing and skipping along to Mo Li Hua with girlish enthusiasm. “As you get older, you have more reason to do the things you were too afraid to do when you were younger” she explains to the corpse, outlining a brief overture she just made to Elmer (Anthony Falcon), the taho vendor, whose grandfather she also saw off around three years ago after which Elmer took over the taho vending business.

Taho is perhaps the perfect encapsulation of Sonya’s newfound hopes, wholesome sweetness and easy comfort. The blandness of off-white silken tofu mixed with the gentle colouring of the amibal syrup and sago pearls, like the Jasmine flower of the folksong, seem to symbolise the brief moments of possible happiness in an otherwise dull existence but even within her increasing sense of positivity she perhaps knows her rekindled desire for Elmer and for life is likely go answered. In any case, she falls into the corpse’s lap as if it really were her mother, attributing to it a supernatural power that keeps the corpses flowing and beckons both life and death to her lonely home.

As in any good fairy tale, however, you have to be careful what you wish for. Sonya gets what she wanted, but not at all in the way she wanted it. The corpse betrays her, leaving her bereft once again and entombed inside her own funeral home with the feeling that there is only one way out. Baltazar shoots in 4:3 with the rounded corners of nostalgic 16mm, but the frame cannot help but recall the small window on the surface of a coffin, as if we were peeking in on her still life from some other plane. Sonya is, in many ways, already dead, trapped in a moribund and hopeless world where even the fragmentary past is being slowly taken away from her – the broken cassette tape, the rapidly depleting furniture, Elmer’s crushing absence. She confesses that she’s afraid of the dark and of being alone, tired enough of her resignation to abandonment to embrace a corpse which can, of course, never leave you. It can, however, disappoint as all false idols will. A melancholy exploration of loneliness, defeat, and despair, Baltazar’s whimsical drama is a haunting ode to emptiness but one that clings sadly to life and hope even as the night draws in.

Ode to Nothing was screened as part of the 2019 Fantasia International Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Mo Li Hua

His Bad Blood (いつくしみふかき, Koichiro Oyama, 2019) [Fantasia 2019]

July 19, 2019by Hayley Scanlon

The sins of the father are visited on the son. Rural superstitions run deep, but is it really fair to condemn a child for having “bad blood” or will the prejudice itself become a self-fulfilling prophecy? The young man at the centre of Koichiro Oyama’s debut feature His Bad Blood (いつくしみふかき, Itsukushimi Fukaki) struggles to assert himself in a small community where his father’s (minor) crimes are still painfully present, but then perhaps like any other young man he himself needs to lay his father’s ghost to rest in order to find his own path.

Decades ago, no good drifter Hiroshi (Ikkei Watanabe) drifted into a small-town in search of a place to die after his latest business venture collapsed, but there found the kindly Kayoko who gave him a home and a chance to start again. Unfortunately, however, Hiroshi reverted to type and after being sent home to get the baby clothes while his wife was in labour, decided to run off with the family’s savings instead only to be caught in the act by Kayoko’s brother Yoshitaka whom he wounded in a fight that eventually saw him beaten by a mob and hounded out of town.

In the present day, Shinichi (Yu Toyama), the son, is a strange, shy young man who has been unable to hold down a job and is widely disliked by the community and especially by his resentful uncle. When the area is plagued by a spate of burglaries, Yoshitaka jumps to the “obvious” conclusion and attempts to have Shinichi hounded out of town the same way he got rid of his father. Hurt that not even his mother believes he is innocent of the crimes of which he is accused, Shinichi takes refuge with the local preacher (Akio Kaneda) where, unbeknownst to him, his estranged father has also decamped to hide out after a life of petty crime finally catches up to him.

Though set firmly in the present day, Oyama’s debut has a distinctly depression-era dustbowl feel with its rural backwater suddenly stirred up by rumours of the railroad’s eventual arrival while the non-conformist Christian church hands down messages of love and compassion in trying times. Hiroshi, possibly unreformable, even puts on a show of getting religion only to go full snake oil salesman in staging a revival inside the Reverend’s church in which his personal prophet, Tanaka Xavier XVI, makes a “disabled” woman walk and successfully stimulates the record crowd to hand over their cash in hope of salvation while Shinichi and the Reverend look on in confused horror.

