Category: New York Asian Film Festival 2018

Liverleaf (ミスミソウ, Eisuke Naito, 2018)

July 6, 2018by Hayley Scanlon2 Comments

“How have things turned out this way?” Asks the heroine of Eisuke Naito’s Liverleaf (ミスミソウ, Misumisou) after receiving a poignant (non)explanation for the cause of all her sufferings. Adolescence is cruel at the best of times, but when you’re stuck in a tiny no horse town with nothing to do, violence can become an easy pastime. The kids of Liverleaf take the art of bullying to all new heights, stopping not at humiliation, ostracisation, or conspiratorial acts of emotional ruin but allowing their petty games to run all the way to arson and murder.

Haruka (Anna Yamada), unlike most of her classmates, is a relatively new resident of a small rural town where she and her family have moved for her father’s job. Her only friend at school, and the only one to stand up for her against the gang of popular kids making her life a misery, is another transfer student, Aiba (Hiroya Shimizu), living alone with his grandmother for mysterious reasons. The usual high school girl tricks of making another girl feel unwelcome – stolen shoes, name calling, silent stalking etc eventually progress into direct violence at which point her father (Masahiro Toda) tries to go to the school to complain. Unfortunately, Haruka’s teacher (Aki Morita) is an almost absent, hollow source of authority who cannot control the kids and nor does she try. She tells Haruka’s dad that as the school will be closing down at the end of the academic year it’s hardly the time to make waves and she sees no need to get involved in such trivial matters. Matters come to a head when the kids, egging each other on, set fire to Haruka’s house with her mother (Reiko Kataoka), father, and little sister Shoko (Sena Tamayori) trapped inside.

It’s true enough to say Haruka reacted to her bullying in the way that society expects – she kept her head down and tried to put up with it without making a fuss. Some may read Liverleaf as a tale of vengeance, but it isn’t. As passive as she’s always been, Haruka’s acts of violence are a matter of extreme self defence. She doesn’t go looking for the ones who’ve done her wrong, but they come looking for her and thereafter pay a heavy price for their continued campaign of subjugation.

Haruka became an easy subject for bullying because she was a literal outsider – Aiba escaped this particular fate through being male, conventionally attractive, and with a confidence and maturity which set him apart from the bratty kids trying to prove their status by belittling others. Once Haruka decides to sit out the rest of the school term rather than put up with constant torment, she activates an extreme chain of events when the next likely target, a strange girl with a stammer (Rena Ohtsuka), decides to do whatever it takes to become one of the bullies rather than their latest victim. Morality goes out the window when fear takes over and some will to whatever it takes to make sure it’s someone else in the firing line rather than themselves.

Yet for all the fear and violence, there’s another, perhaps more interesting, story buried under all the senseless bloodletting. It’s not so much that teenage emotions are running wild, but that they barely have them at all and those they do have find no available outlet. Romantic jealousy spirals out of control, turning in on itself as love denied masquerades as hate. Unable to freely voice their innermost anxieties, the kids take their resentments out on each other, getting their kicks through cruel games which bind them with complicity in the absence of real feeling.

Naito attempts to lend an air of realism to the increasingly bizarre middle school warfare but cannot escape the manga origins of his source material. The violence itself is cartoonish and absurd, but there’s also an unpleasant layer of fetishisation which takes over as the blood starts flowing, almost revelling in acts of extreme cruelty as a young man exults in beating the face of a young girl to a bloody pulp. Unremittingly bleak, Liverleaf makes a bid for pathos in its closing coda as it takes us back to a case of ruined friendships and broken dreams but it can’t overcome the uneasy stylisation of all that’s gone before in swapping emptiness for wistful melancholy.

Liverleaf screens as part of New York Asian Film Festival 2018 on 8th July, 7pm with director Eisuke Naito in attendance for a Q&A.

Original trailer (English subtitles/captions)

Microhabitat (소공녀, Jeon Go-woon, 2017)

July 5, 2018July 16, 2018by Hayley Scanlon3 Comments

Is there a “right” or, by implication, “wrong” way to live your life? The heroine of Jeon Go-woon’s debut feature Microhabitat (소공녀, Sogongnyeo) is determined to live by her own rules, but her unconventional approach to life in competitive Korean society is not treated with the same kind of universal acceptance with which she treats each and every person she meets on her meandering path towards fulfilment. Life is conspiring to take away even the smallest pleasures which make existence bearable, but small pleasures are sometimes all life is about and perhaps the only thing really worth fighting for.

At 31 years old, Miso (Esom) lives what might outwardly be thought of as a miserable existence. Working as a cleaner she exists hand to mouth and is able to afford only a tiny, unheated, one room apartment in a run down part of the city. Her life is tightly budgeted and whatever else anyone might say about the way she lives, Miso is not irresponsible and refuses to get into debt. It is therefore a huge problem when a New Year price hike threatens to push her beloved cigarettes out of her reach. If that weren’t worrying enough, her landlord is also jacking up the rent. Staring intently at her accounts book, Miso contemplates a life without cigarettes and whiskey and then takes a look around her before deciding to strike through the line marked “rent”. Packing her most essential belongings into a couple of suitcases, she decides to make herself temporarily homeless and reliant on the kindness of former friends now virtual strangers whom she hopes will be minded to repay past kindnesses by putting her up for a while.

