Category: Festivals

The Real You (本心, Yuya Ishii, 2024)

Posted on by

“Putting it into words makes it sound like a lie,” according to a young woman struggling to “be real” and express a truth without any of the awkwardness that interferes with emotional intimacy, but there are ways in which lies can be true and truth can be lies. Based on a novel by Keiichiro Hirano, author of A Man which also deals with similar themes, Yuya Ishii’s The Real You (本心, Honshin) probes at the nature of the human soul and asks if there really is such a thing as the “real” you or if authenticity is really possible in human interaction. 

Both Ayaka (Ayaka Miyoshi) and the avatar of his mother Akiko (Yuko Tanaka) describe Sakuya (Sosuke Ikematsu) as being too pure for this world and to an extent they’re right even if many of his present problems are directly linked to having committed a “crime” in his youth. As the film opens in the summer of 2025, Sakuya is a factory worker watching helplessly as robots take over his work. After all, they don’t care about the heat, or being able to breathe under a heavy welding mask, nor do they get tired and they can get this job done much faster than he can. In any case, he ignores an ominous phone call from his mother, who appears to be showing signs of dementia, despite her telling him that she has something thing important to say and stays out with a friend after work only to spot her by the river in a storm on his way home. When she abruptly disappears, he assumes she entered the water and jumps in to save her but is injured himself and wakes up in hospital about a year later.

Of course, we don’t really know that he wakes up at all and it’s possible that all of this is really just a dream or an attempt to make contact with his authentic self through his relationships with two women, his mother and a young woman who also disappeared abruptly back in high school. Even though it’s only been a year, the AI revolution has marched on a pace and the entire world is now run by robots and avatars. Sakuya’s factory is no more, and the only job he can get is that of “Real Avatar” in which he rents out his physical body on behalf of clients who for whatever reason are unable to complete an action in person. Many of his early customers are elderly people who have opted for “elective death” and are trying to relive a precious memory vicariously through the VR headset before they go.

“Elective death” is one of the things that most bothers Sakuya in that he’s told it’s what his mother had chosen and that he’s getting a tax break and sizeable condolence payment so he can continue living in the family home. This eerie proposition that elderly people are being encouraged to decide that “this is enough” frightens Sakuya and hints at the eugenicist aims of an AI society in which those who are judged to be “weak” or cannot “contribute” in the way expected of them are forced to end their lives as if they didn’t deserve to live. He can’t understand why his mother would have chosen to die, but moreover, why she would have done it without even telling him. He can’t decide if the important thing she wanted to say was just about the elective death or if there was some greater truth he’ll now never know because he ignored her when she tried to tell him.

That’s one reason that he decides to use all his savings plus the condolence money to have an AI Avatar of his mother made in hope discovering what she wanted to say. Later he says that he wanted to know “Akiko Ishikawa,” rather just his mother, but is put off at first when confronted by the gap between the image of the mother he remembered and the objective reality. The creator, Nozaki, suggests incorporating memories from a young woman who was apparently his mother’s only real friend to get a fuller picture, but Sakuya resists insisting that he and his mother had no secrets from each other so she had no “hidden side”. Nozaki (Satoshi Tsumabuki) merely smirks and tells him that everyone has different sides to themselves that they don’t share with others, which Sakuya ought to know because there are things he’s not exactly hiding but doesn’t really want to talk about either.

His friend, Kishitani (Koshi Mizukami), wonders if there isn’t something a little incestuous about Sakuya’s desire to build a VF of his mother rather than his first love as he’d assumed he would, and he might be right in a way. Ayaka Miyoshi, played by the actress of the same name, shares a striking resemblance with the high school girl who exited the young Sakuya’s life, Yuki, and has a similar life story, though it’s not clear if they are actually the same person or not even if the AI version of his mother tells Sakuya that they are. Yet Ayaka is his only way of verifying that what the VF Akiko says is actually “true’ rather than some random hallucination cooked up by the machine based on the incomplete information it’s been fed. Through the VF he finds out things about his mother’s past that shock him, not that he necessarily disapproves, just that they conflict so strongly with the image of his mother he’d always had. Additionally, there’s a degree of hurt that though he believed he and his mother shared everything, she kept this actually quite significant part of herself secret from him in much the same way he admits he didn’t tell Ayaka about his “crime” because he feared she might pull away from him if she did.

Ayaka also avoids talking about her past as a sex worker which has left her with PTSD and fear of being touched for much the same reason even if she suspects that Sakuya already knows and that his mother may have told him before she died. There’s an obvious parallel being drawn between them when Ayako insists that she made a clear choice to do sex work out of economic necessity and refuses to apologise for it, while Sakuya has also been selling his body as a Real Avatar. While some of his clients merely need help accomplishing things physically, others hire him for amusement. They send him on pointless errands running all over the city and then give him a bad review for smelling of sweat, or deliberately make him do degrading tasks. They also ask for things that are clearly illegal, such as another RA’s client requesting to see a man die. But Sakuya continues to wilfully degrade himself carrying out each of the tasks faithfully despite the pitying looks of those around him. When he’s unexpectedly employed by a wealthy avatar designer (Taiga Nakano) who uses a wheelchair, Sakuya again sheds his own identity and finds himself playing reverse Cyrano forced to make Ifi’s declaration of love on his behalf only to the consternation of Ayaka who isn’t sure who it’s coming from and is disappointed in both men for the obvious cruelty of the situation.