To engineer some kind of forward motion, the Reverend pushes the two men together but keeps their connection a secret until finally revealing it in the hope that the pair might finally be able to put some kind of lid on the past. Looking for his father, Shinichi avows he’d like to mess up his life just like his father has done to his, but discovers that Hiroshi’s life is pretty messed up already and likely always has been. His fate was pretty much sealed the day pushed the baby clothes out of the way and opened the family safe instead. Shinichi’s job isn’t to save his dad, no one can, but try and accept him so that he can, a sense, reject his “bad blood” and those who condemn him for it to claim his own identity and walk his own path.

Before he can do all of that, however, he’ll have to escape the secondary curse of the unfair prejudice he faces from his home community as a supposed carrier of “bad blood”, destined for criminality and inherently untrustworthy. Despite all he suffers, Shinichi valiantly refuses to become what everyone says he is while deeply resenting his absent father for saddling him with this unhappy destiny. It is, however, Hiroshi who accidentally gives him forward motion through the unlikely shared dream of making an honest killing in the shortly to boom real estate business when the railroad comes to town. An equally unlikely love affair with a similarly strange young woman (Keiko Koike) provides additional possibilities, but still leaves Shinichi feeling trapped by his past despite her urgings to “just be yourself and live in the future with me”. A melancholy tale of freeing oneself from the judgement of others and learning to step out of a father’s shadow, His Bad Blood is a promising debut from Oyama who addresses a difficult subject with compassionate humanism as his melancholy hero finds the courage to walk away from a toxic past towards a more promising future.

His Bad Blood was screened as part of the 2019 Fantasia International Film Festival.

International trailer (English subtitles)

The Island of Cats (ねことじいちゃん, Mitsuaki Iwago, 2019)

July 18, 2019by Hayley Scanlon

“The best is yet to come” resolves 70-year-old Daikichi (Shinosuke Tatekawa) at the conclusion of The Island of Cats (ねことじいちゃん, Neko to Jiichan). Inspired by the manga by the appropriately named Nekomaki, the debut feature from wildlife photographer Mitsuaki Iwago is a decidedly laidback affair, neatly fusing two genres of Japanese comfort cinema – cats and cuisine. It’s also another in the recent run of films deliberately targeting the older generation in its quiet celebration of community and late life serenity, but it’s very existence is also perhaps a mild dig at cold and frenetic Tokyo which can’t help but pale next to the island’s inherent charms.

Daikichi has lived alone with his cat, Tama (who neatly introduces himself using the exalted “Wagahai” in a reference to Soseki’s famous novel), since his wife Yoshie (Yuko Tanaka) passed away two years previously. He has a grown-up son (Takashi Yamanaka) who is married with a teenage daughter of his own in Tokyo, but mostly spends his life hanging out with his old friends and playing with the island’s many cats. His peaceful days begin to change, however, when a pretty middle-aged (“young” to Daikichi and his friends) woman, Michiko (Kou Shibasaki), arrives from Tokyo and opens a cafe – the island’s first. In fact, the older generation find the cafe slightly intimidating, thinking such modern innovations are only for the youngsters, but are finally tempted in when directly invited by Michiko herself who serves up a selection of cream sodas and tasty ice creams in addition to slightly more rarefied treats like fish carpaccio.

In contrast to many an island drama, though the bulk of the population is older there are a fair few youngsters around and plenty of children too – at least enough to keep the local school open and the ferries running frequently. It is true however that most leave when they come of age either heading off to university on the mainland or seeking their fortunes in the cities. Nevertheless, the despite the absence of family the elderly are well cared for by the recently arrived young doctor (Tasuku Emoto) who takes his responsibility extremely seriously and is grateful for the opportunity to come to the island because it’s enabled him to become the kind of doctor he always wanted to be.

Michiko, meanwhile, has come to the island in search of relief from city life which she felt was gradually crushing her. An instant hit with the local cats as well as Daikichi and his friends, her presence adds a new energy to the island as the older generation start to enjoy both trying new things they thought perhaps were “inappropriate” when you’re old, and revisiting those they missed out on in their youth. Friends reconnect, bickering is exposed as an odd kind of affection, and cats just generally make everything better. The island may be dull compared to the bright lights of Tokyo, but it has its charms and those that live there are one big family taking care of each other and enjoying the laidback rhythms of coastal life.

