Category: Osaka Asian Film Festival 2024

A Weather Report (胴鳴り, Yu Kajino, 2024)

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A successful television writer is confronted with the mistakes of his past when the teenage daughter he abandoned before birth suddenly tracks him down in Yu Kajino’s indie drama, A Weather Report (胴鳴り, Donari). The film does indeed feature several storms of the more literal kind, but dances around the fallout of the writer’s unexpected reconnection along with his ongoing inability understand himself or the nature of his relationships.

This is in a sense ironic, as Omori’s (Ryuta Furuya) big hit show Cliffs of Love is a poignant romantic drama about two people who are too shy to reveal their feelings openly and consequently can only behave in ways which seem bizarre. Omori later has a similar moment to the lovers from the show when he attempts to take his relationship with casual girlfriend Satsuki further only to find her on a completely different page and explaining to him that they are both people who don’t know how to love or be loved so they were never really destined to be together for the long term. 

Even so, the man we see now, if perhaps a bit of a sleaze, does not really seem like the “human shit” his former partner Mayumi describes him to be. It’s difficult to know what brought the relationship to an end with such apparent recrimination, though the reappearance of his daughter Hikari confronts him with the possibly questionable decision he made to stay out of her life having been told by Mayumi that she intended to raise the child alone and didn’t need his input. He abandoned her with a sense of relief born of parental anxiety, yet now begins to act like a father protecting and nurturing her after she comes all the way from Niigata on the train to find him having fallen out with her mother who has taken up with a smarmy business man, Numata. 

Hikari later ironically remarks that she was never really interested in her mother until they were separated and is getting to know other sides of her thanks to talking to others that knew her. In another way, it might have been the reverse with her father who was otherwise absent from her life leading her to create her own image of him which meeting threatens to shatter. Omori dreams of attending a theme park with his now teenage daughter who is clearly too old for such things, only to suddenly realise she wasn’t with him any more and feel unexpectedly anxious for her. 

It seems that Hikari was hoping he’d be able to do something to oppose her mother’s relationship with Numata though for obvious reasons he is reluctant to do so, politely listening to Numata’s conservative political ranting without saying a word. She sees them float up like ghosts in a hotel corridor and is somehow haunted by their presence though she says she doesn’t mind her mother dating only taking a personal dislike to Numata who was a frequent customer at the bar her mother ran. As for Mayumi herself she too seems to struggle with loving and being loved, still incredibly angry with Omori all these years later while otherwise drinking heavily and playing Momoe Yamaguchi’s Last Song For You on repeat.

In any case, though the unexpected reconnection with her father may strain the relationship she has with her mother it eventually seems to give her a new kind of strength and maturity even as she contends with a self-centred boyfriend who simply rides off on his bike when she challenges him about sleeping with her friend and tries to adjust to the ironic role reversal of her mum moving on by getting a boyfriend leaving her largely home alone. Omori continues to narrate his life while researching his next drama and getting suckered by the bizarre claims of a potential subject just as he begins to interrogate himself and the regret and failures of his life. Set in picturesque Niigata with the fabulous home in which Hikari and her mother live surrounded by the nature, the film has an elemental quality in which a change in the weather can signal calamity or liberation but also a sense of peace amid the serenity of unexpected reconnections.

A Weather Report screened as part of this year’s Osaka Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Momoe Yamaguchi – Sayonara no Mukougawa (Last Song for You)

13 Bombs (13 Bom di Jakarta, Angga Dwimas Sasongko, 2023)

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There’s an interesting juxtaposition in opening scenes of Angga Dwimas Sasongko’s action thriller 13 Bombs (13 Bom di Jakarta). A security guard in a cash van listens with exasperation to a radio broadcast voicing the nation’s economic decline before remarking that his mortgage keeps going up but his pay stays the same. Meanwhile, across town, two youngsters celebrate after receiving a huge payout from the cryptocurrency exchange app startup they’ve been running, drinking and partying oblivious to the poverty that surrounds them. Yet it’s the two youngsters that have unwittingly spurred a desperate man towards revolution, giving him the false idea of a utopia uncorrupted by money.