Thus this new technology becomes just another means of class-based oppression in which the wealthy use their riches to abuse those without economic means who have no choice but to submit themselves or rebel through criminality while the rich look on with amusement. Sakuya says he isn’t in love with Ayaka, but it’s unclear if he says it because he thinks she’s better off living in material comfort with Ifi, if he really means it, or he’s realised that he was more in love with the image of the girl who disappeared and the missing side of his mother than he really was with her. It seems that Sakuya is really looking for the hidden half of himself through refracted images of the way others see him, while essentially engaging in an internalised dialogue with his own thoughts and memories. He can’t really be sure of the truth behind anything the VF says, a fact brought home by the implication that the great truth he was seeking is a banal platitude and what he undoubtedly wanted to hear yet knew all along. Nevertheless, it’s not until hearing it that he can regain his real self, let go of the past, and be in a position to connect with Ayaka which is also a kind of waking up. Disquieting in its implications for a new AI-based society in which the line between the real and virtual has all but disappeared, there is nevertheless something quite poignant in Sakuya’s gradual path towards saying goodbye but also hello to a new life of greater self-awareness and independence.

The Real You screens in New York July 11 as part of this year’s Japan Cuts.

International trailer (English subtitles)

She Taught Me Serendipity (今日の空が一番好きとまだ言えない僕は, Akiko Ohku, 2024)

Posted on by

Akiko Ohku’s quirky dramedies have so far mostly focused on an introverted woman’s quest for love, but with She Taught Me Serendipity (今日の空が一番好きとまだ言えない僕は, Kyo no Sora ga Ichiban Suki to Mada Ienai Boku ha) she moves into new territory in adapting the novel by Shusuke Fukutoku in which an alienated college student is unwittingly caught between two women. Set in the picturesque city of Kyoto, the film echoes the work of Tomihiko Morimi and revels in the power of serendipitous connection but equally the melancholy loneliness that underpins it in the legacy of grief and regret.

Returning after a six-month absence following the death of his grandmother, Konishi (Riku Hagiwara) is indeed at odds with his environment. He walks as if in a fog and is slightly out of tune with the world around him while often carrying an umbrella, or parasol depending on the weather, as a bulwark to protect him from prying eyes. Unlike his classmates, he speaks in the standard dialect rather than with an Eastern-inflection which his only friend Yamane (Kodai Kurosaki) has taken to extremes, describing his manner of speech as “Yamane Dialect”. It’s on campus that he begins catching sight of a young woman Yamane has dubbed the “solo soba” diner who seems to be just as solitary as he is, though the pair later strike up a connection precisely because of their shared sense of alienation.

To that extent, it’s not unreasonable that Konishi might doubt his new friendship with his young woman, Hana (Yuumi Kawai), who seems to be tailor-made for him and appeared seemingly from nowhere during his absence. Meanwhile, he’s resumed his old job at a local bathhouse where he cleans after hours with a girl-named Sacchan (Aoi Ito) who, judging by the looks she exchanges with the owner’s daughter Kaho, is secretly in love with him though he hasn’t noticed. While Hana is like him quiet and mysterious, Sacchan is a live wire, a young woman full of life who can’t stop talking and makes each of their cleaning sessions a riot of fun and silliness. 

But in keeping with these kinds of stories, Konishi suffers from extreme main character syndrome and never really sees either woman as a whole person rather than as an extension of himself. As Sacchan says in a poignant monologue movingly delivered by Aoi Ito, he never even bothered to ask her full name. He promised to buy her dinner to make up for missing shifts and needing extra help, but most likely never planned to follow through, nor did he ever listen to the song she recommended to him, though he went and read the short story Hana referenced right away. On the one level, there was nothing he could do to avoid hurting her feelings when he couldn’t return them, but at the very least he’s been self-involved and insensitive, just as he is when Hana suddenly drops out of contact and he convinces himself she was only hanging out with him as a joke. Rather than process his pain, he lashes out at Yamane instead and almost loses his only remaining friend before finally growing up a bit and making the effort to say sorry. 

The Japanese title translates as something like “I, who still can’t say, ‘Today’s sky is my favourite’,” echoing a common phrase repeated by Hana’s late father and Konishi’s grandmother, and hinting at Konishi’s inability to embrace whatever life gives him and find joy within it. Nevertheless, he does perhaps learn the importance of saying how he feels before it’s too late while taking into account the feelings of others even if his final confession comes at an awkward and insensitive moment, though it’s true enough that he’s really talking to himself. On one of their surreal adventures, he and Hana visit an unusual restaurant where all the dishes have quirky codenames except for one. It turns out the proprietor used to have someone to help him, but for whatever reason they’re not around anymore. Playing with aspect ratios and split screen, Ohku often fills the frame with a sense of absence in which characters simply disappear quite abruptly, echoing the fragility of these connections and, in fact, of everything, but makes plain that the main thing is to embrace them when they come rather than live in the shadow of loss or let the chance for love pass you by in fear of its failure.

