Category: New York Asian Film Festival 2023

Redemption with Life (兄弟, Zhang Wei, 2023)

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A young man with old-fashioned values is slowly consumed by the contradictions of the modern China in Zhang Wei’s indie drama, Redemption with Life (兄弟, Xiōngdì). The Chinese title translates as the more straightforward “brothers” and hints at the strong bond between the three men at its centre who each find that life has not turned out quite as they hoped. While one silently plugs away, another pushes the boundaries of the law, but the third allows himself to be pulled into callous inhumanity and the exploitation of the dreams of others while working for an enigmatic businessman running what is quite obviously a dodgy pyramid scheme. 

As the film opens, Jianhua has just been released from a two-year prison sentence after taking the fall for the financial impropriety overseen by his boss, Li Gang. He is met by his two sworn brothers, fellow bikers Peng and aspiring photographer Shaofeng, and is intent on starting over described by Peng as some kind of financial hotshot though it’s surprising he would even be able to return to that line of work after being imprisoned for mismanagement. In any case, he ends up returning to Li Gang while justifying himself by using the vast amounts of cash he’s been given to repay victims who lost their life savings when the bottom finally fell out of the Ponzi scheme they’d been running. 

Though his youthful dream was to travel the world, Jianhua is materially ambitious and ties his masculinity to his ability to become wealthy. After starting a relationship with a female biker, he gets deeper into the scam telling her that he wants to make enough money for them to go travelling while otherwise claiming not to be interested in the high life of fancy parties and expensive goods that Li Gang represents. She eventually leaves him because he caused her to feel insecure with all his dodgy dealings though he repeatedly fails to learn his lessons thinking he can solve all of his problems with money. Some debts must be repaid, he solemnly intones, yet as Peng reminds him there are some things that can’t simply be compensated for and some money you just shouldn’t make if causes you to act immorally.

Peng had given his dream as making a lot of money and seems to look up to Jianhua because he works in “finance”, but is otherwise happy enough with the life he’s made for himself running a motorbike garage which is mostly honest work except that he makes extra money by selling smuggled bikes to other bikers. He wants to help Jianhua but worries that he’s already in over his head and unable to escape the allure of his old life. Shaofeng meanwhile is financially stable and pursuing his art on his own terms, turning down an offer Jianhua gets him to work with some top gallery owners because on one level he knows if Jianhua’s involved it’s not legit and on another wants to do things his way even if he’s unsuccessful. 

Skipping back and forth over a number of years encompassing time served in prison the film chronicles Jianhua’s corruption and eventual disillusionment in the realisation that he too is being scammed by Li Gang and his futile attempts to make money with money are forever doomed to failure. The suggestion is that he wants the high life he wanted to reject in order to secure his masculinity in a world now more ruled by the corporate even if this kind of corporatism is itself ruled by violence and vulgarity, not to mention a healthy dose of misogyny and female exploitation. Jianhua’s partner in crime, the similarly deluded Haitao, eventually renounces desire altogether and becomes a Buddhist monk to atone for the destruction his lust for riches wrought on those around him, though Jianhua’s solution is one of old-fashioned manliness that is predictably futile. Slowly, the biker convoy makes its way towards Tibet and a more spiritual place supposedly freer of the destructive consumerism that has already consumed Jianhua and ruined the lives of those he convinced to invest in a scheme he always knew was a scam not to mention morally wrong. A mild critique of the contemporary society ruled by status and acquisition the film’s advocation for an unconstructed masculinity may sit uncomfortably but does nevertheless make the case for a beneficial brotherhood over mutual exploitation. 

Redemption with Life screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Eye of the Storm (疫起, Lin Chun-Yang, 2023)

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In the early days of the pandemic, Taiwan was thought of as kind of safe haven which had largely managed to keep the disease a bay allowing many to live their lives more or less normally while much of the rest of the world contended with intermittent lockdowns of varying severity. The reasons for their success are said to lie in their experience during the SARS crisis of 2003. 

To that extent, there’s a kind of eeriness in Lin Chung-Yang’s poignant drama Eye of the Storm (疫起, yì qǐ) in watching the early days of this present pandemic play out 20 years earlier as medical personnel attempt to deal with a new illness about which they know almost nothing save that it appears to have a frighteningly high mortality rate. As the film opens, self-involved surgeon Xia (Wang Po-chieh) is clocking off a few minutes early in an attempt to make it to his daughter’s birthday party, rudely brushing off the complaints of warmhearted male nurse Tai-he (Tseng Ching-hua) and dismissing requests from his colleagues. Leaving in a taxi, however, he’s soon called back to deal with an emergency operation and becomes trapped when the hospital is placed into lockdown after the report of a possible SARS case. 