The interesting thing about the terrorists is that after attacking the cash van they blow the doors open and then leave without the money, allowing the people to pick it up instead. The explosion was apparently one of several more to come as the gang have placed 13 bombs around the city which they are holding to ransom, demanding to be paid in bitcoin solely through the boys’ exchange. The level of the crypto kids’ complicity is hard to discern, but it soon becomes clear they weren’t up for loss of life even if there’s a large payout at the end of it though they don’t really trust the police either. 

The police, or more precisely, the Counter Terrorism team, don’t come out of this very well. They’re originally quite reluctant to view the incidents as “terrorism” because that will make everything very “complicated” and also worsen the already precarious financial situation. They also seem to be fairly blindsided, arguing amongst themselves about the proper course of action with the sensible and reliable Karin (Putri Ayudya) often shouted down for relying too much on gut instinct as in her decision to trust bitcoin boys William (Ardhito Pramono) and Oscar (Chicco Kurniawan) only for them to immediately run away hoping to find the gang’s hideout for themselves after being disturbed by a strange message from the gang branding them as their allies.

Bitcoin seems like a strange thing for the revolutionaries to pin their hopes on, though it later seems they hope to do away “money” in its entirety, though it’s true enough that all of them have suffered because of the evils of contemporary capitalism. Many were victims of the same pyramid scheme, one man losing everything after his mother invested the family fortune and died soon after, and another scarred by the suicide of his wife and later death of his child. You can’t say that they don’t have a point when the press the authorities on their failure to protect the poor along with their uncomfortable cosiness with wealth and power. As their leader says, people starve to death every day because of poverty or die earlier than they would have because of a lack of access to healthcare yet the authorities don’t seem to be doing much at all to combat those sorts of “crimes”.

Nevertheless, there’s tension in the group with some opposing leader Arok’s (Rio Dewanto) increasingly cavalier attitude to human life and worrying tendency to suddenly change their well designed plans. The battle is essentially on two fronts, the police stalking them with traditional firepower and Arok fighting back with technology, harnessing the power of the internet to disguise his location while hacking police systems and public broadcasting alike to propagate his message of resistance against corrupt capitalism and oppressive poverty. Counter Terrorism does not appear to be very well equipped to deal with his new threat, but can seemingly call on vast reserves of armed troops even if in the end it’s mostly down to maverick officer Karin to raid the villains’ base largely on her own trying to rescue the boys after realising they are trying to help her after all.

These action sequences are dynamic and extremely well choreographed even if some of the narrative progressions lean towards the predictable and the final gambit somewhat far fetched in its implications. Then again, it’s also surprising that Counter Terrorism doesn’t seem to have much security and should perhaps have considered paying a little more for bulletproof glass in the control room. The subversive irony of the seeing the words “New Hope” and “deactivated” on the final screens cannot be overstated even as a kind of order is eventually restored in an otherwise unjust city.

13 Bombs screened as part of this year’s Osaka Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Sumiko 22 (スミコ22, Sawako Fukuoka, 2024)

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22-year-old Sumiko is beginning to fear that she’s losing her sense of self. Even when she hangs out with her friends, she can’t think of anything interesting to say nor does anything they say spark much of an interest. Sawako Fukuoka’s breezy, New Wave-inspired dramedy captures the sense of malaise among young people today who are quickly disillusioned with the conventionality of a stereotypical adulthood while becoming aware that all that awaits them is the constant exploitation of eternal overtime and compulsory afterwork socialising.

That might be one reason why Sumiko (Haruna Hori) quit the job she got after graduating university after only a few months. But then by contrast, her friend describes her 9 to 5 office job as “wonderful,” though adding that she works for a more benign company who have a minimum overtime policy and seem to care about her work/life balance. Her other friend is not so lucky, explaining that he’s expected to work from 7am to 11pm, though can take half the month off. He breaks down in a karaoke booth, in tears screaming that he wants to quit his job. It’s all a bit too much for Sumiko who makes a quiet exit to grab some fresh air. 

