Philip Yung’s long-awaited return after 2015’s Port of Call is a complex historical epic exploring the corruptions of colonialism as morally compromised cops Aaron Kwok and Tony Leung Chiu-wai forge dangerous connections with organised crime. Review.
A cynical lawyer’s existence is upended when a case he’d assumed would be easy ends in a bereaved mother being sent to prison for seventeen years for a crime she almost certainly did not commit in this often hilarious courtroom drama which puts social inequality on trial. Review.
Heavily censored on its release, Patrick Tam’s 1982 classic stars a young Leslie Cheung as an aimless young man from a wealthy family who spends his time hanging out with friends at the beach until his cousin’s romance with a fugitive from the Japanese Red Army threatens to upset their idle days.
“Where does Edo’s poop go?” it’s a question a child might ask but the rest of us somehow gloss over. In the modern world, if we were suddenly confronted with a lot of problematic poop, we’d have to pay someone to come and take it away and that person might then get paid twice for selling it on. In old Edo, however, manure merchants had to buy their raw materials (well, aside from those they could produce themselves) in the hope of selling them on to peasant farmers desperate for fertiliser. Junji Sakamoto’s Okiku and the World (せかいのおきく, Sekai no Okiku) takes a wry look at this circular economy in the dying days of the feudal era and in the end asks us if a samurai’s shit is really any better than anyone else’s.
In a sense it might be, given that historically samurai are better fed but even they are beginning to feel the pinch these days. Sakamoto opens in 1858 which is the year the Treaty of Amity and Commerce between Japan and the United States was signed opening the door to trade with other nations after two centuries of isolation. It is also 10 years before the Meiji Restoration and the eventual abolition of the samurai. Okiku (Haru Kuroki) is just one woman struggling with this moment of social change. Her samurai father Genbei (Koichi Sato) has been kicked out of his clan for challenging corrupt authority, so now she supports him teaching calligraphy at a local temple while the pair live in a rundown tenement in a forgotten corner of the city.
Fittingly enough, Okiku’s name and the film’s title with it is written in hiragana, but the character usually used to write it is that for chrysanthemum which is also of course a stand in for Japan itself. Genbei muses on what the world is, defining it as an expanse of skies and lamenting that those who have only just realised that the world is vast are ironically unable to look past their small corner of it amid the chaos of the bakumatsu era and what he describes as continual “unrest”. But then politics have little relevance to those living in this particular corner of the world or for those who quite literally shovel the shit day in day out just to be able to shit themselves.
Chuji (Kanichiro) and Yusuke (Sosuke Ikematsu) are manure men who purchase excrement from local communities and fine samurai houses to sell on to provincial farmers, transporting it by boat to a silo out in the country they occasionally bulk out with mud seeing as they’re paid by weight. Yusuke rails against his subjugation, revealing that at one particularly low point he was asked to wipe a samurai’s bum while otherwise constantly humiliated by their doorman who really does seem to think his shit’s better than anyone else’s. But as Yusuke points out, samurai or common man everyone eats and shits even if he describes himself as a literal bottom feeder who is nevertheless essential to the Edo-era economy. Without men like him, the samurai wouldn’t eat either because they’d have no crops to buy. Chuji may berate him for being all mouth and no trousers, but times are changing. Even he later mounts resistance by flinging his produce at a now powerless samurai.
Okiku meanwhile has been rendered mute, her voice silenced by the cruelties of the feudal order leaving her struggling to rediscover her place. She has fallen in love with Chuji, but they think they come from worlds even as they witness them merging and realise there is only one vast expanse under an unending sky. In a decade’s time, it won’t mean anything that Okiku is a samurai’s daughter and Chuji an illiterate peasant but for the moment every step towards each other is transgressive and requires courage in breaking an unthinkable taboo. Sakamoto homes in on the muddiness of this “hopeless shitty world”, the unending drudgery and nihilistic futility of feudalistic life but finally offers his shit-shovelling heroes a new sense of possibility amid the ever expanding vistas of a new society. Presented as a series of black and white vignettes each except the last ending in a moment of vibrant colour, the film finally discovers a sense of serenity as Okiku prepares to reenter the world having finally come to understand her place within it.