Unlike so many dramas centring on frontline healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic, :Lin does not necessarily portray the medical staff in the best light. As the suspected case was being treated in B Wing it is the first to be shut down and some of the doctors and nurses start a protest refusing to treat patients with SARS resentful that they’ve been locked up with the disease. Meanwhile, in A Wing some of the nurses also go on strike holing themselves up in the rec room and refusing to come out. As Tai-he had been helping out in B-Wing, he is quickly rejected by his peers and exiled there despite having no symptoms while the nursing staff otherwise know that they maybe condemning him to death in sending him to the frontline battle against the disease.

Also on the frontline is journalist Yu-zhong (Hsueh Shih-ling) who snuck into the hospital after a tip off and is determined to let the people know by capturing the chaotic scenes at the hospital first hand. He and Xia eventually end up going through old records to figure out how the virus took hold while Xia mainly spends his time hiding in a storage cupboard and trying not to come into contact with anyone who might have SARS which is not very doctorly. Though originally desperate to get out of the hospital, Xia’s mindset begins to change when he sees how bad things are in B Wing after being charged with transporting food supplies while he later comes to realise that he may bear some responsibility in the rather cavalier treatment of a patient he recently operated on.

Then again, perhaps there is something also a little on the nose in the constant references to the disease’s origins in China while it’s the hospitals choice to use a Mainland construction firm that directly leads to the infection. In any case, Xia eventually beggins to come around realising that it’s selfish of him to refuse to help when the hospital is already so short staffed with some medical personnel on strike and others already falling ill and even dying. Lin lends the tunnel connecting the two wings an eerie quality in the ominous opening and closing of its oversize doors, as if Xia were really descending into hell dressed in a makeshift hazmat suit of yellow overalls. 

Xia had appeared to be a narcissistic surgeon with little interest in his patients. Criticised by Tai-he he clapped back that it’s the nurse’s job to care for them, not his, while continuing to keep his distance and fixating on being allowed to leave the hospital before beginning to empathise with the sick. Yet many other medical staff react in a similar way, overwhelmed by the fear and chaos of the situation while resentful in feeling that they’ve been unfairly imprisoned only later coming to accept the situation and returning to caring for the patients as best they can. Eerily echoing our present times, Lin’s poignant drama eventually finds a kind of serenity even among so much panic in quiet moments of small victories and human solidarity.

Eye of the Storm screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Netflix trailer (English subtitles)

Mayhem Girls (メイヘムガールズ, Shinichi Fujita, 2022)

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Four teenage girls unexpectedly find themselves with superpowers during the Covid-19 pandemic, but largely struggle with just the same problems as everyone else in Shinichi Fujita’s sci-fi-inflected high school dramedy Mayhem Girls (メイヘムガールズ). Despite the implications of the title, mayhem is not exactly the girls’ vibe though they each in their own way challenge the oppressive social norms of those around them later depressed by the realisation that they’ll soon have to go back to being “normal” and lose this brief respite they’ve been given from the rigours of high school life. 

The girls are already close to boiling point with the pressures of the pandemic as the teachers (ironically) yell at them to use hand sanitiser and social distance. The final straw seems to be the announcement that the Cultural Festival will be going online. That might be one reason why popular girl Mizuho (Mizuki Yoshida) suddenly snaps when her teacher catches her reading Twitter on her phone rather than studying. Miss Sawaguchi (Maako Miwa) is young and somewhat timid, unable to exert her authority over the class which is largely uninterested in her attempt to read out articles from English-language magazines. What’s the point, Mizuho wonders, in learning English if you can’t go abroad anyway? Sawaguchi takes this opportunity to reprimand Mizuho as a means of asserting her control but it backfires as something strange happens when she confiscates the phone. Sawaguchi’s hand stops mid-air allowing Mizuho to simply reclaim it while she runs out of the room as if in pain. 

This is only the first inkling that Mizuho has gained unexpected powers of telekinesis though she struggles to understand what happened, certain that she didn’t touch Miss Sawaguchi and confused that she seems to be talking about “violence” and displaying bruises on her wrists. In any case, the event loses her her phone which is akin to a kind of social death for a teenage girl. Her powers have, however, brought her to the attention of Tamaki (Amane Kamiya) who is a telepath, or more accurately given her an excuse to make contact for as it turns out Tamaki has long been carrying a torch for the oblivious Mizuho who is hung up on the student who was her tutor in middle school, Yusuke (Taisei Kido). Soon they are joined by two more girls, Akane (Manami Igashira) who can teleport, and Kei (Hina Kikuchi) who can read the minds of machines, in a kind of after school superpower club. 