Miso’s plight is symptomatic of many in her generation who feel they’ve lost out in Korea’s relentlessly competitive, conformist, and conservative society, but her fate also bears out something of a persistent social stigma directed at those without means or family. Unlike the friends she decides to track down, Miso never graduated university – she lost her parents young and then ran out of money, but then she isn’t particularly bitter about something she was powerless to control. Miso’s small pleasures are also ones generally marked off limits to “nice” young women who generally do not smoke or drink and the old fashioned austerity mentality sees nothing good in a “self indulgent” need to enjoy life by “wasting” money on “frivolous” things if you claim not to be able to find the money to pay your rent. Some would say Miso has her priorities all wrong and has messed up her life by getting trapped in the world of casual labour and still being single at such an advanced age, conveniently ignoring the fact that much of the social order functions solely to keep women like her in their place so the higher ups can prosper.

Miso, however, would probably listen patiently to their concerns before calmly brushing them off. She is happy – to an extent, at least, with her minimalist life. She doesn’t need a fancy apartment or a swanky car, she only wants her cigarettes, her whisky, and her boyfriend Hansol (Ahn Jae-Hong) – an aspiring manhwa artist who feels broadly the same but is starting to get frustrated with his own precarious economic circumstances and present inability to offer the degree of economic support which would mean the pair could move in together. The first friend she tracks down, Mun-young (Kang Jin-a), has become a workaholic salary woman who self administers saline drips at work to increase her productivity and declines to put Miso up on the grounds having someone around when she’s not there makes her uncomfortable. Each of her old bandmates has opted for the conventional life but it has not served them well – keyboardist Hyun-jung (Kim Gook-hee) is unhappily married and trapped in a home of oppressive silence, Dae-yong (Lee Sung-wook) is a brokenhearted wreck whose wife has left him after less than eight months of marriage, vocalist Roki (Choi Deok-moon) has a strange relationship with his parents, and former guitarist Jung-mi (Kim Jae-hwa) has thrown herself headlong into stepford wife territory going quietly mad through boredom and insecurity in the palatial apartment that belongs to her husband’s family.

For various reasons, Miso understands that she can’t stay with her friends very long though she tries to help each of them as best she can while she’s around. She cleans their apartments, cooks them nutritious meals, keeps them company and listens to their problems though few of them take the trouble to really ask her why it is she is in the position she is in or how they might be able to help beyond providing temporary shelter. Surprised by one of her wealthy clients who is unexpectedly at home during cleaning time and seems to be distressed, Miso does her best to comfort her, making it clear that she does not disapprove of her client’s lifestyle and thinks she has nothing in particular to be ashamed of. The client, vowing to leave her present occupation behind, feels quietly terrible that her decision inevitably means Miso will lose her job but Miso genuinely means it when she says she’s happy for her client and hopes she will be able to attain her dreams.

Forced to leave the memory of each of her friends behind, Miso’s world seems to shrink until even her beloved whisky now seems like it will be out of her reach. Jeon Go-woon is unafraid to lay bare Miso’s bleak prospects, though she depicts them in an often humorous light as Miso goes apartment hunting in the darkest and dingiest part of Seoul, striding up endless flights of stairs to rooms with increasingly tiny windows before landing at the only realistic possibility in a filthy attic space with no electricity. Still, Miso remains undaunted. She is free, beholden to no one, and retains her kind heart even as she becomes a cypher to us, lost under the grey skies of an indifferent city until she alone becomes the tiny light on its ever expanding horizons.

Microhabitat screens as part of New York Asian Film Festival 2018 on 10th July, 6.30pm.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Premika (เปรมิกาป่าราบ, Siwakorn Jarupongpa, 2017)

July 4, 2018by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

Horror and comedy are often more compatible than it might seem, but despite the outward ridiculousness of Thai ghost story Premika (เปรมิกาป่าราบ, Premika-Parab) the issues at its heart are deadly serious. A selection of guests assembled as part of a PR launch for an isolated hotel resort soon find themselves plagued by the vengeful spirit of a murdered karaoke girl and forced to sing for their lives while across town a noble policeman tries to convince his less dedicated colleague that they still have a duty to find the person responsible for a gruesome murder even if the victim was likely “just another worker kid”. Xenophobia, homophobia, sexism, police corruption, people and organ trafficking, exploitation and a host of other social ills become fine fodder for a vengeful ghost but, perhaps, not so much for comedy.

A dismembered body is discovered in the forest. Honest policeman Lt. Poom (Todsapol Maisuk) is determined to investigate the crime-scene despite his sergeant’s attempt to order the rest of the men back to the station as soon as the commanding officer has left the area. Sgt. Ped (Kittipos Mangkang) writes the unfortunate girl’s name down as “Premika” – taken from the label on the cosplay sailor suit she is wearing and abandons the case.

Meanwhile, a number of guests including several celebrities, a film crew, and a couple of competition winners on a delayed honeymoon, assemble at a remote hotel as part of a soft launch PR exercise. The trouble starts when two vacuous Instagrammers power up an old karaoke box sitting in the reception area for decorative purposes. Unbeknownst to them, the box is a definite health hazard because it contains the rotting heart of a murdered girl jumped started into a vengeful fury as her ghost finds ample scope for revenge in these variously troubled souls.