A former concert pianist begins to see the world from a different angle after taking a job cleaning houses in Takayuki Kayano’s humanistic dramedy, Hoader on the Border (断捨離パラダイス, Danshari Paradaisu). Ritsuki (Ryo Shinoda) describes the path that took him to his new line of work as mere coincidence, but there is something satisfying to him in helping people get rid of all the rubbish in their lives both literal and metaphorical and doing so in a broadly sympathetic way that encourages the customer to think hard about what it really is they want and don’t want cluttering their existences.
Ritsuki doesn’t seem to have that much literal clutter, only it also appears that he is more than a little conflicted with his way of life. Seemingly coming from a rather upper middle class family, Ritsuki had trained since childhood to become a concert pianist only to give up a promising future due to a hand tremor which may be psychosomatic. It may be no coincidence that in contrast to the upbeat dance music his boss plays while cleaning, Ritsuki prefers jazz rather than classical and may be looking for something with a little more freedom than the life of a concert pianist.
Even so he quickly discovers how many of his relationships were based on his status as classical musician. His girlfriend of 11 years abruptly breaks up with him apparently no longer interested now that he is a mere piano teacher with a sideline as a house cleaner. His experiences place him well to empathise with some of his clients who are each in someway overwhelmed to the extent that it has prevented them getting rid of literal rubbish from their lives which continues to clog up their homes only further deepening their sense of internalised shame. Then again, one of his first clients, Asuka (Yumiko Nakamura), is in her own way “shameless”, unembarrassed when Rituski discovers a box of DVDs she describes as “precious” featuring herself in her previous career as a porn star.
The film doesn’t go into what led to her home becoming a “trash house”, but perhaps does suggest there is a degree of shame involved in the proposed solution of welcoming more visitors to encourage her to keep the place presentable. The reason she needed it cleaned is that her son’s teacher has become fed up with her attempts to dodge a home visit while his usual behaviour has them thinking there may be something wrong in his family circumstances. As is later revealed, the teacher, Mariko (Tomu Muto), also lives in a trash home for unclear reasons but that seem to reflect her generalised anxiety in her inability to make decisions or take care of the rubbish in her life. She’s recently become engaged to a man who seems a little domineering but is also becoming suspicious of her reluctance to let him into her flat worried that it’s because she lives with another man while also hurt and confused by her rejection of intimacy.
Similarly, a care worker preparing to move back to the Philippines (Mac Sekioka) found himself living in a trash home after falling into depression following the death of his mother. The thing he didn’t want to get rid of was a Tupperware container containing a stew his mother had made for him he’d been keeping in the freezer for the last eight years and eventually shares with Ritsuki as a final ritual before moving on. Another old man meanwhile needs a little more persuading with the situation complicated seeing as the main reason his son wants them to intervene is that he suspects there may be valuable antiques trapped under all that trash. What led to Shigeo becoming a local pariah remains obscure save that he too seems to be suffering with guilt and grief, haunted by the figure of a tiny woman who claims he threw her away. In some cases, it seems like at some point it all became too much and what each of the clients needed was a helping hand to get them started, Ritsuki and his eccentric boss gradually freeing them of the burdens of their lives while restoring both peace and order as he too learns to move forward bonding with his new work family no longer quite so constrained but living in the freedom and happiness of an uncluttered existence.
After centuries of conflict, two feuding countries finally begin to put the past behind them to work for a common future in Kotono Watanabe’s animated fantasy romance, Gold Kingdom and Water Kingdom (金の国 水の国, Kin no Kuni Mizu no Kuni). Adapted from the manga by Nao Iwamoto, this is very much a story of coming together to create a better future for all in which it’s always better to follow the most difficult path if it leads to longterm peace rather than opting for a quick fix like a dynastic marriage that won’t take place for another fifty years.