Though they eventually become good friends, the relationship between the girls is strained by their differing views on their powers and by Mizuho’s concurrent obsession with Yusuke who is now a part-time delivery rider struggling to find a full time job in the middle of the pandemic. Using Kei’s powers to track him down she waits outside his house for him to come back and inserts herself into his life. Though he seems as if he’s about to remind her that her behaviour is inappropriate, Yusuke eventually goes all in on Mizuho after learning of her powers and asks her to use them to rob a bank so he can forget about his employment woes. 

There are many things you shouldn’t do for a boy and robbing a bank is very high on the list, though perhaps merely a more extreme version of a lesson typically learned in adolescence. In any case, this is far as Mizuho is pushed to the dark side. Other than that, none of the girls really consider using their powers for evil ends with even Tamaki admitting that she has thought about poking around in Mizuho’s head but feels it would be wrong to do so. It’s Tamaki who draws the short straw in being largely unable to articulate herself even by using her powers before eventually trying to communicate in images only to be robbed of the power to do so at the very last second when she’s reduced to being “normal” once again. 

“Normality” does seem to resume for them, each of the girls heading back to their own individual cliques having seemingly learned little from their experiences save Tamaki who is left with a lingering sadness. Perhaps what they’ve been through is a kind of mayhem, a period of chaos provoked by the pressures of the pandemic along with oppressive teachers and the regular teenage issues of unrequited love and romantic disappointment but they’ve returned to “normal” all too quickly leaving precious little time to meditate on the results of their flirtation with superpowers and psychic abilities in a world in which normality itself is both somewhat illusionary and infinitely oppressive.

Mayhem Girls screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Where Is the Lie? (Marupok AF, Quark Henares, 2023)

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What is it that motivates acts of seemingly pointless cruelty, why do people obsessively waste their own lives trying to make those of others miserable? Quark Henares’ inspired by real events (depending on who you ask) catfishing drama Where is the Lie? (Marupok AF) sees a trans woman fall victim to homophobic love fraud amid a climate of intense transphobia and subsequently make the decision to take a stand not as a petty act of revenge but to reclaim her dignity and protect her community while generously wishing her tormentor well. 

The catfisher, Beanie (Maris Racal), is given the right to reply through a series of confessional videos which slowly gain prominence towards the film’s conclusion. She admits that she knows what she did but does not really understand why she did it save justifying herself that she’s been “bullied” by members of the LGBTQ+ community in the past. She deliberately mangles the acronym and makes a point of using male pronouns to refer to the trans woman she’s currently targeting, Janzen (EJ Jallorina), but later starts to slip up instinctively using “she” after spending months talking to her normally over a dating app posing as buff model Theo (Royce Cabrera). Asked what the point of all this is, Beanie doesn’t have much of an answer beyond the cruelty itself explaining that the end goal is simply to ghost the target once they’ve made an emotional connection to cause them to feel hurt or humiliated. Perhaps these seem like low level consequences to Beanie who regards the catfishing as something like a weird hobby though one she expends an immense amount of time on seeing as she doesn’t appear to have anything else going on in her life aside from her actual job as a video director working in the fashion industry. 

The strange thing is though is Beanie describes Janzen as fun to talk to and they even seem to strike up a genuine connection over their shared interest in design. Beanie then finds herself in dilemma, simultaneously accelerating the plan to avoid having to deal with her complicated feelings but then restarting it after its natural end point by inserting herself into the conversation posing as Theo’s cousin and apologising on his behalf for his treatment of her in a moment of panic. The implication is that Beanie’s behaviour is motivated by an internalised homophobia in which she cannot bear to admit her desire for other women keeping her connection with Janzen because she is attracted to her but simultaneously denying it through a deliberate attempt to cause her pain and humiliation in returning her feelings vicariously through the fake Theo persona.

Some may feel that the film to too sympathetic towards outward transphobe Beanie or that once again implying the villain is closeted is unhelpful, but there may be something in her claims to be a kind of victim too in that her internalised homophobia is caused by societal conservatism in a largely Catholic, patriarchal culture. The film is clear on the dangers and discrimination Janzen faces daily both online and off as her friends remark on the case of a trans woman being arrested for using the ladies’ bathroom and later TV news footage shows president Duterte pardoning a US soldier who had been convicted of murdering a transgender sex worker. As the film begins, Janzen’s boyfriend breaks up with her over his discomfort about publicly dating a trans woman, implying that he is ashamed or embarrassed in his inability to explain the relationship to his older conservative parents. An online date then goes south when he realises she is trans. As her friends tell her Theo seems too good to be true especially as his social media only contains professionally taken photos and no personal posts or connections but Janzen is blinded by love and deeply wants to believe that the relationship is “real”.