To leave the ghost to one side, the guests begin to argue amongst themselves as they’re forced to spend time together in the otherwise isolated hotel, hardly noticing the strangeness of the goings on which include blood pouring from the taps and sudden blackouts. Once the karaoke loving ghost arrives she challenges each of them to sing for their lives – if they get the words wrong, go off key, or fail to get over 80 points on a song picked at random they will fall victim to her bloody axe of vengeance.

There is however a method to her madness – the ghost is looking for her own killer who happened to be completely tone deaf, leaving her with a deep seated hatred of those who hog the mic but can’t sing. Finally she gets the chance to sing her own sad song of vengeance in which she reveals the tragedy of her past – a poor farm girl sold into the big city red light district and then unable to escape because of the money she “owes” to her captors. Molested, beaten, raped, she finds herself exploited by men with no sign of escape and, as the news paper reports at the climactic moment record, she is far from alone. The police are themselves complicit in a vast ring of female exploitation and people trafficking. It’s no wonder Sgt. Ped wanted to forget the whole thing – after all “it’s just another worker kid, who cares”. Lt. Poom at least cares, reminding his sergeant that the victim had a mother too and deserves their respect in death even if they failed to protect her in life.

Prioritising the silly comedy over the serious issues, Premika fails to make the contrast hit home, allowing the humour to undermine the inherent critique of a misogynistic society while also indulging in some of the very ideas which support it to get a few cheap laughs. While there is a quiet lament for unrequited, unspoken same sex love, the androgynous photographer’s ambiguous gender is a constant source of comedy (even if the homophobic/anti-trans slurs directed in their direction eventually send a microphone right through the abusers chest) lending a slightly sour note to the proceedings as “Premika’s” axe continues to fall on the enablers of misogyny.

Premika screens as part of the New York Asian Film Festival 2018 on 13th July at 8.15pm.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Midnight Bus (ミッドナイト・バス, Masao Takeshita, 2018)

July 3, 2018by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

You know how it is, you coast along empty inside for what seems like a millennia until you finally decide to change your life and life says no, not like that. The hero of Masao Takeshita’s adaptation of the Naoki Prize nominated novel by Yuki Ibuki Midnight Bus (ミッドナイト・バス) must be well acquainted with phenomenon as his attempts to move a new relationship to the next level are scuppered by the unexpected arrival of not only boomerang children, but an estranged ex-wife and in-laws to boot. Caught between two places, two families, and a number of possible futures it might be time to head off road but the courage to leave the familiar route behind is a hard thing to find when you’ve been used to the security of travelling in tunnels.

Riichi Takamiya (Taizo Harada) drives the overnight bus from Niigata to Tokyo. In the capital, he has a tentative relationship with a younger woman, Shiho (Manami Konishi), who runs a small cafe/bar but his attempts to introduce her to his home life back in the country run aground when grown-up son, Reiiji (Ko Nanase), picks exactly the wrong moment to come home after having abruptly given up his lucrative IT job and moved out of his Tokyo flat. Meanwhile, Riichi’s daughter, Ayana (Wakana Aoi), has embarked on a wacky cosplay career and is thinking about marrying her longterm boyfriend. At this extremely sensitive time, Riichi spots a familiar face on the bus one day – his estranged former wife, Miyuki (Mirai Yamamoto), who has returned to Niigata to visit her ailing father and take care of “family” business.

All three Takamiyas are in a sense adrift, never having properly dealt with the abrupt exit of Miyuki who left when both the children were small. As a young scrappy couple in post-bubble Tokyo, Riichi and Miyuki had been happy but when Riichi decided to move the family back to Niigata for a “less stressful” existence everything began to go wrong, largely because of Riichi’s unforgiving mother who made her daughter-in-law’s life a misery. Now Reiji is facing a similar dilemma in finding city life too demanding, but unlike his father he can afford the time to take a break and figure things out seeing as he is single and unburdened by the need to support a family. Ayana, meanwhile, is about to find herself in a similar position to her mother as she discovers when she plans to introduce her intended to her father only to have him bring his snooty parents along unannounced and change the venue to an upscale restaurant more in keeping with their tastes. Poking into family details, looking down on Riichi’s job, and finally making a pointed comment about Reiji’s stress-related skin condition and a “concern” regarding her son’s children being “contaminated”, it’s obvious Ayana and her boyfriend’s mother will never get on.

Riichi is a kind and patient man, though sometimes a little insensitive in his far seeing plan to ensure everybody’s happiness. He bears no ill will towards Miyuki and hopes that she will be able to rebuild a relationship with her children, engineering a plan to bring them together while he helps her cope with the events that have brought her back to Niigata. Meanwhile, he also tries to keep things going with Shiho who has been hurt before and understands the reasons for Riichi’s hot and cold attitudes but is increasingly frustrated by the abrupt changes in his feelings and intensions. Riichi will have to make a choice between past and future, but if he chooses to put his family back together again it must be short lived as he prepares to push his children back out into the world with a little more direction and confidence after having addressed their deep seated familial traumas.