Though Sumiko puts a cheerful face on it, we often see her seemingly caught motionless in moments of complete and total despair. She doesn’t seem to know what she’s doing with her life and has no real sense of direction. Nevertheless, we can see that through her sometimes strange enoucounters she begins to regain an interest in the world along with a desire for forward motion, taking an active role in her life by offering a slice of pizza from the restaurant where she works to a man who plays the recorder in the underpass she’s sometimes fantasised about dating.

We see her gleefully draw a little cat in the sauce on top of her salisbury steak only to be middle rebuked by a radio host who can’t abide such childishness, but in a sense this is exactly what Sumiko is striving for the freedom to be cheerful and creative rather than a soulless drone valued only for her productivity. Another of her roommates also has his quirks, displaying a toy dinosaur called Tom on his bike that so impresses the proprietor of a restaurant that she makes him a little bow tie.

Sumiko lives a relaxed life, working at the pizza restaurant and otherwise spending her days wandering the neighbourhood, playing frisbee with her roommate Hana, or hanging out with friends. A female convenience store worker flirts with her awkwardly, first bonding over a shared love of cats and then admiring the line of her arms and the way they bend at the elbow. She watches a couple fight at a vending machine and then worries that she’s been rude in informing a woman wearing white jeans that her underwear line was visible when she bent down to tie her laces. The woman later seemingly becomes a friend, appearing in a short film Sumiko makes capturing the quirky surreality of her life.

Drawing inspiration from the French New Wave, Fukuoka adds a deadpan voiceover to narrate Sumiko’s aimless days each broken into sections from her diary complete with an adorable crayon doodle. Sumiko might be hit by small moments of despair but otherwise remains cheerful, embracing the simplicity of her life along with the company of her friends even if it is sometimes a little hard to bear. She thinks she was born to eat cake and is obsessed with salmon, finding the moments of small joy in her life and along with them a new sense of purpose and direction that might in its own way be simply to stay still, living as she pleases and embracing her aimlessness as freedom rather than anxiety. Cute and quirky in its surreality the film captures something of life’s absurdity, but also displays a boundless empathy for those like Sumiko who aren’t so much lost as aimlessly on their way to the place they were they were always supposed to be.

Sumiko 22 screened as part of this year’s Osaka Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Amalock (あまろっく, Kazuhiro Nakamura, 2024)

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The purpose of a lock, at least far as those on water are concerned, is to keep everything on an even keel and protect the surrounding area from flooding. From the lock’s point of view it might be a thankless task, people never notice you’re there unless you’ve somehow failed at your job but the lock is ever present and always about its duty even if it might be difficult to understand. For all of these reasons, the heroine of Kazuhiro Nakamura’s gentle indie drama had come to think of her father as the titular Amalock (あまろっく) but often resented him for it, seeing him only as lazy and irresponsible.

For Ryutaro (Tsurube Shofukutei), meanwhile, laughter was the only way to make life bearable. His motto was to always enjoy the things that happen in life be they good or bad which is why he puts out a congratulations sign when his grown up daughter Yuko (Noriko Eguchi) returns home after being made redundant. Despite being good at her job and in receipt of several commendations for her work, Yuko is simply not pleasant to be around and creates tension in the office with her grumpy aloofness and tendency to make younger male members of staff cry in front of her. 

The implication is that Yuko became the exact opposite of the father she thought was feckless and of no use to anyone, yet mainly finds herself lying in front of the TV in a tracksuit mainlining snacks exactly as he had done when she was a child. Seemingly trapped in an intense depression, she makes no attempt to find new work for eight years, instead being supported by her father’s moribund ironmongers. The surprise news that he plans to remarry 20 years after her mother’s death to a woman barely 20 who works at the townhall sends shockwaves through her life and turns her into a petulant, resentful teenager who can’t accept her new stepmother.

The situation is of course ridiculous. Yuko is almost 40 and Saki (Ayami Nakajo), Ryutaro’s new wife, makes no attempt to wield authority over her beyond the well-meaning attempts to introduce potential husbands more because she thinks it would be nice for her to have someone than she wants her out of the house. Even so, Yuko’s problem is that she can’t understand the way her father works and that his cheerful attitude to life has value to those around him who are buoyed up by his friendliness and easy going nature even when times are hard. Like the Amalock, he’s always been there quietly supporting her despite her scorn and resentment, preventing her from becoming overwhelmed by the floodwaters of life tragedies.