That might go someway to explaining why she puts up with so much nonsense from Theo and continues to interact with him even after he calls her a series of slur words, leaves her waiting at the airport for a fake meeting, and then dumps her in a Jollibee after convincing her to travel all the way to Manila knowing she has no return ticket or place to stay. Playing out almost like an incredibly perverse Cyrano de Bergerac, the film at times pushes Janzen into the background in favour of exploring Beanie’s motivations for her seemingly senseless, sadistic cruelty, but subsequently allows her to reclaim centrestage in owning her own story by taking a stand against transphobic bullying on behalf of the other victims and her wider community while very much claiming the moral high ground by wishing Beanie nothing but peace though whether she’ll ever find it is anybody’s guess. 

Where Is the Lie? screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival. 

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Images: © Anima Studios, Kroma Entertainment, December 2022.© 2022 Kroma Entertainment. All Rights Reserved

Bear Man (웅남이, Park Sung-kwang, 2023)

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According to an ancient legend, bears who eat garlic and mugwort can become human though it’s not exactly clear why they’d want to. The debut film from Park Sung-kwang, Bear Man (웅남이, Woongnami) as its name suggests follows a pair of bear cubs who decide to give things a go in the human world but with wildly differing results as one is adopted by the researcher who allowed them to escape and the other by a vicious gangster who exploits him for his violent capabilities and shows him little love. 

Love is something Woongnam (Park Sung-woong) got a lot of thanks to his devoted mother and though not exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer had forged a promising career as a local policeman before he was let go after falling into a kind of funk on overhearing his father on the phone suggesting that the life expectancy for a regular bear is only 25 so he might not have much time left. Thanks to his nature as a bear man, Woongnam ages much faster than everyone else and already appears to be middle-aged though he is also blessed with immense strength and agility. After agreeing to bend the law by helping his feckless friend Malbong (Lee Yi-kyung) win in at illegal gambling Woognam comes to the attention of a group of police detectives investigating a shady gangster who notice a man looking just like Woongnam taking out a host of bad guys at the harbour. 

There is something quite poignant in the puppy-like existence of Woongbok (also Park Sung-woong) who keeps looking up to his boss as a father figure with a mixture of fear and longing. He gazes enviously at a family crossing the road in front of him and later visits Woognam’s home where Woongnam’s mother thinks that he’s Woognam and tries to feed him his favourite foods while he just looks on silently without expression. Where Woongnam is basically good, not too bright but heart in the right place, Woongbok has been raised as creature of violence by his intimidating father figure and carries a threatening aura with his slick haircut and tailored suit. 

The police want Woongnam to pose as Woongbok so they can take down the gangsters who have not only been trafficking drugs but also dabble in scientific research into viruses and their cures apparently about to unleash an epidemic in China to profit off the drug sales. It’s not all that clear what the scientists who released the bears were actually researching though there is a kind of parallel in the fact the other pair seemingly settled down, adjusted to their new environment and had a few cubs while Woongnam and Woongbok ended up becoming humans with bear-like abilities. Woongnam has to be prevented from entering hibernation and sleeps flat out like a bear but otherwise keeps his true nature secret even while covertly helping the townspeople out getting rid of beehives and freeing trucks stuck in the mud. 

That would be about the extent of “policing” in this kind of small-town where there’s nothing much to do but catch fish in the river and chat to wild boar. Park builds on the surreality of everyday rural life with mounting absurdities such as the parade of teenagers who troop through the convenience store where Woongnam’s live-streaming friend Malbong works each of whom he is largely able to unmask thanks to his keen sense of smell, and the polytunnel that doubles as a gambling den for down on their luck farmers. Woongnam’s biggest regret is losing his position as a police officer and it’s his desire to get it back to make things up to the people who raised him that encourages him to go along with the detectives’ crazy plan even if means he has to undergo weird martial arts training inspired by Drunken Master and take lessons from a strange movement coach in how to walk like a gangster. Yet in the end it’s Woongbok’s innocent desire for familial love that becomes a source of salvation, turning against his gangster brethren to protect the warmth of Woongnam’s family home. Quirky in the extreme and defiantly absurd, the film nevertheless has genuine heart in otherwise strange tale of wandering sons and bears of men.

Bear Man screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival. 

Images: © 2023 KIMCHI PICTURES PRODUCTION. ALL Rights Reserved.

Bad Education (黑的教育, Kai Ko, 2022)

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According to a jaded policeman in Kai Ko’s directorial debut Bad Education (黑的教育, Hēi de Jiàoyù), only 10% of people are good and 10% bad with 80% somewhere in the middle depending on the circumstances. As another person puts, even bad people have principles and in an odd way it’s a sadistic gangster who becomes a moral authority teaching the trio at the film’s centre a few valuable lessons in just how far south something can go when you allow yourself to be swayed by peer pressure and adolescent bravado. 