The bus journey becomes a point of transition in more ways than one – between city and country but also between two personas and two ways of being. In Niigata Riichi is “dad”, the family lynchpin, while Tokyo affords him the opportunity to be a “man” in relative freedom, free to pursue a second chance at romance with all his baggage safely stored at home. Like his children he will need to find a way to integrate his past self with his future one if he wants to forge a way forward, but in order to do that he’ll have to accept the risks a putative future entails and make peace with his old life in order to start all over again. A sometimes poignant family drama, Midnight Bus is a restrained affair but one filled with empathy and a generosity of spirit as its various protagonists learn to free themselves from familial legacy in order to pursue their individual destinies with kind eyes and clear hearts.

Midnight Bus screens as part of New York Asian Film Festival 2018 on 11th July at 6pm.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Old Beast (老獸, Zhou Ziyang, 2017)

July 2, 2018by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

Filial piety is a favourite theme in Chinese cinema, but with an ageing population, increasing distance between parents and children, turbulent economic circumstances, and a rapidly modernising world, questions are being asked about the responsibility owed to one’s family when that responsibility is not always reciprocal. The small-scale tragedy at the centre of Old Beast (老獸, Lǎo Shòu) is that of a man who felt that his various statuses allowed him to ride roughshod over the social order, neglecting other people’s feelings in order to prove his own superiority but only ever reminding himself that he is trapped and empty.

In the arid cities of Inner Mongolia, “Old Beast” Lao Yang (Tu Men) likes to play the big man around town. His business went bust years ago, and now he’s chiefly known as the holder of many debts stolen from men at gaming tables who will likely never be able to make good on their ambitious wagers. With his ill-gotten gains, Yang turns off his mobile to avoid “annoying” calls from his bedridden wife to take a friend out on the town to cheer him up after he explains he’s having a lot of trouble trying to swap his camel for a cow. Yang and his friend spend the night in a “spa”, during which time his wife collapses and ends up in hospital while his grown up children rally round trying to make up for Yang’s constant failings. Still not ready to answer his phone, Yang heads to his mistress’ before he ever thinks of going “home” to make sure his wife is OK.

Yang’s rather depressing life is however about to implode, not least because of his constant neglect of his wife. Yang’s long suffering children have just about had enough – not only are they on the hock for their mother’s medical bills which ought to be their father’s responsibility, but they’re all also suffering because of his bad reputation. Yang’s son-in-law is promised a promotion at work, but warned that Yang’s various disgraces won’t go in his favour while his son’s marriage faces extreme pressure thanks to the increased strain on his daughter-in-law as she attempts to look after her own home and that of her in-laws. Yang thinks that as he raised them, lent them money when times were good, and has been supportive in other ways, he is “owed” all the respect that filial piety demands even though it is clear that any help he gives to anyone else is largely for his own benefit. He thinks only of himself, even stooping so low as to steal the money the children have raised between them to pay for their mother’s operation only to use it to buy a cow to pay back his friend whose camel he sold to a dodgy butcher and then passed off as “beef”.

The children, taking matters into their own hands, eventually stage an intervention, forcing Yang to sign a contract that he will finally change his ways. Affronted, Yang reports his own kids to the police and then takes them all the way to a court hearing which he eventually storms out of when forced to confront his own lack of moral character. The world holds no love for old men like Yang who care little for conventional morality or the feelings of others, seeking only to be “respected” in an attempt to paper over their own feelings of insecurity and self loathing. Yang’s youngest daughter, married and living in the city, has the most filial piety owing to not having been so directly confronted with her father’s misdeeds and so she feels she ought to help him, against the advice of her husband, only to find herself betrayed when a conversation with her sister reveals Yang’s gentle long con. The question remains, considering Yang’s treatment of them, do Yang’s family really owe him anything as a “father” or are they entitled to walk away and leave him to wreak his self-destructive magic on himself alone?

It is difficult to sympathise with Yang whose overwhelming self obsession knows no bounds, but then he is perhaps a product of his times. A chancer and a grifter, one who’s always trying to make deals and come out on top, he’s lost big in the fluctuating economy of the modern Chinese state. Yang feels trapped, dreaming of horses, plains, and escapes as he casts off the “burden” of his family for the easy pleasures of a younger mistress, spas, and gaming tables but he cannot escape himself. The half-built city all around him is a reflection of his own ruined hopes, suspended in a kind of melancholy defiance as a reminder of the hubris of a more hopeful era. Yang cries silently as he watches his family collectively decide he’s not worth it anymore, unable to repair the connections he has failed to forge in a misguided faith that he is owed something for nothing. The world, however, has changed. Even the old will have to pull their emotional weight, or the whole system will come crashing down.

Old Beast screens at New York Asian Film Festival 2018 on 3rd July, 9pm.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

We Will Not Die Tonight (Richard V. Somes, 2018)

July 1, 2018by Hayley Scanlon1 Comment

“Your moves are so old”, complains the director of a filmset towards the beginning of Richard V. Somes’ We Will Not Die Tonight, “it’s like the ‘80s”. An homage to The Warriors among other punk infused action classics of the 70s and beyond, We Will Not Die Tonight is as gritty and as grimy as they come following a pack of cornered desperados who unexpectedly find themselves to be the good guys when confronted by an evil unthinkable even on the streets of Duterte’s Philippines. Each in need of fast dough, a desperate gang of martial artists determines on the job to end all jobs, but it’s no surprise that they get a lot more than they bargained for just trying to survive in an unforgiving world.