In his way, he’s done something similar for Saki who ironically only ever wanted what Yuko could have had in a happy “harmonious” family having experienced a series of troubles of her own. Saki honours Yuko’s mother’s memory and includes it in her vision of the “family,” but struggles to get through to Yuko who remains difficult and resentful unable to see the value in the kind of life that Saki wants or in herself as human who might benefit more from interacting with others. The twin stressors of unexpected tragedy and a tentative marriage proposal from a man who turned out to know her little better than she thought begin to shift her perspective allowing her to see what it really was her father brought to the world and what she might bring to it too if only she were less serious about things that don’t really matter.

That is after all how you find your way to a harmonious life, becoming an Amalock for others who can also be an Amalock for you and might be willing to make a few compromises to make that happen. Set in the tranquil town of Amagasaki, Nakamura’s gentle tale captures a little of life’s absurdities along with the simple power of good humour to make life easier to bear. Rooted in tragedy as it may be, Ryutaro’s philosophy of making life a celebration has its merits and ones which are not lost on a newly enlightened Yuko becoming more and more like her father but also like herself at the heart of a harmonious family.

Amalock screened as part of this year’s Osaka Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Snowdrop (スノードロップ, Kota Yoshida, 2024)

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As the heroine of Kota Yoshida’s Snowdrop (スノードロップ) says close to the end of the film, you can become used to living in miserable circumstances and bear it because it is your normal but being suddenly confronted by them does nothing other than compound your misery. At least that’s how it seemed to her while attempting to register for social security payments after her father suffers a workplace accident and needs surgery they can’t afford in order to be well enough to be employed and earn money. 

Then again, her family circumstances are a little unusual in that her father, Eiji, left when she was little only to return 25 years later and ask to be taken in again swearing he’d work hard. Nearly 20 years after that, Naoko (Aki Nishihara) has had to give up working to care for her mother who has advanced dementia and requires round the clock care leaving Eiji as the only breadwinner though he is also elderly and working only as a newspaper delivery man which already makes it very difficult for them to make ends meet. It’s Eiji’s boss who suggests they apply for government help so that Eiji can get treatment for the gout that’s affecting his legs and get well enough to work again, though it’s clear that the family feel a degree of shame about the idea of accepting assistance even though as social worker Munemura points out it’s something that’s available to everyone should they ever need it.

The problem is however that you have to prove that you’re struggling which can be a long and difficult process. Naoko later describes it as a kind of humiliation, that she was forced to parade her penury and by doing so was confronted by the misery of her circumstances. Munemura describes her as a very earnest woman and is impressed by the way she meticulously fills in all the correct forms while the house, when they come to inspect it, is tidy and well kept (something which might actually go against you in other countries) even if they’re eying up her car and wondering if she really needs it. Munemura also sympathises with her on a personal level, realising from the forms that Eiji must have been absent from the family for an extended period and that they suffered because of it while it must also have been hard for Naoko caring for her severely ill mother alone for over 10 years.

Naoko herself has a largely beaten down, defeated aura in which she’s given up on the idea of a future for herself. She later describes caring for her mother as its own kind of escape in that she always found it difficult to get along with other people and never felt confident at work so being a carer became a kind of identity for her that she also feared losing if they were successful in their application and were able to secure nursing assistance for her mother. As well-meaning as Munemura is, she is not perhaps in the position of being able to see or deal with all sides of the issues someone like Naoko faces and is therefore shocked by the dark place her despair eventually takes her. Munemura faces a similar issue with a woman in her 70s whose claims that the cleaning job they insisted she take was simply too difficult for her at her age is treated with less than total sympathy by her slightly more cynical colleague.