Perhaps intended as a graduation prank, Chang (Berant Zhu) suggests he and his friends Han (Edison Song) and Wang (Kent Tsai) exchange otherwise unspeakable secrets to cement their ongoing friendship through the threat of blackmail and exposure. Chang tells a frankly disgusting story that he raped and impregnated a young woman with learning difficulties while Han claims that he bludgeoned a homeless man to death but no one noticed. The only one to be going on to university, Wang does not have any particularly dark secrets to share. All he can come up with is that he once read his father’s texts and found out he’s having an affair, while otherwise confessing to having stolen the answer sheet to a test. As expected, Chang and Han don’t like his answers and begin to threaten him, pushing Wang back towards the edge of the roof as if they meant to kill him so wouldn’t spill the beans. 

Chan and Han were of course bullshitting, they haven’t done anything of the sort, but they manage to persuade Wang that he’ll have to do something similar to complete the pact. They challenge him to throw paint at a gangster which turns out to be an incredibly bad mistake though to be fair to them, Chan and Han may not have expected Wang to actually do it. It’s only then that they start to realise they aren’t children any more. Actions will have consequences and even if, as Mr. Hsing (Leon Dai) the gangster boss later says, they haven’t done “anything wrong” they’ve gone about everything in the wrong way and will eventually have to pay. Chan looks up at him pleadingly and answers like a child that he’s sorry and won’t do it again, but Mr. Hsing points out that whether he does it again or not is of no interest to him. It’s not what this is about. 

What it’s about is perhaps a different kind of “graduation”, leaving the innocence and naivety of childhood behind for the cynicism of adulthood and the moral greyness of grownup society. Then again, they weren’t all that innocent to begin with that they could come up with heinous crimes to confess and imagine that their friendship would survive it. The policeman says that 80% of people could go either way in most situations, himself included it seems, painting a fairly bleak picture of the contemporary society. Chased through the city by Hsing’s foot soldiers, Chan and Wang end up stealing a taxi from a taxi driver who had just raped the young woman passed out drunk in his car though no one makes much of an effort to help her as each remains fixated on their personal goals such as escaping and fleeing the city. 

In the opening scenes, a lobster had been plucked from a tank and had its legs cut off in a moment of foreshadowing while customers in Mr Hsing’s seafood restaurant with greasy mouths suck on shrimp whose corpses they soon spit out and discard. Something quite similar happens to the boys as the cracks in their friendship are further exposed. Even back on the rooftop, they’d reflected on the class difference between them with Wang, whose father owns a factory he is expected to take over, the only one going to college, while Chan jokes about becoming his driver and Han remarks that he’d like to drive a Maserati (one stands across from him as he’s viciously beaten in his underwear by Hsing’s goons). 

Figuring out they have no underworld connections, Hsing asks for money and the boys immediately look to rich kid Wang only he refuses because it’s too embarrassing to ask his dad for that amount of cash. Engaged in some kind of sadistic power play, Hsing tries to get them to cut each other’s pinkies off with the guys each turning on and blaming each other. Chan too tries to argue that they came back to save Han so he owes them (only they didn’t), while later blaming Wang for going ahead with the dare rather than himself for setting up this stupid prank as a means of having something to remember in their old age. Later he admits his insecurity, uncertain of his own future and frightened that his friends will leave him behind but it’s already too late. Wang ironically fulfils the pact, his graduate rosette fluttering as he does so as if to remind us that he’s now “graduated” from childhood innocence, but ironically destroys rather than cements the boys’ friendship with one chaotic night of violence and terror. Incredibly dark with moments of bleak humour, Bad Education offers a lesson in retribution and the costs of peer pressure and bravado and leaves each of its heroes changed, if not slightly broken, by the realities of a duplicitous adulthood. 

Bad Education screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival. 

Teaser trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Faces of Anne (แอน, Kongdej Jaturanrasmee & Rasiguet Sookkarn, 2022)

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A young woman wakes up in a grimy hotel room with floral wallpaper marked by damp stains. She discovers that the window is frosted over and won’t open while she has no idea of how she got there or who she is but otherwise instinctively knows that the face she sees in the mirror does not belong to her. She tries to call out and hears a voice from an adjacent room telling her to be quiet and that her name is “Anne”. Anne asks her how she knows if she can’t see her, but the voice just tells her that she knows her name is Anne with no further explanation. 

As it turns out in Kongdej Jaturanrasmee & Rasiguet Sookkarn’s Faces of Anne (แอน) every girl in the place has the same name and as gradually becomes apparent are all reflections of a single personality. The key Anne discovers that her face seems to change seemingly at random leaving her uncertain even within the bounds of her fractured identity. A psychiatrist tells her that a name is “not as important as who you are” while encouraging her to learn to accept the face she sees as her own, but she remains confused, abstracted from herself, and unable to reconcile her selfhood with its reflection. Meanwhile, she is stalked by a violent demon in the guise of a deer name Vitigo who wanders the hospital corridors taking out any Annes that it finds. 