Our heroine, Kray (Erich Gonzales), is a principled young woman who prides herself on her sense of justice, her good heart, and her ability to survive. Each of these qualities will stand her in good stead in the chaos that’s about to engulf her but for the moment they’re all that sustains her in her frustrating life as a stunt double for low budget movies. Berated by a director (Lehner Mendoza) who seems like he just wants to shout at someone while the “real” actress (Dani Baretto) blithely insists the stunt woman is an unnecessary waste of money, Kray can do little more than grin and bear it, unable even to make much of a fuss when she realises she’s only getting half pay on account of the director’s bad mood. She needs the money because her father (Baldo Marro) is ill and needs medical treatment, though he urges her to give up the stunt work which is dangerous and leaves her feeling humiliated to take a low paid but steady job working for a friend’s catering company.

Kray isn’t suspicious when a couple of her old friends turn up out of the blue, but quickly catches on when her ex, Ramil (Alex Medina), fetches up too. He wants to get the gang back together for one last hurrah. Having let them all down before, Ramil’s suggestion is not universally popular but as everyone is so desperate for money they eventually agree. Unfortunately, Ramil’s plan is once again a bust as it turns out the contacts he’s made are not into drug trafficking (itself a dangerous prospect given the current regime) but something far darker – snatching kids off the street for illegal organ trafficking. Now, our guys aren’t saints but they didn’t sign up for murdering children and even the slimy Ramil manages to suddenly develop enough of a backbone to firmly refuse and walk away. You can’t walk away from this sort of thing, however, and all hell breaks loose as they find themselves on the run with a little girl they save from the bad guys while they try to get to relative safety.

Unlike many similar genre examples, Kray and her friends aren’t hardened street gangsters or young punks, they’re way out of their depth in the murky Philippine underworld where drugs have become too much hassle while disappearing street children might even be viewed as a public service by the current regime. A bunch of martial arts experts with broken dreams and ruined hearts, all they want is to survive. Kray wants to help her dad, Cheche (Max Eigenmann) wants to move back to the country and open a shop, Jonesky (Thou Reyes) is just sick of being poor, and Reneboy (Nico Dans) is looking for a family seeing as his own has moved to Germany without him. Ramil, the slick pretty boy leader just wants to lead with a mild ulterior motive of using his friends to get rich and perhaps winning back the respect of old flame Kray. This world, however, is not going to let them have any of that – they are going to have to fight not only for their lives but also for what’s right if they want to survive.

Somes backgrounds an authoritarian regime as the enabler of such a dark and amoral world as it thinks nothing of gunning down “drug dealers” in the streets while turning a blind eye to other kinds of violence and horror which, in a strange way, perhaps play into its continuous propaganda machine. Yet as much as our heroes are essentially trying to fight their way out of inescapable poverty, Somes’ grime fuelled action picture is pure B-movie, filled with gritty street violence enacted with makeshift weapons and fierce ingenuity. The fighting is ugly, and real (not to mention bloody), but our heroes are fighting for more than just their lives, they’re fighting for the soul of the society in which they live. Desperate to survive, they would rather die fighting than give in to the darkness but the night is long and the battle only just beginning.

We Will Not Die Tonight was screened at the New York Asian Film Festival 2018.

Original trailer (dialogue free, English captions)

Smokin’ on the Moon (ニワトリ★スター, Kanata Wolf, 2017)

June 30, 2018by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

Slacker drama has become a mainstay of the Japanese indie scene as aimless young men drift freely in a society which promises them little and threatens to take much. Even so they’ve rarely been quite so genially lost as the pair at the centre of Kanata Wolf’s Smokin’ on the Moon (ニワトリ★スター, Niwatori★Star) whose relatively serene life of stoner bliss is radically derailed after a dramatic encounter with a psychotic yakuza drug dealer. Dreaming of escape, a better life somewhere else, the pair find themselves taking very different paths as they reflect on their familial pasts, broken dreams, and future promises.

34-year-old Sota (Arata Iura) and his younger unofficial roommate and official best friend Rakuto (Ryo Narita) live a “simple” life of casual work which pays for rent and getting stoned if not much else. They are broadly “happy” with their aimless drop out lives and determined not to get involved with the shadier sides of their underworld existence by avoiding the pull of hard drugs and gangster hang outs. All that ends up going by the wayside when their dealer, Jay (Peron Yasu), is offed by sadistic yakuza Hatta (Kanji Tsuda) who makes a point of dropping in on the boys to ask them if they know where Jay might be in order to make sure they don’t. Being directly confronted with gangster violence sparks Sota into a series of epiphanies as he suddenly realises that the stoner life is not a good fit for a man of 34, while Rakuto, who has few other options, considers throwing his lot in with Hatta if only to remain on the sidelines of organised crime.

Sota, son of an Osakan okonomiyaki restaurant owner (Eiji Okuda), left home in flight of family legacy, bored with boring small-town life and resentful of his “destiny” as the heir to a family business. Eight years in Tokyo, however, have been largely wasted, squandered away on constant evasion with nothing more to show for his time than a few crazy stories and a deeply held friendship. Sota does at least have a safety net, he can always go home to a family that will welcome him with open arms. Rakuto is not so lucky. Harbouring deep seated resentment towards his mother who was unable to protect him from a violent step-father, Rakuto fled Okinawa to escape the memory of a traumatic childhood which is perhaps why he finds himself becoming a surrogate father to a little boy whose mother, as it turns out an old friend of his, desperately tries to kick a crack habit given to her by an unforgiving city even as it crushed her dreams of musical success.