Daikichi’s son, visiting when he can, is keen for him to come and live with the family in Tokyo but he and Tama are happy enough on the island just muddling through the way they always have surrounded by friends and happy memories. Reconnecting with his late wife through the recipe book she left behind, he resolves to learn a few dishes of his own – filling the rest of the pages with recipes learned from Michiko, his friends, newspapers and TV, determined to go on learning as long as he can. Sharing his life with others on the island, Daikichi too finds a new zest for living even as his days pass much as before, resolving that there is still plenty more to enjoy as he enters his twilight years. Gentle and mellow in the extreme, The Island of Cats is not promising much more than living up to its name but does its best to sell the charms of serene island life as Daikichi and his friends rejoice in the simple pleasures of shared cuisine and admiring “everybody’s” cats as they continue to do pretty much whatever they please while warming the hearts of the kindly islanders as they enjoy their days of fun and sunshine with nary a care in the world.

The Island of Cats screens in New York on July 20 as part of Japan Cuts 2019. It will also screen in Montreal as part of the 2019 Fantasia International Film Festival on July 28.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Chiwawa (チワワちゃん, Ken Ninomiya, 2019) [Fantasia 2019]

July 17, 2019by Hayley Scanlon2 Comments

Following indie drama The Limit of Sleeping Beauty, Ken Ninomiya takes a further step towards the mainstream with Chiwawa (チワワちゃん, Chiwawa-chan), inspired by Kyoko Okazaki’s 1996 manga. Updated for the Instagram generation, Ninomiya’s adaptation leans heavily on his trademark clubland style and sheds the sense of nihilism which defined mid-90s pop culture in favour of a world weary exploration of identity in the internet age in which connections are wilfully fleeting and personas easily interchangeable. The party is, however, about to come to an end for the latest generation of bright young things seeking hedonistic release but finding only emptiness in the superficial pleasures of meaningless excess.

The titular “Chiwawa” (Shiori Yoshida) is found dead, floating in pieces in Tokyo Bay. The notice of her demise is, in fact, the first time many of her friends discover her real name, Yoshiko Chiwaki, apparently 20 years old and according to the news a nursing student. She was for a time a big star on Instagram and a popular internet model whose face could be seen all over the city on mile high billboards, but before that she was just a girl looking for fun and friends in the Tokyo club scene which is how she met our heroine, Miki (Mugi Kadowaki). Like Miki herself, Chiwawa was added to the small group of clubland friends as the current squeeze of playboy student Yoshida (Ryo Narita), introducing herself with her enigmatic nickname supposedly a reference to her petite stature. Branding herself as an ultra cute airhead, she quickly worked her way into the disparate group of Bohemians but eventually outgrew them and moved on to more dubious pleasures including an ill-fated love affair with a famous photographer (Tadanobu Asano).

The only one of her friends seemingly preoccupied about what happened to Chiwawa, Miki begins an investigation but her research is less geared towards finding out who killed her – something the police don’t seem to be very invested in, but discovering who she “really” was. Mimicking the structure of Okazaki’s episodic manga, Miki begins interviewing her friends to build up a kaleidoscopic composite of the woman she thought she knew while perhaps discovering something about herself as she reconsiders her own life trajectory and the coming end of her youthful days in the clubland scene while pondering where it is she’s supposed to go next.

Like much of Okazaki’s work, the manga’s mid-90’s setting is soaked post-bubble malaise as her dejected youngsters escape from the sense of crushing disappointment in the wake of the abrupt end of the heady ‘80s heyday of Japan as leading global economy, but for Miki and her friends twenty years later perhaps things aren’t all that different as they fight the onset of adulthood and the relative lack of freedom and possibility they will encounter when their student lives end and the workaday world finally arrives. Aspiring filmmaker Nagai (Nijiro Murakami) captures everything with his video camera while working as a photographer’s assistant by day, allowing Miki and her friends to use the studio at night for their Instagram side gigs which is how Chiwawa winds up in the fashion biz.

Some starving artists, others merely nervous hedonists, the gang have no money but when Chiwawa runs off with the gigantic bribe a group of slimy businessmen were boasting about carrying, the gang manage to blow it in just three days of upscale partying. Miki alone, and perhaps more in hindsight, feels the emptiness of all this senseless excess but it’s Chiwawa herself who seems to fear the party’s end most of all. When you start to think it’ll go on like this forever, that’s when you know it’s about to end she laments, apparently missing her old gang like crazy but knowing you can’t put something back together after it falls apart.