A largely unexplored subplot in which it’s implied there was another sister who was given up because of the father’s abandonment and the family’s poverty hints at a deep-seated childhood trauma but also fissure within the family itself as Naoko explains her actions solely with the justification “we were a family” as if she too feared being left behind or abandoned even while her older sister has evidently been able have a family of her own though is also very sympathetic towards Naoko and in no way holds her responsible anything that happened. All she really wanted was an escape from her misery, which she may in a way get with the fresh shoots of a new life already visible to her if only she can embrace them. Shot with a detached naturalism, Yoshida’s drama is often bleak though does not lack for empathy and especially for those like Naoko who are largely left to deal with their misery all alone.

Snowdrop screened as part of this year’s Osaka Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

The Lyricist Wannabe (填詞L, Norris Wong, 2023)

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Sometimes a dream might have come true only we never really noticed. In Norris Wong’s autobiographically inspired drama The Wannabe Lyricist (填詞L), a young woman battles her way towards becoming a Cantopop songwriter yet perhaps she already is one by virtue of her constant act of lyric writing. What she craves is the validation of having a song published, yet experiences setbacks at every step of the way that encourage her to doubt her talent or the right to continue chasing her dreams.

At a particularly low point after being taken on by a music producer to work with a spoilt influencer who’s getting studio time as some kind of favour, Sze (Chung Suet Ying) is told that her lyrics are no good and that after struggling so hard for six years perhaps she ought to take the hint and accept she isn’t suited to this line of work. It’s an act of intense cruelty, though one in part motivated by a well-meaning faux pas. In her excitement, she told the influencer she’d write lyrics for her album for free just to be published, but the palpable sense of desperation seems to have put the influencer off unable to have confidence in the work that Sze herself has devalued.

She encounters something similar during a partnership with an aspiring pop star who says he likes her lyrics but then drops the bombshell that he plans to sing in Mandarin because it’s a bigger audience. Ironically, on a trip to Taipei to sell his album she’s told that his accent is no good for the local market and while they like the song she worked on she later realises that they hired another lyricist for “real” release without even telling her. What’s more, tones don’t matter while singing in Mandarin whereas lyric writing in Cantonese is a painstaking process of trying to ensure that the tone of the word fits the melody. Aside from its political implications, not only does the pop star’s arbitrary decision to just sing it Mandarin ruin the lyrical flow she spent so long perfecting but entirely disrespects her work.

After deciding to take a break from trying to make it in music, Sze gets a job working at a ridesharing app startup where she’s roped in to create a jingle but once again her hopes are dashed when the business strays into a legal grey area and several of the drivers are arrested. While the app’s creator silently cries in his office, his female colleague ponders going somewhere else, “anywhere that doesn’t punish dreamers” which seems like a nod not only towards an oppressive capitalism that values only marketability but equally the increasingly oppressive atmosphere of the nation’s political realities. In a way this is what Sze ends up doing too, putting geographical distance between herself and the failure of her dreams by returning to the land which as the farmer says never lies to you, you reap what sow.

Yet for all her drive and perseverance there are others who view Sze’s obsession with her dreams as selfish and self-involved complaining that she rarely considers the feelings of others and neither notices nor cares if she may have hurt or inconvenienced them. She’s told that her lyrics are hollow because she lacks life experience but also is incapable of empathising and cannot see anything outside of her quest to become a lyricist. She watches other people move on, her brother getting married, friends enjoying career success etc while she’s still stuck looking for her big break only for something to go wrong just as everything was about to go right.

Wong signals the playful qualities of her fantasies though use of onscreen illustrations and even a karaoke-style video along with the nostalgic quality of the early 2000s setting of Sze’s schooldays with its MSN messenger and ICQ. Sze may be “dragged along by the melody” in more ways than one as she tries to make peace with her dreams and her future and find some way of living in harmony with the rhythms of the world around her but eventually comes to realise that she was a lyricist all along no matter what anyone else might have tried to convince her she was.

The Lyricist Wannabe screened as part of this year’s Osaka Asian Film Festival and opens in UK cinemas 15th March courtesy of Cine Asia.

Original trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Blue Imagine (ブルーイマジン, Urara Matsubayashi, 2024)

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Over the past few years, there have been a series of scandals exposing a culture rampant sexual harassment and abuse which has long been an inextricable part of the Japanese film industry. Just recently, a director very like the one in Urara Matsubayashi’s indie drama Blue Imagine (ブルーイマジン) was arrested following several accusations of sexual assault though like his film counterpart insists that he has done nothing wrong and all his relationships were consensual. 