Discovering an old report card on which he’d written that his greatest ambition was to work hard for his family, Rakuto decides he needs to buck up and become a responsible husband and father who can provide a stable home for a woman and a child. There are, however, few opportunities for middle-school dropouts and even those there are Rakuto has already disqualified himself from thanks to his stoner looks which include fiery red hair and several prominent tattoos (prohibited in almost every conceivable “decent” job in Japan). Thus he feels his only option is to become a kind of errand boy for Hatta, naively believing he will allow him to remain in the shallower end of the gangster pool just dealing weed and making deliveries rather than pushing hard drugs or getting involved in violence. While Sota finds peace in the country, Rakuto begins to build the family life he’d always dreamed of while trying to cope with the constant anxieties of being an underling to a bunch of unhinged crooks.

Wolf shifts registers throughout – starting off in stoner comedy where our heroes inhabit a bohemian world of gay bars and randy landladies, shifting into crime thriller as the nasty gangsters rear their heads, and then finally ending up in masculine melodrama as Sota recounts the sad story of his friend who, despite his good heart, finds himself a victim of fate rather than of himself or even of his society. Mixing strange animation and surrealist diversions with an affecting tale of friendship, Smokin’ on the Moon is another sad story of those unable to find their place in the world taking refuge in each other only to find a melancholy compromise even as fate threatens to rob them of the little joys they’ve found.

Smokin’ on the Moon screens at New York Asian Film Festival 2018 on 10th July at 9.15 pm plus Q&A with director Kanata Wolf

(Kanata Wolf (かなた狼) previously known as Yuichiro Tanaka (たなか雄一狼). Surname is Wolf as per official website).

Original trailer (no subtitles)

The Looming Storm (暴雪将至, Dong Yue, 2017)

June 29, 2018by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

Great changes were afoot in China in 1997. While the rest of the continent contended with the Asian Financial Crisis, China saw the death of reformer Deng Xiaoping who had begun the business of putting the nation’s economy on a modern footing – something which was still very much in progress under the then premier, Jiang Zemin. The old unprofitable factory cities and the work unit system were on their way out, but with little in the way to replace them save the hope for a new and glorious future. The hero of Dong Yue’s debut, The Looming Storm (暴雪将至, Bào Xuě Jiāngzhì) has an unhappy destiny in that his name uses characters which could be translated as “unnecessary remnant of a glorious nation”. He, like many of his generation, is one caught out by his country’s sudden shifts and finds himself living out a fantasy, chasing at shadows and eventually destroying himself in a misdirected attempt to attack a society which has all but forgotten him.

We begin at the end – in 2008, Yu Guowei (Duan Yihong) is released from prison as a parolee, awaiting the return of his ID card and along with it his official existence as a member of society. Flashing back to 1997, Guowei is the security officer at the local factory. Having proved himself efficient in catching petty criminals thieving from the communal resources, Guowei gets himself a “model worker” commendation and the nickname “Detective Yu”. Fancying himself as a top investigator and there being very little to do in this no horse town, Guowei is, in a sense, excited when another body of a young woman turns up near the factory closely matching the pattern of other recent murders and hinting at a serial killer. Seeing as the police are short staffed in any case, the local sheriff decides to humour Guowei by allowing him to go on trying to solve the case on his own.

Guowei investigates the crime with methods he’s learned from hardboiled movies – staking out the crime scene and asking awkward questions in an illicit local disco where, it is suggested, some of the victims may have been earning money through casual sex work. He becomes obsessed with shadowy figures, faces hidden by raincoats, who lurk on the periphery anonymous and almost unseen but yet unsettling. Guowei finds and chases his quarry, only to abandon a friend in need while the suspect gets away leaving Guowei with only his shoe as a possible clue.

During his model worker speech, Guowei somewhat milks the occasion but proudly states that he intends to live a “meaningful live”. Given the depressing drudgery of his existence it’s unclear how he intends to do that, but then his “investigation” becomes his great and glorious destiny – something which will bring both meaning and acclaim to his otherwise meaningless existence. Like many of his age, Guowei has learned to be proud of his contributions to society through his work but remains unaware that the security bureau is not well respected. Everyone knows Guowei is a pure hearted sort who cannot be corrupted and pretends to respect him for it, but in reality they find him priggish and ridiculous. Unbeknownst to him to there have been many more mysterious thefts he’s never discovered because the entire factory and even his own assistant are engaged in a complex system of bribery to cover them all up.

When the factory is unceremoniously shut down, all Guowei is left with is his need to find the killer. Striking up a relationship with a pretty sex worker, Yanzi (Jiang Yiyan), who dreams of opening her own hair salon in Hong Kong – another new horizon in 1997 though one she fears she may never see, Guowei perhaps has another shot at building a “meaningful life” but rejects it, suppressing his natural desires for his obsessive pursuit in deciding to use his new muse as bait. Time and again, Guowei backs away from the reality, unwittingly sacrifices friends and lovers in service to his self created narrative in which he is a hero seeking justice whose victory is all but assured. Having discovered the truth, Yanzi’s eyes are opened – she has woken up from the beautiful dream of a possible future while Guowei is still boyishly dreaming of becoming a hero in an unheroic world.