She Taught Me Serendipity screened as part of this year’s Toronto Japanese Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Aimitagai (アイミタガイ, Shogo Kusano, 2024)

Posted on by

When we say, “what goes around comes around”, we usually mean it in a bad way that someone is only getting what they deserve after behaving badly themselves. But the reverse is also true. The smallest acts of kindness people do without thinking can have quite profound effects on the world around them because, in the end, we are all connected. A bereaved father remarks that he thought novels that only had kind-hearted characters were unrealistic, but now he wants to believe that kind of world could exist after realising the impact his late daughter’s kindness had on those around her.

It was Kanami (Sawako Fujima) who saved Azusa (Haru Kuroki) in middle school when she was being bullied for coming from a single-parent family and the pair remained firm friends ever after until Kanami was suddenly killed in an accident while working overseas. Kanami’s loss leaves Azusa struggling to move forward with her life while mired in grief and uncertainty. Having lost her mother some years previously, she has never really dealt with the trauma of her parent’s acrimonious divorce and has a rather cynical view of marriage despite working as a wedding planner where her unmarried status sometimes causes her clients anxiety though it obviously has very little do with her ability to do her job. She’s always been clear with her long-time boyfriend Sumito (Aoi Nakamura) that marriage isn’t something she sees in her future, though he seems to want more commitment, while she repeatedly describes him as “unreliable” and is hesitant to take the next step with their relationship whether it involves getting married or not.

In that sense it’s really Azusa’s inability to surrender herself to the concept of what her grandmother (Jun Fubuki) calls “amai-tagai”, or mutual solidarity, which they experience first-hand while visiting her as another old lady nearby comes rushing in saying her house is on fire. It’s not so much reciprocity as a generalised idea of having each other’s backs, that people help each other as needed without keeping score in much the same way as Azusa was saved by Kanami and as she later realises by Komichi (Mitsuko Kusabue) whose piano-playing soothed her spirit though Komichi intended to play in secret, allowing her music to blend in with the six o’clock chimes as a daily act of atonement for having played the piano for boys who were going off to war many of whom never returned. It is then Azusa who saves Komichi in turn by telling her that she felt comforted by her music and that she does not believe that she has no right to play it simply because of the ways it was misused in the past. 

What Azusa fears is that by getting married she would essentially be cutting herself off from her paternal grandmother who, aside from her aunt (Tamae Ando) who is also Komichi’s housekeeper, is the only other family member she seems to have a meaningful connection with. Unable to let go Kanami, she keeps sending her messages little knowing that her mother is actually reading them and feeling both sorry and grateful that her daughter had such a good friend who like her is also struggling to continue on without her. She and Kanami’s father (Tomorowo Taguchi) find solace in the letters they receive from children at an orphanage where Kanami used to donate cakes and sweets after visiting there on a job. The photos she took are on display at their bathrooms, Azusa said because Kanami wanted them to be in a place where the children felt free to embrace their feelings privately without fear of embarrassment. 

The photographs, letters, and belated gifts are all examples of the ways in which what Kanami sent around is still going around and will continue to do so long after she herself is gone. Through realising the reality of “aimi-tagai”, Azusa learns that the world can also be a kind place, Sumito might be more “reliable” than she thought, and it might not be such a bad idea to trust people after all. Based on the novel by Tei Chujo, the film’s interwoven threads of serendipitous connections and the unexpected results of momentary acts of kindness prove oddly life-affirming if only in the ways in which each realise that Kanami is always with them even if physically absent.

Aimitagai screened as part of this year’s Toronto Japanese Film Festival.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Hong Kong 1941 (等待黎明, Leong Po-Chih, 1984)

Posted on by

“Britain has reassured the people that it will not give up Hong Kong,” according to a radio broadcast at the beginning of Leong Po-Chih’s Hong Kong 1941 (等待黎明). The words have a kind of irony to them and not only because Britain did abandon the people following the Japanese invasion, but because the film was released on the eve of the Sino-British Joint Declaration in which it said something quite similar. 

But then again, the opening scenes are themselves quite critical of British rule as they, on the one hand, insist they aren’t going anywhere and, on the other, start evacuating women and children to “safer” areas of the commonwealth such as Australia. Out of work actor Fei (Chow Yun-fat) fled the Japanese incursion on the Mainland and came to Hong Kong, but now tries to stowaway abroad a boat going to Australia. He’s caught by a little British girl who speaks fluent Cantonese yet refers to him as her “slave” and insists that he “kowtow to me, now.” But then the girl suddenly adopts the persona of the Empress Dowager Cixi and demands the same. Fei makes the first of his many jumps into the water around Hong Kong, as if only in this liminal space can he be free. Anticipating the wave of migration occurring before and after the Handover, and also that of the present day, he and his friends Keung (Alexander Man Chi-leung) and Nam (Cecilia Yip Tung) set their sights on leaving to find Gold Mountain in Australia or America.