Miki fails to solve the mystery of Chiwawa, perhaps sorry that she didn’t try harder to know her while she was alive but also knowing that’s partly because “Chiwawa” might not have wanted to be known for all that she was chasing love and acceptance in all the wrong places. In the end, she retreats into a past that no one quite remembers, another melancholy ghost of Tokyo’s neon-tinged nightlife. Youth moves on, clubs close down, the world keeps turning. That may be the saddest thing of all, Chiwawa remains unknown, unloved, and finally unremembered. A melancholy exploration of fractured identities, the ethereality of youth, and the impossibility of true connection, Chiwawa is another zeitgeisty piece from Ninomiya which takes the manga’s post-bubble anxiety and reboots for an age of alienation in which the end of the party is always lingering painfully on the horizon.

Chiwawa was screened as part of the 2019 Fantasia International Film Festival

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Almost a Miracle (町田くんの世界, Yuya Ishii, 2019) [Fantasia 2019]

July 15, 2019July 22, 2020by Hayley Scanlon

“Being nice to everyone means hurting someone” the wounded heroine tries to explain to the perpetually confused hero of Yuya Ishii’s Almost a Miracle (町田くんの世界, Machida-kun no Sekai). After adapting a book of poetry and topping the Kinema Junpo list with the melancholy romance of urban ennui The Tokyo Night Sky is Always the Densest Shade of Blue, Ishii returns to the lighter fare which inspired his earliest work with a whimsical adaptation of the manga by Yuki Ando in which a goodly young man begins to realise that sometimes being nice to everyone can create additional complications.

The titular Machida (Kanata Hosoda) is one of those people who seem to be exclusively composed of goodness. He truly believes that each and every person in the world is precious and loves them equally, so when he sees someone, anyone, who seems unhappy or in need of help he comes running (literally). Everything begins to change for him, however, when he injures himself during an art lesson and is sent to the infirmary where he meets sullen delinquent Inohara (Nagisa Sekimizu) who bandages his hand in the absence of the nurse. Entirely unused to people doing nice things for him, Machida is struck by this unexpected act of kindness and resolves to make a friend of Inohara who seems lonely and claims to hate people – something Machida is incapable of understanding.

Indeed, nicknamed “Christ” by some of his more cynical classmates, Machida sees only the world’s beauty and just wants people to be happy. He assumes that’s the way everyone else feels too and so it doesn’t really occur to him that some people are just mean. Even when he meets someone acting badly he has a knack for spotting the unhappiness that lies behind it and the desire to help them heal. Thus he alone sees the accidental self-loathing and pathological need for acceptance that have led pretty boy model and popular kid Himuro (Takanori Iwata) to become a self-centred jerk who thinks sincerity is for babies and that “taking things seriously only makes everything harder”. He may have a sort of point in that it’s much easier to keep pretending nothing, especially other people’s feelings, is very important but it’s Machida alone who is perspicacious enough to remark on how sad it is that all of his “friends” have forgotten something he told them just a few minutes ago and instructs him that he needs to be kinder to himself rather than hanging out with vacuous people who don’t care about him at all just for the kudos of superficial acceptance.

In fact, much of Machida’s laidback superpower is geared towards getting people to be more comfortable in themselves so that they can in turn accept others. Ironically, that’s mostly because he hasn’t yet quite accepted himself and thinks he’s the worst human of them all which is part of the reason he’s so nice to everyone as a means of repaying the kindnesses he’s been shown in the past.

Where Machida sees only the world’s beauty, cynical failed writer Yoshitaka (Sosuke Ikematsu) sees only its ugliness. His lofty literary ambitions having fallen by the wayside, Yoshitaka has become a tabloid hack and occasional paparazzo whose wife is beginning to lose faith in him as he sinks deeper into the morass of scandal rag “journalism”. Yoshitaka justifies his actions with the rationale that the world is rotten, filled with “evil” and home to only self-interested people who revel in the suffering of others. Several random encounters with Machida, however, force him to revise his opinion – if someone that good and that pure really exists then what does it say about the rest of us?

Then again, Machida’s guileless goodness can often make him accidentally insensitive as he tries to balance one person’s expectation of happiness against another’s. Thus he gets himself mixed up in an odd kind of love triangle with Himuro’s old girlfriend Sakura (Mitsuki Takahata) and the lovelorn Inohara who is becoming increasingly exasperated by Machida’s mixed signals, unable to figure out if he’s just being “kind” or actually might like her. Unfortunately, Machida doesn’t quite know himself as, ironically seeing as he’s so keen on emotional honesty in others, he is remarkably out of touch with his own feelings. In any case, his desire for “sincerity” in all things sees him steer clear of saying something which isn’t true to make someone happy even if he finds himself unable to express the truth plainly when it really counts.