In this case, the dynastic marriage actually works out but only because romantic heroes Sara (Minami Hamabe) and Naranbayar (Kento Kaku) end up meeting by chance and falling in love organically despite the class disparity and cultural differences between them. The kingdoms of Alhamit and Balkari had been feuding in part for the petty reasons of a dog and cat respectively doing their business on the wrong side of the border wall erected after previous war. Neither nation being very much interested in the dynastic marriage proposed by the previous generation in which Alhamit would give its most beautiful woman as a wife to Balkari’s cleverest man, Alhamit sent a cat instead while Balkari sent a dog. Poor Balkari engineer Naranbayar simply laughed off his new “bride” while Princess Sara of Alhamit decided to go along with the ruse knowing that to kick up a fuss would likely send both nations back to war.
They happen to meet when Sara transgressively ventures beyond the wall in search of her dog, Lukman, who has fallen in a hole in the forest. With her pretty sisters needling her, Sara asks Naranbayar to pretend to be her new husband, little realising that he is the man she is intended to marry. The youngest of four sisters, Sara has always felt inferior and fears that she cannot live up to the title of Alhamit’s most beautiful woman but begins to fall for Naranbayar who is in fact very clever but also kind in the way most of her family aren’t. Naranbayar genuinely cares about the people of Alhamit and quickly works out that in this incredibly wealthy, “golden” desert city they will run out of water within 50 years while water is something the poor nation of Balkari has in abundance.
An alliance will save the lives of people in Alhamit, but also also benefit those of Balkari in boosting its economy but not everyone is motivated towards a diplomatic solution with many in the court clearly agitating for war in which they would simply conquer Balkari to capture its resources. The King is under pressure in thinking of his historical legacy, not wanting to be seen as a weak monarch as his namesake earlier was in having restored with relations with Balkari rather than seeking to dominate it militarily. Under the sway of potentially corrupt shaman Piripappa (Chafurin) he rules with an authoritarian fist, while his haughty daughter Leopoldine (Keiko Toda) has appointed a handsome actor as an advisor to signal her opposition.
Only through the genuine love which emerges between Sara and Naranbayar can the country be saved in turning away from pointless acrimony towards a more open future marked by mutual cooperation and friendship between two equal nations. Through falling in love with Naranbayar, Sara grows in confidence and learns to see herself as beautiful no longer inferior to her sisters but playing a full part in the life of the court as they work together to solve the water issue and return life to their arid land. Beautifully designed with its Middle-Eastern aesthetics and strong contrast between the desert kingdom of Alhamit and the beautiful forests of Balkari, the film also features charming paper art bookends and a watercolour credits sequence depicting a happier future for both nations as they forge a new society together. Heartfelt in its central romance, Watanabe’s charming love story positions cross cultural connection as the best means of overcoming centuries of pointless conflict along with allowing each of its heroes to become more of themselves as they work together to create a new world of love and peace in which all can prosper and live in happy harmony.
The heroine of Enen Yo’s Double Life (ダブル・ライフ) has a recurring dream of being trapped in an endless tunnel. No matter how long she walks, she can never see an exit, but she also claims that she is always awake to her true self. It is in a way her true self that seems to have gotten away from her as she struggles to overcome career disappointment and a moribund marriage to a passive aggressive salaryman who barely speaks to her and seems to resent her presence in his life.
After giving up her dance career following an injury, Shiori (Atsuko Kikuchi) has been working as an assistant to movement coach Kumiko whose practice is closer to performance art than contemporary dance. Shiori had wanted to take part in one of Kumiko’s “Communicating Love” couples sessions and though her husband Ryo had originally agreed he cancels at the last minute with an abrupt text message he refuses to explain over the phone. He refuses to explain at home too, later giving an excuse that would have seemed reasonable if he’d offered it in a less abrasive manner but given his behaviour makes him seem guilty and evasive. Smelling another woman’s perfume on his shirt only deepens Shiori’s suspicions that he’s been having an affair. It’s for these reasons that she takes up the recommendations of a friend, Misaki, to contact a man who rents himself out for role play assignments to pose as her husband so that she can participate in the workshop even without Ryo’s cooperation.