But they’re one day too late because the date of their departure is that the Japanese arrive in Hong Kong. Their haste to leave was in part caused by the fact that Nam’s father, Ha Chung-sun (Shih Kien), was trying to force her to go through with an arranged marriage her prospective groom didn’t want either. Nam is never really free as, as she points out, even after her father relents and allows Keung to marry her after she is raped by a police officer emboldened by the chaos and therefore worthless to him as currency, Keung never actually asked her and she’s in effect forced into a marriage with him instead. In fact, she returns to the shrine Keung lives in two find the two men constructing her marital bed for her with the double helix symbol of happiness already placed above it in an ironic expression of patriarchal oppression.

Indeed, her position is more precarious than either of the men and we see other families roughly cutting their daughters’ long hair to make them look like boys in fear of a rapacious Japanese army. But it largely turns out that it wasn’t so much the Japanese they needed to be worried about as the local population, experiencing a temporary limbo in which the social order has been suspended. Police officer Fa Wing (Paul Chun) who had acted as a lackey for Ha Chung-sun while constantly eying up Nam leads a gang of looters to Ha’s house to take their own revenge against his capitalistic oppression of them. Ha had largely made his money through rice profiteering and exploiting the local workforce. Recent layoffs at the warehouse had led to a labour riot, while Keung and his friends had been running a sideline skimming sacks of rice to sell on the black market. 

Ha and his henchmen anxiously await the arrival of the Japanese hoping that they will protect them from retribution, but the Japanese do not arrive fast enough. When they do, Ha collaborates and attempts to ingratiate himself with the Japanese officer in charge of the colony who once again takes a liking to Nam. General Kanezawa (Stuart Ong) also uses their poverty to starve them into submission, promising rice to anyone who will come and sing with him. The song he chooses is “Shina no Yoru” by Li Hsiang-lan, whom he describes as “their very own”, yet was actually a Japanese woman, Yoshiko Yamaguchi, groomed for stardom in Manchuria and marketed a Chinese star in propaganda films. Another song of hers, Ieraishan, can be heard earlier on the soundtrack as if heralding Japanese arrival. 

Though Nam tries to resist, Fei raises the trio’s arms in a cry of “banzai” in a moment of ostensible collaboration designed to buy them temporary safety. His philosophy and that of many others is to take the rice and deal with the rest later, which Fei does by becoming an enforcement officer with the Japanese to get papers that will allow all of them leave. He uses his position to help a gang of Mainlanders who are resisting the Japanese, and are, in fact, the last ones to stay behind and defend the colony, as well as well as save Keung when his attempt to rescue two friends who have been sold out for forced labour on another Japanese-controlled island by a local gangster backfires and he’s captured himself. 

Ironically enough, Fei had been the first one to try to leave and described himself as “selfish” after jumping back into the water to return to Nam and Keung who didn’t make the boat on time because they were trying to save a local eccentric everyone calls “emperor” played by the director himself. Fei is quite obviously in love with Nam, and she gradually falls for him in return though symbolically wedded to Keung, if not in the legal sense. Again, she has no say over her romantic future which is sorted out between the two men with Fei abiding to a code of honour in continuing to protect the relationship between Keung and Nam. Perhaps this echoes the way in which the Hong Kong people of 1941 or 1984 have little say in their future either as their fate is decided by two distant powers. Nevertheless, it leaves Keung feeling awkward and inadequate, realising that Nam likely prefers the smart and dynamic Fei over his constant failures and inability to protect her, though he is never jealous or resentful towards him only knowing that he is continually indebted. Yet it’s Nam who eventually strikes back for Hong Kong and for her own freedom while Fei looks on as children in the street play at beheadings as if they were Japanese soldiers. She embodies the spirit of Hong and carries it with her, and as the Chinese title of the film suggests, waits for a new dawn while accepting that just like old memories it will be replaced by what is to come. She speaks from a perspective that is both historical and uncertain, mourning the past while fearful of the future, but all the while continuing to live as one new dawn replaces another.

Hong Kong 1941 screened as part of this year’s Focus Hong Kong.

Trailer

Possession Street (邪Mall, Jack Lai, 2024)

Posted on by

Possession Street is a real street in Hong Kong, but its name doesn’t hint at the supernatural. Rather, it’s located on the former site of Possession Point where the British took possession of Hong Kong in 1841. Nevertheless, there is definitely some body snatching going on in Jack Lai’s claustrophobic zombie-esque horror set in the decidedly purgatorial space of a shopping centre on the brink of demolition. 