What seems to be going on is an attempt to reintegrate the shards of a fractured personality into a coherent whole only it’s manifesting as a massacre of the self as the demon bumps off each of the multiple Annes insisting that only one, the “real” Anne, can be allowed to leave. But then no one is really only one person but presents a series of personas to the outside world all of whom can be said to be “real” even if otherwise inauthentic. In an illuminating flashback, high school girl Anne chats with another couple of girls about fake online profiles where they can share their “real” selves each of which of course have a completely different profile photo much as the serial Annes have a different face. What we can assume to be the key Anne expresses that she just wants to find a place where she can be completely herself and thinks she has one in a relationship with a boyfriend whose face we never see but had shades both of a man who might be her father and the hero of a video game the atmosphere of which seems to have coloured the aesthestics of her eerie mindscape. 

Some might find it easy to dismiss her identity crisis as teenage angst or to suggest that what she’s suffering from is a broken heart though Kongdej Jaturanrasmee & Rasiguet Sookkarn also make reference to a number of problems faced by young people in contemporary Thailand such as online harassment and bullying, sexual harrassment at school and the bad student movement protesting an oppressive educational environment laying bare the pressures on key Anne’s mind that might cause her to become estranged from herself. Asking probing questions about identity, the film wonders if Anne can learn to find herself as distinct from all of these images or if in the end identity and image are inextricably linked to the extent that they can no longer exist distinctly and Anne has no power to identify herself but must rely on the identification of others. Then again, the voice from the other room knows she is Anne without seeing her precisely as she is also Anne, identifying herself in the absence of image. 

Eerie and filled with a Lynchian dread in its hellish lightning and grimy hotel room setting, the film turns Anne’s psychodrama into an existential slasher in which she awaits the arrival of the Final Girl. Retracing her steps, she seeks escape in a pattern of trial and error unwittingly at war with herself even as tussles over identity and authenticity while trying to reconstruct a shattered identity by reclaiming the images of the past or perhaps as simply as the psychiatrist had put it learning to accept the face she now wears as her own. Haunting and empathetic, the film has only sympathy for the wandering ghosts of a fractured mind and the vague hope that together they can put Anne together again. 

Faces of Anne screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival. 

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Images: © M Pictures Entertainment Public Company Limited.

Motherhood (母性, Ryuichi Hiroki, 2022)

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Is love ever really unconditional or are we all just chasing a sense of parental approval even after we become parents ourselves? According to a reporter late into Ryuichi Hiroki’s adaptation of the Kanae Minato novel Motherhood (母性, Bosei), there are only two types of women, mothers and daughters, and it is in some ways a confusion of roles that frustrates the relationship between two women who are never fully able to form a maternal connection. 

Asked by a colleague if she felt her parents loved her, the reporter answers that they were the kind who made her wear a frilly blouse with a big collar for the school play and got her new shoes for Sports Day suggesting that their love was in its way performative and they cared more about how other parents would judge them than they did about her feelings seeing as she actively hated filly blouses with big collars. Alternatively, it may have been another kind of misunderstanding in they got her these things because they thought they should make her happy and took her rejection of them as resistance. 

The little girl at the film’s centre, Sayaka whose name is only spoken in the film’s closing scenes, encounters something similar when she asks her grandmother for a Hello Kitty bag having been presented with one featuring a beautifully embroidered bird. Her mother, Rumiko (Erika Toda), finds this highly offensive thinking that Sayaka has rejected her grandmother’s lovingly handmade gift in asking for something shop bought featuring a popular character, but Sayaka treasured her grandmother’s embroidery and just wanted her to sew Hello Kitty instead. 

In her voiceover, Rumiko implies that her annoyance is also born of shame in that Sayaka has forgotten everything she taught her about consideration for the feelings of others, while in her own the pain in Sayaka’s eyes is clear. She feels slighted, almost threatened by her mother’s hushed reaction advising her that it’s better to stick with birds because then people will realise that’s what she likes and go out of their way to give her bird-themed presents. The irony is that, at least in the way Rumiko tells it, her mother Hanae (Mao Daichi) believed they were such a happy family because she accepted their love “straightforwardly” when really it was anything but. Fixated on Hanae, Rumiko lives her entire life to make her mother happy even down to her choice of husband despite warnings from all sides that they are otherwise not particularly well suited. 