This might in someways seem perverse given that the workshop is about exploring intimacy as a couple, but as Kumiko explains it’s as much about coming to understand your own feelings as it is your partner’s. Shiori has in a sense hired Junnosuke to mirror her, conforming to her image of an idealised Ryo as the tender and loving husband he does not otherwise seem to be. Perhaps just incredibly good at his job, Junnosuke is a perfect fit for the exercise and is able to effectively pick up on Shiori’s buried anxieties echoing her dream of the tunnel but envisioning her as a beautiful butterfly dancing its way towards the exit. Shiori decides to hire him for an extended period and even rents a small flat to role play a happier marriage but also begins to lose sight of the boundaries of their “fake” relationship.
As Junnosuke says, once he’s in character it’s his lived “reality” until it’s not, but one also has to wonder what toll this lifestyle takes on the core “Junnosuke”, whether he can be said to exist at all and is able to have “authentic” personal relationships or whether not having them affects his life if he is able to derive emotional satisfaction through his various role playing activities. In any case as he later reminds Shiori he is a creature of her creation who only ever mirrored her desires and in doing so showed her who she is and what she wants along with the way out of the dark tunnel towards a more satisfying existence.
Kumiko, who is herself dealing with a sense of loss, tells her something similar in explaining that she must rediscover her centre of gravity which is also a means of spiritual reorientation in recalibrating herself to her present physicality and learning move in tune with the rhythms of the body she has now not the one she used to have before the injury which she must fully accept as a part of herself. It’s rediscovering her love of dance that grants her mastery over her body and soul and allows her to find a way through her despair in accepting that she must change to meet the new future rather than remaining trapped in a disatfying present defined by a longing for an immutable past.
Shot with a breezy poeticism that is at once lyrical and naturalistic, Yo’s gentle drama explores a process of healing conducted through theoretical role play that suggests that in certain cases literal authenticity is less important than the emotional in making an essential truth fully visible. In any case through living her “double life”, Shiori gains a new perspective on herself and others that finally allows her to see the light at the end of a tunnel she feared would never appear.
Chisato (Akari Takaishi) and Mahiro (Saori Izawa) continue to struggle with everyday life in Yugo Sakamoto’s sequel to the hugely popular slacker comedy action fest, Baby Assassins, Baby Assassins 2 Babies (ベイビーわるきゅーれ2ベイビー, Baby Valkyrie 2 Baby). A deadpan satire on institutional bureaucracy in the underground hitman society, the film sees the girls targeted by a pair of rivals that in any other film may be the heroes of the story only this time around they’re hapless challengers whose attempt game the system only results in more chaos and misery.
Beginning to get their act together, the girls are still it seems completely hopeless at managing their money and are suddenly faced not only with a hugely expensive bill for a gym membership they took out five years previously and forgot to cancel, but also reminded that they were upgraded from the “Jolly” insurance scheme to the “Merry” insurance scheme when they graduated high school so their payment information has expired and needs updating. It’s this extreme set of circumstances that lead to them being in a bank at the moment it is robbed by a pair of fugitive thieves. The terms of their assassins contract forbid them from using their skills outside of the job, but they can’t afford to wait any longer and decide to tackle the robbers so they can send their transfer through before the deadline but end up getting suspended for their pains. While suspended they’re forbidden from killing anyone and get no salary so they’re back where they started looking for part-time jobs to help make ends meet.
Their predicament is mirrored by antagonists Yuri (Joey Iwanaga) and Makoto (Tatsuomi Hamada) who as the film opens end up killing completely the wrong gangsters because of a logistical mixup. The problem is that Yuri and Makoto are subcontractors not yet admitted to the Assassins Guild which means they don’t get access to the best jobs and have no workplace protections. Essentially what they want is to join the union, but they aren’t qualified so their boss, Akagi (Junpei Hashino), comes up with the neat idea of knocking off Chisato and Mahiro to free up their spots in the Guild.
Sakamoto has great fun satirising Assassin’s Guild bureaucracy as the girls are constantly forced to reference their contract through Mr Susano (Tsubasa Tobinaga) and his little blue book to figure out what is and isn’t allowed in their lives as top hit women. Meanwhile, they’re once again forced to try and live “normally” and find they aren’t very good it at it while having to take quite literally odd jobs as shopping arcade mascots managed by a weird old man (Tetsu Watanabe) obsessed with Masaki Suda and the film We Made a Beautiful Bouquet which becomes something of a running gag. Both Chisato and Mahiro and Yuki and Makoto reflect on the strange cafe hierarchy of being offered a selection of tiered menu sets at escalating prices all the way from basic chicken to barbecued meats as reflective of a wealth-based social system while the boys continue to vacillate over asking out the pretty waitress.