Indeed, it’s the vendors themselves that are in someways zombies. Representatives of a generation that is tired of fighting and barely clinging on to what they’ve got, they run their moribund stores stubbornly refusing to move with the times almost as if they were haunting the place. A former stuntman, Sam (Philip Keung Hiu-Man) runs an unprofitable video shop that plays classic Hong Kong wuxia movies of the kind he used to be in. Sam’s wife left him taking their daughter Yan with her when the shop first ran into financial difficulty and Sam refused to do much about it other than swear it would figure itself out in the end.

Which is one way to say young Yan (Candy Wong Ka-Ching) escaped the mall, though she continues to idolise her father and has developed a love of film precisely because of what he taught her. She tells him that she’s dropping out of uni to become a filmmaker because she wants to keep Hong Kong cinema alive in what seems to be a meta comment on the state of the industry in which Hong Kong cinema itself has become a kind of zombie, like the vendors simply treading water while trapped in a constant state of decline in its conflicted necessity to please the Mainland censors. 

In this way, the claustrophobic space of the post-war shopping centre stands in for Hong Kong itself. A place that’s lost its lustre and fallen behind the times, the mall has fallen into a state of disrepair. Many of the stores have already closed and there’s not much footfall. The mall has a serious rat problem, though really that’s about to be the least of its worries. Even so, it’s the rodents who are partially responsible for chewing on the power cables and requiring a trip to the super secret meter room where one of the vendors accidentally damages the seal keeping a not all that ancient evil from bubbling to the surface. 

As the ghost later explains, like the vendors they are those who have been left behind by the new Hong Kong and cannot progress into its future. The mall was built on top of an air raid shelter which was sealed shut by an American bomb leaving all those inside to turn to depraved acts of survival such as cannibalism along with violent outrages like rape before dying horribly inside. Their resentment has awakened another ancient evil that wants to kill everyone in the world, beginning with everyone in the mall which is locked shut until the following morning. Clearly influenced by the the Last of Us with its fungal zombies who spread the curse by coughing up a visible miasma and are covered in pustular growths, the infected echo a particular face of evil such as the fat cat capitalist constant running down his daughter who is the only one who tries to help him. He remarks that he’s glad her brother never showed up, because now the family name will continue. 

Meanwhile, Yan has been a part of this community since she was a child and fond attachments to many of the vendors including the Taoist priest whom she once-called Uncle Con-Man. Master Mak (Alan Yeung Wai-Leun) was entrusted with a mission by his former master who knew about the air raid shelter and was the guardian standing it over it, making the sure the evil didn’t leak out, but Mak has lost the faith and with the imminent demise of the shopping centre come to the conclusion that it’s time to call it quits. There is then something in the fact that this Taoist philosophy actually works and proves the only real way of overcoming the supernatural threat as if calling forth the spirit of Hong Kong. On the other hand, it’s really Yan who is trapped in this place and seeking escape in permission to move on but also to continue fighting for the Hong Kong that’s disappearing in keeping its cinema alive. When Sam tells her “ga you,” he echoes the words of the protestors while ironically telling her not to give up even though life rarely turns out the way you hoped. In effect, she liberates them all including herself from a self-imposed limbo of resigned stagnation while walking into the light of a new day determined to fight for the kind of future she wants for herself rather than what anyone else might have wanted for her.

Possession Street screened as part of this year’s Focus Hong Kong.

Trailer

Valley of the Shadow of Death (不赦之罪, Lam Sen & Antonio Tam Sin-yeung, 2024)

Posted on by

A pastor’s faith is tested when a young man who was involved with the death of his teenage daughter arrives at his church in search of salvation in Lam Sen & Antonio Tam Sin-yeung’s In Valley of the Shadow of Death (不赦之罪). Though his faith tells him that he must forgive and that it is his duty to help this lost young man who has no one else, it is obviously incredibly difficult for him to reconcile his Christian philosophy with the reality of his guilt and anger.

It’s this contradiction that’s at the heart of the film in examining whether Pastor Leung (Anthony Wong Chau-sang) is merely a hypocrite who expounds on “the beauty of suffering,” while wallowing in his grief and fundamentally unable to put what he preaches into practice. But the problem is it’s Leung’s religiously that’s a part of the problem in that its oppressive qualities and implacable rigidity also contributed to his daughter’s death. It’s convenient for him to shift all of the blame onto Lok (George Au) because it means he doesn’t have to think about the impact of his own choices or indeed question his faith in God as his wife (Louisa So Yuk-Wah) has done. 

Mrs Leung also seems to blame her husband on some level and the relationship between the pair has become frosty in the extreme. A reporter arrives to interview Leung about his work while Mrs Leung goes out of her way to make as much noise as possible as she leaves for work. She has since lost her faith, unable to understand why God would do this to them, while Leung regards Lok’s arrival, like many things, as a test yet already knowing he has been found wanting. He does his best to force himself to treat Lok with kindness, but in the end, if God really did intend to give him a son in place of a daughter, Leung cannot accept him.