The reporter makes a point of commenting on another diner’s poor table manners in a restaurant with the result that he gets up and leaves, feeling uncomfortable in the wake of her rude intrusion. She explains that she was brought up to feel as if she always had to get everything right as if being loved depended on being good much as Rumiko had felt. Little Sayaka is more or less the same, constantly chasing maternal affection though receiving little in return as Rumiko struggles to transition from the role of daughter to mother and continues to fixate on Hanae caring little for anything else. When the family are forced to vacate their cute forest cabin of a home to move in with father Satoshi’s (Masaki Miura) harridan of a mother (Atsuko Takahata), Rumiko tries the same tactic believing that if she can become “good” in her mother-in-law’s eyes then she will eventually accept her little realising that she is simply a difficult woman who will never be like her own mother and only finally embraces her as a daughter as she lovingly mothers her long after she has become bedridden and appears to be suffering from dementia. 

Then again, perhaps the constant nagging, a tendency to run people down and push them away, are also frustrated ways of showing love and ironically what the mother-in-law might have wanted was someone to fight back as Sayaka tried to do much to Rumiko’s chagrin as she accused her of ruining her attempt to curry favour. Sayaka finds a diary belonging to her father, Satoshi, which recounts memories of domestic violence which he rebelled against indirectly through taking part in the student protests little caring about the cause only channeling his rage and disillusionment into something that didn’t really matter to him so would make no difference if it failed. She calls him a weak man who hides behind women, forcing Rumiko to take care of his mother while otherwise unwilling to stand up for himself or take responsibility for his family. 

Perhaps men are only fathers or sons too and this one had little idea what to do with a daughter. Naively proposing on the third date, he said he wanted to build a “beautiful home” presumably to escape the one he grew up in attracted as much the genial atmosphere of Hanae’s upper middle class mansion as to Rumiko herself. Hiroki paints the forest-bound “dream home” in nostalgic shades of pastel, lending it almost an uncanny sense of fairytale bliss that the family can never live up to despite Rumiko’s Stepford-esque attempts to become the perfect housewife by essentially becoming her mother. Offering her version of events mainly through a confession to a priest, it’s clear that Rumiko has not been entirely honest before God, but neither of our narrators are really all that reliable even if relating how they felt something happened at the time leaving us less with one concrete version of the truth than a tragic tale of love frustrated by the codified roles of mother and daughter along with maternal jealously and anxiety. 

Nevertheless, they are united by a maternal legacy and the act of ensuring the line will continue connecting all of them to the future through the chain of motherhood. The reporter’s thinking may have a degree of internalised misogyny as she remarks on the societal prejudice that regards an unmotherly woman as hardly a woman at all while giving no recognition to women who are neither mother nor daughter in her contemplation of the maternal instinct which she otherwise regards as learned rather than innate. Asking for definitions, she comes up with the need to protect one’s child which is perhaps something her mother may have lacked when it counted but did not necessarily mean she had no love for her at all despite her fits of resentment. Shot with a degree of eeriness that dissipates in favour of a darkening realism in the later stages, Hiroki’s heightened drama nevertheless suggests that an equilibrium can be found in the maternal relationship even if it is painfully won.

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

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Images: ©2022 “MOTHERHOOD” FILM PARTNERS

The Cord of Life (脐带, Qiao Sixue, 2022)

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“The flowers of the Steppe can’t bloom forever,” an old woman explains somewhat cheerfully though not really knowing to whom she is speaking in Qiao Sixue’s deeply moving Mongolian drama, The Cord of Life (脐带). A young man struggles to find the balance between embracing his traditional culture and the desire for modernity, but begins to discover new direction after taking his elderly mother who is suffering with dementia back to the grasslands in search of the place she calls “home”.

Naranzug has several “homes” throughout the film though none of them are perhaps exactly what she means which maybe more a feeling than a physical location. In any case the first of them is the home of her eldest son, a flat in the city where they’ve installed a door with bars on it on her room to stop her wandering off. Apparently the neighbours have been complaining and it’s already led to a physical altercation which has serious financial implications for the family. Younger brother Alus (Yidar) has long been living in Beijing where he makes a living as a musician combining electronica with the Morin Khuur fiddle he learned to play as a child. When he’s called back to help, he’s shocked both by the progression of his mother’s condition, she no longer recognises him, and the way his brother and his wife treat her though as Naranzug later says herself they are quite clearly exhausted and are doing the best they can with the resources available to them. 

Alus particularly objected to the prison cell-style door and the practice of locking his mother up which seemed so undignified, though he later resorts to something similar himself in the titular cord, a literal rope that he uses to tie her to him so that she won’t get lost or injure herself. At one point he loops the rope around her waist and pulls her as if she were a stubborn cow unwilling to leave the paddock, coaxing her back inside the house with his music. Several times Naranzug is liked to a wandering animal who should be free upon the Steppe, firstly the lost cow but also a mother sheep to a lost lamb she later delivers to a paddock where she sings a folk song to encourage a ewe to feed it in a metaphorical allusion to her inability to recognise her own lost son who is also a lost lamb searching for his mother. 