It’s kill or be killed but the girls know on some level that the guys are just like them and even quite good hitmen for “amateurs” so it’s a shame they have to die for having attacked and nearly killed one of their friends. After sorting out who’s won through a high octane series of shootouts and one on one fights, the four sit down on the ground and share snacks while waiting for the inevitable like they’d just been having a violent picnic while hanging out in a disused warehouse. Even the losers seem to accept their fates, acknowledging that they’ve lost in a fair fight and making no further attempt to resist.
In any case, adulting is hard even when you’re not a top assassin struggling with when it’s appropriate to put your training to use. As the girls point out, it’s hard to get by on part time work when it would take a hundred days dressed in a humiliating panda outfit to earn what they’d get for one kill while freelancing is strictly forbidden along with strike action and taking one’s grievances to Twitter. Turns out the assassin life is more complicated that you’d think and just as filled with annoying bureaucracy as any salaryman job. Thankfully the friendship between Chisato and Mahiro has only grown stronger as they face off against the twin threats of red tape and adulting in their lives as “contract” killers.
If love is unselfish, is it really love at all? Based on a semi-autobiographical novel by Makoto Takayama, Daishi Matsunaga’s deeply moving romantic drama Egoist (エゴイスト) asks if all love is in the end transactional and if to deny its “selfishness” is akin to denying love itself because it would mean denying a basic human need for connection and reciprocity. In the end, perhaps selfish is what we should be with love because we are always running out of time and if we aren’t careful it will slip away from us unnoticed.
An “extreme realist”, fashion editor Kosuke (Ryohei Suzuki) is already full of regrets and many of them linking back to the early death of his mother from illness when he was only 14. It’s clear that his financial wealth helps to fill an emotional void but also that he’s lonely and longs for a sense of family that’s long been absent from his life. He rarely visits the conservative hometown where he was bullied for being different, and seems to have a strained relationship with his widowed father (Akira Emoto) who doesn’t know that Kosuke is gay and continues to ask him about getting married and settling down. Early on in his courtship with Ryuta (Hio Miyazawa), a personal trainer he met through a friend, Kosuke remarks that he’s never met a lover’s mother before hinting at the landmarks of a relationship such as marriage that LGBTQ+ people often miss out on in a conservative culture in which such things cannot always be discussed openly.
Later, Ryuta’s mother Taeko (Sawako Agawa) tells Kosuke that knew from that first meeting that they were more than just friends and was happy that her son had someone he loved who loved him regardless if they were a man or a woman. But just when the relationship had seemed to be blossoming, Ryuta had abruptly tried to break up with Kosuke explaining that he had been involved in sex work since his early teens in order to support his mother who was unable to work due to illness. Now that he’s experienced real romantic love he finds sex work “painful” but has no other means of supporting himself and so gives up love for economic necessity. “I’ll buy you,” Kosuke unironically counters adding a note of literal transactionality to their relationship which is already fraught with disparity in the respective differences in their ages along with Kosuke’s wealth and Ryuta’s poverty.
Kosuke later describes his gesture as “pure”, something he’d previously called Ryuta while also remarking that he found him too “polite” in bed and would rather he be a little more “selfish”. In a way it’s altruistic, he isn’t really trying to trap Ryuta into a compensated relationship only to help him while simultaneously ensuring that he stays in his life. His wealth fills a void, but it’s by giving pieces of it away that he feels that void decreasing. Kosuke first gives Ryuta gifts for his mother, knowing that it’s easier for him to accept them because doing so is unselfish when the gift is for someone else. Even so as he later acknowledges sometimes the gift is more for himself than the recipient, a means not of manipulation but of healing. Kosuke claims not to know what love is and largely mediates it through money along with additional acts of care, but as Taeko later tells him it doesn’t really matter if he doesn’t know because they felt his love anyway.