Machida’s superpower, however, blows through the world like a gentle breeze spreading goodness wherever it goes. Proving it really does come back around, all the people that he’s helped eventually come running to help him so he can achieve his romantic destiny on the most romantic of days. A whimsical celebration of the infectious power of unguarded goodness, Almost a Miracle is a beautifully pitched counter to nihilistic cynicism in which kindness becomes a kind of superpower, saving the world one lost balloon at a time.

Almost a Miracle was screened as part of the 2019 Fantasia International Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Sadako (貞子, Hideo Nakata, 2019) [Fantasia 2019]

July 13, 2019by Hayley Scanlon

Just over 20 years ago, Hideo Nakata’s Ring became an international phenomenon and kick started a J-horror boom that continued to define the nation’s cinematic output for the following decade. The J-horror boom, however, eventually imploded after a series of diminishing returns turned the figure of the long-haired ghost into something of a self parody. Even so, Sadako has continued to haunt Japanese cinema like the malevolent spirit we all know her to be and now she’s back with a brand new curse.

Adapted from the 2013 novel Tide by Ring author Koji Suzuki (though in actuality an almost entirely original story), “Sadako” (貞子) is set firmly in the present day and twenty years after the mysterious chain video curse took so many lives. Our heroine, Mayu (Elaiza Ikeda), is a clinical psychologist working in a regular hospital where she tries to help those with physical ailments maintain their mental health. New to the job, she is currently struggling with a doctor’s major dilemma in figuring out how to keep a personal distance from her patients who have a natural tendency to latch on to a caregiver even while knowing that the relationship must necessarily remain a professional one.

The trouble starts when a mysterious, mute young girl is brought into the hospital. Mayu is unable to get through to her and she doesn’t even seem to know her name but the mystery is partially solved when the police turn up with evidence that suggests the girl is the daughter of a woman who set fire to her apartment, killing herself and five others in a danchi blaze. Prompted by the detectives, the girl reveals that the woman was indeed her mother who referred to her as “Sadako” though the girl states that it is not her name. In any case, the police are none the wiser. Meanwhile, Mayu is also dealing with a personal problem as her feckless younger brother Kazuma (Hiroya Shimizu), who had given up his studies to become a YouTube star, has gone missing after filming himself exploring the “creepy” abandoned apartment building where Sadako was kept in confinement by her apparently “freaky” mother, a failed psychic.

The original Sadako curse might have been well and truly played out, but Sadako once again decides to get out of her well and shame mankind with a very particular mission of highlighting persistent child abuse and neglect which, sadly, continues to be a pressing social issue in contemporary Japan where several child abuse scandals have made headline news in recent months. This time she doesn’t really appreciate being caught on video which is where Kazuma gets himself into trouble, but is busying herself calling the souls of all abandoned children to a creepy cave which used to be a shrine for the souls of ascetic monks who died while undergoing spiritual training on the island.

Meanwhile, Mayu bonds with the little girl who seems to sense her own innate sense of loneliness as a woman who was herself “abandoned” as child. Raised in secret by her mother who was convinced she is the reincarnation of the legendary “Sadako” and feared her strange powers, the little Sadako remains somehow trapped between the human world and the supernatural, in need of rescue by a sympathetic, maternal figure.

Perhaps in keeping with the 20th anniversary celebratory nature of the project, Nakata sticks largely to late ‘90s aesthetics complete with a familiar J-horror score, muted colour scheme, dimmed lighting, and generally eerie atmosphere. He is not attempting to reinvent the wheel but only to turn it a few more times, even having one of his victims baldly recite the “original” Sadako legend for Mayu’s benefit before adding a few new details as she goes about her investigation of the creepy cave. Nevertheless, the archetypal long-haired ghost maintains her appeal as she evolves once again, revamped for a new generation’s anxieties and re-emerging from the well of despair with rage and vengeance on her mind. Filled with creepy dolls, scattered sutras, and a healthy amount of plot holes, Nakata’s return to the Ring franchise cannot recapture the magic of the original but does its best to ape its charms with yet another exploration of flawed motherhood retooled for more a more anxious age.