But Lok looks to Leung as a more literal kind of father anyway. He is genuinely moved by Christianity and sees something in it that he equates with salvation, but at the same time perhaps only because he thinks it will confer “forgiveness”. His problem is also that he doesn’t seem to understand what was wrong about what he did despite completing his prison sentence and assumed that everything would be fine once he repaid his debt to society. Only on learning that Ching is dead does he begin to feel guilty and understand the full impact of his actions. On his release he’d tried to contact Ching on a messenger app though it’s not quite clear for what purpose. Even if he really did want to apologise or try to make a mends, it’s a selfish thing to do given that she almost certainly would not want to ever hear from him again and his resurfacing in her life would only cause her further pain. 

In any case, the film uncomfortably muddies the waters in implying that Ching herself is also responsible for what happened to her, while Leung never really reckons with the new information he’s learned about his daughter who may not have been as sweet and innocent as he’d assumed her to be. Likewise, the fact that Lok had such a difficult life encourages us to sympathise with him and minimise his crime, but he made a clear choice to what he did and is also responsible for it. As Leung is fond of saying, everyone is a sinner, though he doesn’t always seem to accept the same about himself. Lok too maybe entitled to redemption, and helping him may be a way for Leung to make sense of his daughter’s death while atoning for his part in it, but if it’s a test from God it’s one he’s struggling with and largely beyond the limits of his faith. In truth, some of the ideological questioning seems confused or contradictory, more like a thought experiment than a real situation and Lok a hypothetical rather than a lost young man who’s done something unspeakable but still doesn’t really understand why it was wrong. Obsessed with the concept of “forgiveness”, he childishly thinks that winning it would annul his crime as if it didn’t happen in same the way that baptism washes away sin. Leung, meanwhile, cannot practice what he preaches and uses his religion, the very thing that made him fail his daughter, as a shield to avoid thinking about his own culpability. Only God can forgive, Leung’s fond of saying, but the person he needs forgiveness from the most may be himself. 

Valley of the Shadow of Death screened as part of this year’s Focus Hong Kong.

Trailer

90 Years Old – So What? (九十歳。何がめでたい, Tetsu Maeda, 2024)

Posted on by

Everyone keeps congratulating Aiko Sato (Mitsuko Kusabue) on reaching 90, but she can’t see what’s so special about it. Having retired from writing after publishing her last novel at 88, she’s really feeling her age and has little desire to anything but sit around waiting to die. That is, until she’s badgered into picking up her pen by a down on his luck, “dinosaur” editor certain that her words of wisdom will strike a chord with the young people of today.

Marking the 90th birthday of its leading lady Mitsuko Kusabue and directed by comedy master Tetsu Maeda, the film takes its name from a collection of essays published under the title “90 Years Old, So What?” which largely deal with what it’s like to be old in the contemporary society along with the way things have changed or not in Japan over the last 90 years. It does not, however, shy away from the physical toll of ageing despite Kusabue’s sprightliness or the undimmed acuity of Aiko whose only barrier to writing is that she fears she’s run out of things to say and the energy to write them. During her retirement, she remarks on the fact that her legs and back hurt while she also has a heart condition and everything just feels like too much bother. Her daughter Kyoko (Miki Maya), who lives with her along with her twenty-something daughter Momoko (Sawako Fujima), asks her why she doesn’t go out to meet a friend, but as Aiko says, most of her friends have already passed on or like her don’t really have the energy to leave the house. 

In many ways, her age isolates her as she finds herself slightly at odds with the contemporary society. She turns the television up louder because she finds it difficult to understand what younger people are saying and doesn’t get why they stare at their phones all the time. Though she manages most things for herself, she has to call repair people, which costs money, if something breaks down while her daughter’s not around to fix it, even if it’s something as simple as a paper jam in a fax machine or pushing the off button on the TV too hard so it won’t turn back on again. Nevertheless, so intent is she on “enjoying” her retirement that she repeatedly turns down the entreaties of a young man from her publisher’s who wants her to write a column and always turns up with fancy sweets which are, as she says, well-considered gifts, but also a little soulless and superficial being driven by fashionable trends of which Aiko knows nothing and by which she is not really impressed.

There is something quite interesting about the contrast between herself and fifty-something Yoshikawa (Toshiaki Karasawa) who is also a man behind the times and a relic of the patriarchal culture she railed against in her writing and rejected in her personal life, divorcing two husbands and going on to raise her daughter alone. In the opening scenes, she reads an entry from an advice column about a woman who’s sick of her husband of 20 years because he’s a chauvinist who dumps all of the domestic responsibilities onto her while looking down on her because of it. Aiko tuts and contradicts the advice of the columnist, remarking that the answer is simple. She should just tell him to his face that she hates him and then leave. Nevertheless, the fact remains that not all that much has changed since she was young. The husband’s behaviour is considered “normal”, while the woman’s desire to be treated with respect or leave her marriage is not. Yoshikawa is effectively demoted because he has no idea that his treatment of a female employee amounts to workplace bullying and sexual harassment even if he didn’t intend that way because he’s trapped within this old-fashioned patriarchal ideal and is unable to see that his behaviour is not acceptable nor that he’s been taking his family for granted while considering only his own needs and positioning himself as the provider. 