Matsunaga frequently cuts backs to visual motifs such as door numbers, envelopes, and dropped coins to hint at the transactionality of love but eventually reflects that love is an act of exchange in which the desire to be loved is an essential component. Kosuke eventually asks his father how it was for him when his mother was dying and he recalls a conversation in which she said she wanted to leave him because she couldn’t bear to see him suffering for her, a request which could in itself be read as “selfish” even in its “selflessness” with his reply implying that it’s alright to be selfish in love because in way it might be its ultimate expression. Filming with handheld realism, Matsunaga captures the rhythms of contemporary gay life along with the easy giddiness of burgeoning romance and the poignancy of profound loss tempered only by a fleeting feeling of warmth and the jealous memory of a “selfish” love.
Is there a sadder thing than a solo walkie talkie? The heroine of Yusuke Morii’s quirky dramedy Amiko (こちらあみ子, Kochira Amiko) is given a pair of retro presents for her birthday, a set of toy radios and a disposable camera each intended to help her bond with the baby brother expected to join the family in the immediate future, but the sad fact is that Amiko has no one else to communicate with and largely lives in her own little world like a ghost in her own home.
Even so, she doesn’t seem to be particularly lonely and is only just beginning to realise that she’s a little different from the other kids. Living in a nice house in tranquil seaside town in Hiroshima, Amiko appears to be a happy little girl with a loving family around her even if her relationship with step-mother Sayuri (Machiko Ono) who teaches calligraphy in a back room may be a little strained. Sayuri disapproves of Amiko’s unusual behaviour and for some reason does not allow her to join the other children at the classes leading Amiko to peer in from a crack in the door until one of the other kids inevitably notices her.
In an odd way, Amiko’s situation improves when the family encounters a tragedy, losing the baby they’d all been so excited about welcoming. Touched by her attempts to look after her as she recovers at home, Sayuri warms to Amiko and embraces her as a daughter finally inviting her to take part in the calligraphy classes once they resume. But a well-meaning gesture on Amiko’s part that from an adult perspective is insensitive and inappropriate throws Sayuri into a depressive spiral from which she never recovers. The rest of the family describe Amiko’s gesture as a “prank” as if she did it with malicious intent when really it was just her way of dealing with her grief. Of course, everyone else is trying to deal with their grief too and each going about it in their own way so they don’t have time or really the inclination to sit down with Amiko and help process what’s just happened to their family.
Amiko becomes convinced that there’s a ghost haunting her balcony and it must be that of her younger brother who hasn’t made it to Heaven yet and is trying to come home, though her attempts to ask her father about it see her literally pushed away while he can’t see her confusion as anything other than a hurtful fantasy. There is indeed a ghost haunting her family, but it’s the grief they cannot share with each other or bear to explain. Amiko’s older brother Kota (Kensei Okumura) begins to go off the rails and then leaves the family entirely to join a biker gang instead. Amiko’s father (Arata Iura) doesn’t even bother to look for him, expressing only mild confusion when Amiko points out that Kota doesn’t come home anymore answering only that he’s sure he saw him “the other day”.
It’s no wonder then that Amiko retreats into a fantasy world, singing a song to herself to ward off ghosts while followed around by several of them including for some reason mummies and people from 18th century Europe. She in turn follows a boy she likes seemingly oblivious to the various ways he attempts to avoid her, while otherwise ignoring a loudmouth kid who is the only other person willing to talk to her despite her classmates’ conviction that she is simply “weird”. Amiko maybe beginning to realise this herself, wondering if her forced courtship may have strayed into the “creepy” and asking directly for advice wanting to know what about her seems to make others uncomfortable or embarrassed. After a period of mild neglect, Amiko even starts walking around school in bare feet because she doesn’t have indoor shoes or clean socks but most seem to just regard it as another expression of her oddness. As the other kid points out, it’s both a symbol of her “freedom” and one of the reasons she gets bullied. Amiko’s story is sad, but Amiko doesn’t know that and simply goes on living in her own little world with its strange logic simply waving to the departing boats of the floating dead with a cheerful “I’m fine” while otherwise abandoned on an unfamiliar shore with only herself to rely on.