Dong paints the industrial factory town in tones of washed out browns and greys as the rain falls without end, muddying the streets and thickening the air. Having made a life changing transgression, Guowei is asked what the point in any of this really was and seemingly has no answer, his fantasy perhaps shattered by his single act of horrifying violence intended for the world in which he lived which had already robbed him of so much, but vented on a possibly innocent party all because of a personal conviction more akin to prejudice. A victim of changing times denied his future, the “meaningful life” that would allow him to greet the new century with head held high, Guowei creates a new narrative for himself in which he can be the hero but there is a storm always looming and Guowei has been swiping at ghosts flickering on the peripheries of his fracturing mind. Eventually Guowei too decides it’s time to leave this place only to find no way out from the blizzard conditions which continue frustrate the path towards his future.

The Looming Storm screens at New York Asian Film Festival 2018 plus Q&A with director Dong Yue on 9th July at 9.30pm.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Kamikaze Taxi (Masato Harada, 1995)

June 28, 2018by Hayley Scanlon1 Comment

Almost 25 years later, Masato Harada’s post-bubble critique of a society failing to deal with its traumatic past feels oddly relevant. Xenophobia, misogyny, class oppression, and political corruption are far from unique problems but find fertile ground in a society in flux in which recent economic trauma has forced tensions to the fore. 1994 was a period of marked political chaos in which a corruption scandal had brought down a Prime Minister while the country debated electoral reform and attempted to deal with the ongoing recession, finding itself caught between the problems of past and future as the Showa era legacy continued to gnaw at the promise of Heisei.

Lowly goon Tatsuo (Kazuya Takahashi) has been charged with finding girls for corrupt politician Domon (Taketoshi Naito), but his world is turned inside out when Domon badly beats a prostitute leading his girlfriend Renko, a madam, to kick up a fuss which eventually gets her killed by sadistic mob boss Animaru (Mickey Curtis). Insensitively ordered to dispose of Renko’s body, Tatsuo’s resentment intensifies until he is shouldered with caring for the injured prostitute, Tama (Reiko Kataoka), who tells him that Domon keeps a large amount of cash hidden in his house. Seeing a chance to escape from the yakuza world whilst getting revenge on everyone involved in the death of Renko, Tatsuo enlists a few of his trusted guys and stages a heist. It goes badly wrong, leaving everyone except Tatsuo dead.

Meanwhile, on the run, Tatsuo gets a lift from Peruvian returnee Kantake (Koji Yakusho) now working as a taxi driver after being unable to find any other kind of work in the middle of a recession in a society not always welcoming of overseas workers. Although he was born in Japan and spent most of his childhood in the country, Kantake’s grasp of the language has become corrupted and he finds himself unable to communicate in his “homeland” despite being “Japanese”. Even without verbal communication, the two men bond and Kantake returns to collect Tatsuo despite becoming aware of his gangster past, forging a kind of brotherhood in their shared outsider status.

When Tatsuo is first introduced to Domon, the first thing he asks him is if he is “fully Japanese”. Domon “hopes” he is, but has his doubts because his name “sounds a bit Korean”. Harada opens the film with some on screen testimony from migrant workers in Japan, some of whom are, like Kantake, of Japanese birth if raised overseas but nevertheless find themselves regarded as foreigners – turned down for housing and employment, cast out from regular mainstream society. In the bubble era when it was all hands to the wheel, the migrant workers were an essential part of a well functioning economy, but now the bubble’s burst and they are no longer “needed” as construction dwindles and the demand for casual labour decreases, men like Domon begin to suggest simply sending them all “home”.

A fierce nationalist, Domon is also a misogynist whose sexual proclivities run to extreme violence. Sadly, his views are not so far from the mainstream as might be hoped – the heartless yakuza think nothing of silencing Renko and then disappearing her body, while Tama’s assault is something bought and paid for. On TV, Domon appears on a panel discussing the comfort woman issue and unsurprisingly refuses to acknowledge it while the increasingly exasperated female contributor points out that the use of comfort women was not only a state sponsored crime but a crime against women which speaks volumes about current social attitudes. Domon insists that the Japanese women who “served” as prostitutes overseas were soldiers, while the “foreign” women were soulless money hungry mercenaries who deserved everything they got. In his view, all of today’s problems are down to “selfish” career women who should get back in their boxes as quickly as possible so everything can go back to “normal”.

The wartime legacy hangs uncomfortably over modern Japan as ultra nationalists like Domon harp on about their time in service, exploiting their fallen comrades for personal and political gains. Kantake too, it seems, has fought in a war and is the son of a former kamikaze pilot of the kind despised by men like Domon who themselves have continued to live even in defeat. Drugs and foreign wars link two eras and two continents, not to mention two men, as Kantake reflects on the true “kamikaze” spirit as seen in the beautiful flight of the Condor coasting on the winds above the Andes. It is indeed a gust of wind which saves him as he decides to fulfil Tatsuo’s quest for vengeance, remaining true to their brotherly bond and attempting to wipe the slate clean by eliminating the corrupting forces which deny each of them the right to live as full members of their society. Asked for his life story by a dying man, Kantake begins to speak but all too quickly is urged to “forget about Showa” – a partial plea for making peace with the past, getting rid of nationalism, the yakuza, the hierarchical and patriarchal society in favour of something kinder and more honest built out of its ashes.