Sadako screened as part of the 2019 Fantasia International Film Festival.

Singapore release trailer (English / Simplified Chinese subtitles)

Maggie (메기, Yi Ok-seop, 2018)

July 12, 2019October 14, 2019by Hayley Scanlon

“When we fall into a pit, what we need to do, is not dig any further but quickly climb out” according to a mysterious post-it discovered by a nurse when picking up the laundry (apparently inexpertly performed by her preferred cleaning service). The aphorism turns out to belong to Doctor Lee (Moon So-ri), the head physician at Love of Maria hospital where the titular Maggie (메기), a catfish, lives in a small tank observing the life around her and sometimes predicting earthquakes and other earth shattering events. A surrealist odyssey across the “pitfalls” of modern society, Yi Ok-seop’s quirky debut feature ponders the ramifications of distance as her various heroes weigh up the nature of “truth” as an absolutist concept.

Narrated by Maggie, the drama begins when the radiographer and her boyfriend are unexpectedly snapped during an intimate moment in the X-Ray room. The picture is then stolen and held up for everyone to see, at which point nurse Yoon-young (Lee Joo-young) worries that she and her boyfriend Sung-won (Koo Kyo-hwan) have been caught out using the privacy of the X-ray booth for unintended purposes. As Maggie says, no one pays much attention to who took the photo only to who might be in it, which is why the entire hospital, except Doctor Lee, ring in sick the next day with only Yoon-young turning up in the morning with the intention to resign. Figuring out what must have happened (and seeing as she’s the only one not embarrassed we can guess who took the photo), Doctor Lee is very upset to realise that the entirety of her staff has probably lied to her. With her intense belief in humanity shaken, Doctor Lee decides to engage in a trust game with her new best friend, Nurse Yoon-young, and simply choose to believe what they’re told, testing their hypothesis by visiting a random employee to verify if they really are “sick”.

Meanwhile, as a result of the earthquakes Maggie intermittently predicts, mysterious sinkholes have begun appearing all over the nation. This is good news in one sense because it provides lots of extra work for otherwise unoccupied young men like Sung-won who have lost out in Korea’s insanely competitive economy. Like Sung-won, the other men on his team are also well-educated types who otherwise wouldn’t be considering manual work and are hoping for something better once the sinkhole business finally clears up. Mistrust, however, also works its way into their relationship when Sung-won loses a precious white gold ring given to him by Yoon-young, later becoming convinced that one of his colleagues has swiped it.

The loss of the ring leads to an increasing unease between Yoon-young and her boyfriend which is deepened by a visit from Sung-won’s ex who suggests there may have been problems in their relationship which she feels Yoon-young ought to be aware of. Though Sung-won seems sweet natured and laidback, never having acted in any way that would have given Yoon-young cause for concern, she begins to doubt him – suddenly worried by his overly violent crushing of a can out in the street. Doctor Lee’s advice is to simply ask Sung-won directly if the accusations are true, but Yoon-young can’t seem to do it and continues living along side him somewhat resentfully as she eventually comes to the decision to “believe” her friend at face value without investigating further.

“The truth cannot exist wholesomely”, according to Maggie’s “father” (Kwon Hae-hyo). It will always be polluted by self-interest and personal bias. As Doctor Lee says, there will always be people who believe you and people who don’t, so perhaps a healthy level of cynicism is something you need to accept in order to go on living in the world. Even Love of Maria Hospital is not immune to the disease of misrepresentation – a former convent given over as a place of healing it was later bought by an arch capitalist and is now run as a private hospital business (not that it appears to have many “customers”), despite Doctor Lee’s rather amusing ad which proclaims it “of the patients, by the patients, for the patients”.

Finally Yoon-young concedes she’ll need to simply ask Sung-won about his past and gets an honest response, but his honesty only seems to see him falling into a deep pit of despair, calling out from the bottom in the hope of being understood. A surreal exploration of contemporary social woes from the rabidly capitalist society to the growing distance between people in an increasingly interconnected age, Maggie attempts to find the emotional honesty sweet spot but discovers that trust, like everything else, is a complicated business.

Maggie screens on 13th July as part of the 2019 New York Asian Film Festival. It will also be screening as part of the 2019 Fantasia International Film Festival on 17th/18th July.

Interview with director Yi Ok-seop from the Busan International Film Festival