Ever felt like a bit player in your own life? For the hero of Masahiko Sato, Yutaro Seki and Kentaro Hirose’s Roleless (宮松と山下, Miyamatsu to Yamashita), it’s more like he lives ten thousand lives if only for an instant in his life as an extra and may have, in a way, cultivated an image of himself as a blank canvas who no longer exists in an absolute form. In a way you could call it multiverse living, but when confronted with a possible point of origin, a lost selfhood he may have forgotten or wilfully rejected, it presents him with an existential question not so much of who he wants to be but if he wants to be at all.
We first encounter him as an unlucky retainer in a jidaigeki who is quickly cut down only to rise again and run around the back to give his name as “Miyamatsu, a samurai” to the prop girl who gives him a different hat so can he go back out there and die a second time. Miyamatsu has an air of perpetual blankness in his often vacant expression as if he were both there and not. The film often wrong foots us and we can never be sure what is “real” and what part of a movie, except that it all obviously part of the movie we ourselves are watching. We see what we think are moments from Miyamatsu’s private life only to realise that the camera was rolling all along when someone shouts “Cut!” and it becomes apparent that Miyamatsu was not its main focus.
Along the way he gives hints of his loss of selfhood, earnestly replying that he doesn’t know when a fellow extra quizzes him on the watch he’s wearing and how he got it but his discomfort could stem from several places and it’s never quite clear how much of an interior life Miyamatsu creates for his various roles, whether he really does just see them as performers of an action, is playing “himself” as he peers over a police cordon at a crime scene, or is a fully fledged person with an individual history. Later he tells a colleague who admires the way he fills in forms at his part time job working at a cable car that he’s always enjoyed the process of filling in a predetermined frame but also that he likes the floating sensation the cable cars give him.
All of which might explain why he’s so destabilised when a man (Toshinori Omi) approaches him claiming that they worked together as taxi drivers more than a decade earlier and that his name is Yamashita. He apparently “disappeared” after sustaining a head injury and has been “missing” ever since. The man takes him back to the home of his much younger sister, Ai (Noriko Nakagoshi), who has since married and appears to be incredibly relived to see him even if it seems she might also be hiding something. He wonders if it’s suspicious that there are no photos of him in their family home, but is reminded that with the age difference he hadn’t lived there while she was a child and only came back after their parents died to take care of her because she was still in high school. Her husband, Kenichiro (Kanji Tsuda), seems to be constantly needling him though again, it isn’t always clear whether he actually wants him to remember or suspects that he already does and is choosing to pretend not to.
Even so, Miyamatsu slides into the life of Yoji Yamashita as easily as any other role finding his way back into the character with unexpected moments of connection such as the muscle memory that grants him a perfect baseball swing, or the strangely familiar taste of cigarettes to a non-smoker. Then again, there’s obviously something sinister going on, a darkness underlying his “personal” history that might have made him want to absent himself from himself or else an oppressive sense of bullying that is reflected in Ai’s hesitant answer when Yamashita remarks on what a good husband Kenichiro seems to be. Miyamatsu claims that he’s ever only played one “real” role, and in a way this is it as he begins to claim something like a backstory even if it’s one he may not ultimately want that nevertheless renders him a little less vacant. Mysterious and unsettling, the film asks some probing questions about the nature of identity, whether it is self-defined or gifted, but also discovers a kind of serenity in Miyamatsu’s free floating life of transient realities.
Leung Ming Kai and Kate Reilly’s four-part anthology attempts to capture the flavours of a Hong Kong in transition. Imbued with a gentle nostalgia the four stories do not so much eulogise as celebrate the island’s unique culture while perhaps provoking questions about an uncertain future in the face of political instability and widespread protest. Review.
Handover Hong Kong becomes a teenage wasteland for alienated youth in Fruit Chan’s seminal 1997 drama as a small time street punk finds himself on a quest to deliver the bloodstained letters of a high school girl picked up by his friend while bonding with another young woman suffering with a serious illness. Review.
Windows on Worlds 