Yet it’s 90-year-old Aiko rather than his humiliating demotion or the failure of his marriage who begins to show him the error of his ways by accepting him into her own family like a lonely stray. Aiko’s essays don’t really say that everything was better in the past, even if she’s confused by modern people who are annoyed by the cheerful sounds of children playing and a city alive with life because she remembers how everything went quiet during the war and how depressing that could be. But she does sometimes think that progress has gone far enough and things were better when people had more time for patience with each other. That said, patience is one of the things Aiko has no time for, advising Yoshikawa to charge forward like a wild boar because one of the benefits of age is that you just don’t care anymore what anyone thinks so get ready to annoy people or exasperate them but carry on living life to the full. Ironically, that might be a gift that he gave her by convincing her to write again which returned purpose to her life and gave her a reason to engage again with the world around her lifting her depression and making her feel as if she still mattered. The real Aiko turned 100 in 2023 and carried on writing, while 90-year-old Kusakabe is herself undergoing something of a career resurgence in recent years proving that even if you’re 90 years old, so what? There’s still a lot of life left to be lived and you might as well carry on living it doing what you love for as long as you can.

90 Years Old – So What? screens 21st June as part of this year’s Toronto Japanese Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Ravens (レイブンズ, Mark Gill, 2024)

Posted on by

“All I see are self portraits”, the hero’s by then former wife cuttingly remarks on visiting his comeback exhibition in the company of her new husband, seemingly a much more conventional businessman. Japanese films about photographers are similar to those other countries make about writers in that their protagonists are often very flawed people, tortured artists consumed by their own trauma and often turning to drink at the expense of their personal relationships. Tadanobo Asano has in fact played similar roles a few times before. In Yoichi Higashi’s Wandering Home, he played real life war correspondent Yasuyuki Tsukahara who passed away from kidney cancer at the age of 42 after years of alcohol dependency, while in 1999’s One Step on a Mine, It’s All Over he played Taizo Ichinose whose obsession with getting a photograph of Angkor Wat eventually results in his death.

Masahisa Fukase was one of the key photographers of the post-war era and also an incredibly troubled soul. The conceit of Mark Gill’s Ravens (レイブンズ) is that Fukase is accompanied by a giant, anthropomorphised, English-speaking raven (José Luis Ferrer) who gives voice to his darkest thoughts and impulses. A magazine profile describes Fuksase’s work as having dark and occult influences, which the film attributes to the fact that his incredibly conservative father (Kanji Furutachi) used to lock him inside a more literal dark room as a punishment when he was a child. 

Like many of his contemporaries, Fukase’s photographs often express the widening gap between the traditional and the modern in the changing post-war society and the film also uses many of his motifs such as his family photographs to express the changing dynamics between them. Fukase himself is caught in the nexus of this continuing battle in inheriting the legacy of his father’s war trauma. A heavy drinking, violent man, Sukezo insists that as the oldest son Fukase must take over their family photography studio and that taking photogaps is a commercial activity not an artististic one. Fukase’s wife and muse Yoko (Kumi Takiuchi) often says the same thing, undercutting Fukase’s sense of purpose in his work even while he also denies Yoko’s role as a collaborator rather than simply as a subject. “Any woman will do,” the Raven tells him though that turns out not quite to be the case. 

Yoko complains that that Fukase never really looks at her but sees the world abstractedly through the lens of his camera which is really just another way of avoiding reality. She thinks she begins to understand him after belatedly meeting Fukase’s family years after their marriage and witnessing one of his father’s drunken rages first-hand, but it only seems to push them further apart. Despite his claims of artistry, Fukase quickly becomes jealous of the attention Yoko attracts as the star of his photographs as if she has eclipsed him, the artist, and can no longer be controlled by his camera. He clearly wanted the fame and acclaim through his success only seems to deepen his self-loathing and desire for death. His father had told that a man who failed to achieve success by 40 should kill himself, though when Fukase does eventually attempt to take his own life he does so by hanging, hoping that his assistant will photograph it, rather than by using the sword his father shoved at him.

Though Fukase describes Yoko as a very modern woman she too is caught by this cycle in that her mother tells her it’s a wife’s duty to forgive her husband even after he wounds with a knife during a drug-fuelled psychotic episode. Despite separating from him, Yoko continues to visit Fukase in the hospital where he remains after suffering a traumatic brain injury until his eventual death in 2012. In its way, it’s a frustrated love story in which the relationship between them is disrupted by the intrusion of outdated social codes, generational trauma, and Fukase’s own demons which appear to have been with him since childhood. The conviction that Yoko comes to is that all his pictures are actually reflections of himself and that he is incapable of seeing the world through any other lens even as he tells her that the sky is just the sky and ravens are just ravens, nothing means anything. He tells his assistant that he thought he was in search of death the whole time, but maybe it was death that was looking for him. Dreamlike and ethereal, Gill weaves back and fore throughout Fukase’s life from his conservative upbringing to the heady 1970s and gradual comedown of his later years before finally discovering a melancholy sense of serenity as Fukase, finally, dares to gaze back into the lens.