She repeatedly asks Alus to take her “home” but he struggles to understand what she means because to him he already has, reminding her that their house on the Steppe is also “home” before realising that she pines for her childhood and long dead parents who lived by a long forgotten tree. The rope between them becomes a surrogate umbilical cord that allows them to an extent to reconnect as Alus becomes more familiar with life on the Steppe as its atmosphere pours into him in much the same way the sheep drank from the ewe or the farmer transferred fuel from one bike to another. “It shouldn’t all be Morin Khuur and throat singing” the comparatively traditionalist Tana encourages him, “we’re not living in the past”, giving him freedom and permission to embrace both the new in electronica and the traditional in the sounds of the plains. It’s not for no reason that Naranzug is always telling him to “listen”, for music is everywhere. 

Qiao Sixue’s roving camera captures a real sense of poignancy along with mysticism in the moving final scenes in which Alus must say farewell to his mother, letting her go or perhaps return to the embrace of others in the “home” that she was always seeking. She thanks him for returning her to this “happy place” of music, fire, and dance that seems like something from another time or perhaps out of time. As she reminds him, the river never stops flowing though the flowers on Steppe cannot bloom forever. Through a series of surreal adventures, mother and son begin to reconnect while Alus quite literally rediscovers his roots and then like the river keeps going moving forward under the Mongolian skies taking the past with him into a new future on a journey towards a new home.

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

Original trailer (Simplfied Chinese subtitles only)

Abang Adik (富都青年, Jin Ong, 2023)

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Displaced brothers find themselves trapped on the margins of a prosperous city in Jin Ong’s gritty drama, Abang Adik (富都青年). Essentially a story of brotherhood, Ong explores the fates of those largely cast out from mainstream society who must as one character later says be forever watchful, keeping a place to hide and to which escape while denied the most ordinary of things such as home and family for no reasons other than bureaucracy and prejudice. 

Both Abang (Chris Wu Kang-ren) and Adi (Jack Tan) were born in Malaysia but are technically undocumented and finding it difficult to replace their identification without things like birth certificates or access to other family members to help replace them. While Abang, who is deaf, is earnest and determined to do everything properly, Adi is sick of waiting for things to work out in his favour and has begun working as a middleman for traffickers to earn enough money to pay for a fake ID while supplementing his income with sex work. The pair are aided by social worker who tries to do her best to help get their documentation in order but finds herself with an uphill battle against implacable bureaucracy and governmental indifference. 

Ong spends most time with the brothers but makes clear the oppressive quality of the world inhabited by those trapped on the margins such as the undocumented migrants who become victims of a police raid following a tip from a broker taking kickbacks. As Adi later remarks they ask for workers to come and then they want them to go, irritated to see a policeman carrying a watch he appears to have just accepted as a bribe. With no other family members around them, the brothers have been cared for by a neighbour, transgender sex worker Money, who is like them locked out of mainstream society just for being who she is while Abang finds himself further disadvantaged by his disability and the difficulties involved in finding employment. 

Abang falls in love with a refugee from Myanmar but her family will soon be moved on to another country, while Ali develops feelings for one of his clients though she soon tells him she’s planning to move to another area to get married and enjoy a more stable if perhaps less financially comfortable life outside of the city. He offers to marry her instead, but really has nothing to give her other than his body. When a tragic accident sends the brothers on the run, they realise they have no one to rely on but each other and no real place to go. In a poignant monologue in the film’s closing scenes, Abang complains to a well-meaning monk that he is incapable of understanding his life or how difficult it has been for him to simply go on existing. He wishes that he could speak, that he had a family, that he had a safe space to call home and was not forever looking over his shoulder in case he had to leave in a hurry but instead all he gets is cosmic irony sacrificing himself to save Adi in the belief that he still has a chance at a better life if only he can swallow his pride, meet his father, and get an ID card. 

In the end they are both displaced, forcibly separated and pushed in opposing directions. Abang revisits their childhood, making paper aeroplanes as he once had with Adi and saying a final farewell with their ritualistic practice of cracking hardboiled heads on each other’s heads finding for a moment an identity as brothers reflected in each other. Ong shoots their marginalised existence in vibrant colour but also captures a sense of the city as oppressive and unwelcoming, as if it were actively ejecting them with its ubiquitous police patrols and constant danger while authority figures are largely corrupt and uncaring save the earnest social worker who ironically pays a heavy price just for wanting to help those who need it most. Melancholy if not exactly bleak, the film positions the brotherhood between the two men as a course of salvation allowing them to overcome a sense of despair in a society that seems all but closed to them.

Abang Adik screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival. 

Original trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)