Kamikaze Taxi screens at New York Asian Film Festival 2018 on 1st July at 6pm plus Q&A with director Masato Harada.

HD re-release trailer (no subtitles)

The Hungry Lion (飢えたライオン, Takaomi Ogata, 2017)

June 27, 2018June 2, 2020by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

Rumour has a strange power. A baseless lie, no matter how innocuous, can quickly derail a life but the power of lie with a tiny grain of, if not truth exactly but circumstantial evidence, can prove ruinous when there are vested interests at play which make belief an attractive prospect. The heroine of Takaomi Ogata’s The Hungry Lion (飢えたライオン, Ueta Lion) finds herself at the centre of such a storm through no fault of her own, becoming a victim not only of her country’s restrictive social codes, tendency towards victim blaming, and reluctance to deal openly with “unpleasant” topics, but also more directly of the latent jealousy lurking in her closest friends which finds a convenient home in someone else’s scandal. Nobody will come to her rescue, her “disgrace” has exiled her from the group and she finds herself abandoned as a lonely a sacrifice to the hungry lion that feeds on social shame.

High school teacher Mr. Hosono is not exactly popular with his students. He is strict with the boys but less so with the girls, as he proves greeting one tardy student who blames a train accident for his late arrival by berating him about his regulation busting necklace while allowing a female student, Hitomi (Urara Matsubayashi), who arrives a couple of minutes later to take her seat unharrassed. Midway through the register, Mr. Hosono is called away and eventually arrested in connection with the viral video all the kids were looking at before he arrived which appears to show him in a compromising position with a student. For one reason or another, a rumour spreads that Hitomi is the girl in the video. She isn’t, but few believe her strenuous denials and her life becomes one of constant strife not only because of the bullying itself, or the injustice of being falsely accused and then disbelieved by those closest to her, but by the way she is made to feel embarrassed and shamed for causing trouble to others even though she herself has done nothing wrong.

A “relationship” between a teacher and a student is never appropriate, and Mr. Hosono has at least been removed from his position at the school, but no one seems very interested in identifying the girl in the video in order to help her, only to spread ruin and rumour. Hitomi is not the girl in the video, but even if she had been there is no support on offer to her as a person who has been abused by someone in a position of power she should have been able to trust, nor are there any measures in place to ensure her academic life will not be unduly damaged by becoming involved in such a traumatic incident. Aware of the rumours, the school accepts Hitomi’s assertion that she is not the girl but still suspends her to avoid “awkwardness” and protect their own reputation. Likewise, her own mother and sister are far from supportive, berating her for bringing shame on the family and creating problems for them in making the family a target rather than standing by her in her ordeal whether she had been the girl or not.

The rumour itself seems to spring from persistent shaming and stigmatisation of atypical families. Hitomi is 18 and she has a boyfriend who is a little older. He has some shady friends and likes to push buttons as he does by causing mild embarrassment to Hitomi by taking her into the curtained off “adult” section of the local video store in an attempt to shock her. Nevertheless the pair eventually make their way to a love hotel (where they are not age checked) and he films her in a compromising position. Girls talk and Hitomi’s friends all know about her relationship which is also plastered all over her social media on which she is something of a star. Some of her friends are jealous but also harbour a degree of disapproval and the mere fact that she is already sexually active ties her to the girl in the video and casts her in an “impure” light in the cute and innocent world of high school girls. Similarly, her boyfriend’s estimation of her drops after she consents to sleep with him while his leering friends make lewd comments and regard her as an “easy” girl who has lost the right to refuse their advances.

Ostracised for essentially becoming a “fallen woman”, Hitomi is left entirely alone with no one to turn to for support. Later, authorities are keen to stress that it’s important to speak out if you’re suffering because adults will always help children but like everything else they are just empty words. The school give out a pamphlet on the importance of prudence when using social media, but refuse to accept their responsibility in failing to protect their students. The news meanwhile becomes obsessed with tearing apart Hitomi’s family, laying the blame at their feet, insisting that Hitomi’s downfall is in someway a result of her parents’ divorce even blaming her mother for having the audacity to find a “boyfriend” before her children were fully grown. The image we had of Hitomi is suddenly reversed. No longer is she a “slutty schoolgirl” involved in an illicit relationship with her teacher, but a neglected child damaged beyond repair by “liberal modern society”.

Reputation is what matters, but reputation is easily manipulated and rewritten, muddy even when objective truth is revealed. Ogata shoots in brief vignettes, each severed from the next by a stark black screen which forces us to examine the objectivity of each scene as distinct from the others, assembling our own versions of “objective” truth which are in fact guided by Ogata’s carefully crafted editing. Fake news has an agenda, truth does not, but it’s often much easier to believe the lie especially if the lie benefits us much more than the truth or enables us to feel superior to someone we secretly think needs taking down a peg or two. Society is a hungry lion which feeds on shame, externalised and internalised, as those who find themselves on the wrong sides of a series of social taboos become unwilling sacrifices to its unkind, unforgiving, and unrelenting hunger for suffering.

Screening at New York Asian Film Festival 2018 on 30th June, 2.45pm.

Original trailer (English subtitles)