This is the battle that the women face. When Noeru (Mayu Yamaguchi), an aspiring actress, tries to take her case to the press she’s first met by a scruffy reporter who puts it to her that she willingly participated in a game and her problem is she didn’t get her half of the bargain rather than having been victimised by a predatory man. The reporter claims that they have women like that in the office who are keen to accompany older men for drinks or dinner in the hopes of getting ahead. In retrospect, one could see Tagawa’s treatment of her as a kind of grooming. He love bombs her with praise for her talent and then half promises her a leading role in his upcoming film before attempting to take advantage her. He insists he’s done nothing wrong, and perhaps on some level believes he simply seduced the women he assaulted unable to see how the power he wields over them prevents them from refusing or resisting him. Then again, he and his producer routinely engage in misogynistic banter and wilfully give false hope to the actors who take part in his workshops hoping to bolster their chances of landing professional gigs. 

Eventually it’s this wilful crushing of dreams that begins to get to Noeru along with the knowledge that Tagawa is still out there probably doing the same thing to other women aided and abetted by a misogyinistc culture that prevents the women from speaking out through shame and social stigma. When Noeru tells her brother, a lawyer, what happened to her he snaps back that this is why he didn’t want her to become an actress as if she’s somehow brought it on herself. A female reporter who treats their case with sympathy encounters something similar when her editor is relcutant to publish because to him it’s just how things work in the entertainment industry so there’s not really a story in it. 

Yet the waters are muddied a little by a sub plot revolving around the concept of compensated dating or as it’s now called “sugar dating” in which young women “date” wealthy older men who provide them with material goods rather than money. One of Noeru’s friends encounters the dangerous side of the arrangement when her Daddy becomes violent and possessive, threatening to leak nude photos of her if she chooses to break up with him. Her friend Yurina (Yui Kitamura) disapproves of what she’s doing which is in effect what the actresses were accused of in engaging in, a solely transactional relationship. A young man Noeru meets who lives in the floors above the refuge she later begins helping out at sees some of their fliers but immediately says they aren’t really for him, which seems like an ironic comment though it’s also of course true that men also suffer sexual harassment from both men and women while facing a similar but different level of social stigma to the women who are just beginning to find the strength to speak out thanks to their newfound solidarity.

Much of this is due to the efforts of Michiyo who runs Blue Imagine to support women who’ve suffered sexual assault or violence. Her Filipina barmaid Jessica also suffered domestic abuse at the hands of her Japanese husband which was compounded by her vulnerability as foreign national knowing her husband could use her immigration status as a further tool to control her while she had little access to help or support.Yet it’s she who tells Noeru that silence is also complicity and she should speak out to the extent that she is able in order to improve the situation for women in the film industry or at least put a stop to Tagawa’s abuse of power.

Confronted at a press conference for his film that is still shockingly going ahead, Tagawa denies everything while the leading actress is forced to say that he was a perfect gentleman only later asking why he and the producer bullied her into a nude scene that wasn’t in her contract or why it was so important for her to take off all her clothes. Pressed by the women for a explantation for his assaults he offers only that his sexual desire was too powerful. The female reporter and her colleague bemoan the lack of progress over lunch, but also refer to another scandal about a minister and his secretary though it turns out not even to be the one the female reporter thought they were talking about. 

In the end, however, it’s less about changing the film industry or in indeed society at large as it is about solidarity between women as symbolised by the closing scenes in which everyone at Blue Imagine sits down to dinner together to enjoy traditional Filipino food prepared by Jessica and another woman who arrives at the refuge after suffering domestic violence. Through bonding with other women in similar positions and making the decision to fight back, Noeru comes to make peace with herself and begins moving past her trauma determined to support other women in the hope that something will finally change. Shot with a down to earth naturalism, the film may at times feel bleak and filled with a sense of despair yet displays its own resilience and eventual serenity born of female solidarity and long-awaited self acceptance,

Blue Imagine screened as part of this year’s Osaka Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)