Ravens screens 20th June as part of this year’s Toronto Japanese Film Festival.

International trailer (dialogue free)

Last Mile (ラストマイル, Ayuko Tsukahara, 2024)

Posted on by

“Customer-centric”, what does that actually mean? The Amazon-like US-based conglomerate at the centre of Ayako Tsukahara’s Last Mile (ラストマイル) prides itself on its customer-centric philosophy, but at the end of the day, what that really means is that they give us what we tell them we want through our purchasing patterns and browsing history. That would be that we want everything as cheap and fast as it’s possible to be and don’t really think about the wider implications or what a world of infinite convenience might be doing to the society around us.

At least from the perspective of corporate lackey Elena (Hikari Mitsushima), recently returned from the US, the reason Daily Fast pressures its delivery staff to lower costs isn’t to maximise their profits, it’s so they can go on providing lower prices to customers which to her is all part of their customer-centric approach. This doesn’t really gel with her off-the-cuff remark about the warehouse not having a safety net to protect the workers from accidental falls or, she ominously adds, prevent people from jumping. That she brought it up at all might signal that she knows something’s not quite with the way this company treats its employees, though as it turns out she may have something else on her mind. In any case, when she arrives on her very first day the entrance to the complex is little better than a cattle market with a man on loud speaker barking instructions about were to go to the 800 members of staff some of whom have only been brought in to bulk up for the upcoming Black Friday sale. 

Which is all to say, it wouldn’t be all that surprising if the fact that some of their parcels have been exploding on delivery were a concerted attack against their ultra-capitalist philosophy, though actively delivering bombs to people who didn’t order them is not very “customer-centric” in any case. Obviously, Elena isn’t keen on this either but is also convinced that it can’t really be their fault because they have strict and dehumanising security measures in place preventing the workers from bringing in anything inessential. Even after she works out that the bomber has actually warned them that there are 12 bombs out there, she wilfully withholds the evidence from law enforcement to avoid damaging their share prices while trying to minimise business interruption rather than do anything sensible like stop delivering people parcels until they’ve figured out what’s going on with the bombs, though the real mystery is why the police don’t really seem to have the power to do that and, in fact, end up working with the warehouse to check each parcel individually to keep the conveyor belts going.

From the aerial view, the city itself resembles the warehouse with the roads taking the place of the belts as delivery vans shuttle along them. Seventy-something delivery driver subcontractor Sano (Shohei Hino) once had a friend who used to say that they were the ones who kept the country running. Yacchan became the number one driver largely because he took 10 minutes to eat his lunch and worked every hour god sent for dwindling pay with the implication that his gruelling schedule contributed to his early death. Sano’s son Wataru (Shôhei Uno) has just started working with him on the van after being laid off from an electronics job. They made quality washing machines that were designed to be efficient and to last, but of course they couldn’t compete with cheaper brands so they went bust.

Elena berates herself for being “too Japanese” for the American company which is to say that she takes pride in her work. That’s not to say that everything about the American business culture is bad as she encourages her assistant, Ko (Hikari Mitsushima), to call her Elena and to feel free to speak his mind rather than equivocate to avoid causing offence. But despite their “customer-centric” approach, it’s clear that the company puts profits above all else and treats its workers, who are not actually employees, poorly, without concern for their wellbeing. Yagi (Sadao Abe), the boss of logistics first Sheep Express which is the prime courier for Daily Fast, laments that he’d love to hire more drivers to help them through this crisis but he can’t because they’re always squeezing his budget and no one will work for their terrible rates except for those who, like Sheep Express itself, have no other options and will have put up with it because they’re dependent on Daily Fast. And because they’re dependent on Daily Fast, it means we all have to keep buying stuff we don’t really want or need just keep the belts going because we’re terrified about what will happen if they stop.

There is a direct comparison between Wataru’s well-made washing machines and the cheap and fast consumerist model that’s gradually taken over that suggests things like craftsmanship and integrity have gone out the window in a world where no one really bothers to go the last mile anymore, though it’s his steadfast engineering that eventually saves the day while even Elena comes to rethink her career trajectory and advises the drivers to strike and end this culture of exploitation because it turns out Daily Fast needs them more than they need Daily Fast. But maybe we don’t really need Daily Fast either, and we’re as much to blame for letting them give us what we think we want without really considering what that actually means. Perhaps a “customer-centric” society’s not all it’s cracked up to be, especially when workers and consumers are often the same people stuck on conveyor belts knowing there’s only one way to stop them.

Last Mile screens 19th June as part of this year’s Toronto Japanese Film Festival.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Hakkenden (八犬伝, Fumihiko Sori, 2024)

Posted on by

Kyokutei Bakin thinks he’s a hack who writes inconsequential pulp that will be forgotten faster than yesterday’s headlines. He’d never believe that people hundreds of years later would still be talking about his work. Yet he may have a point in his conviction that people crave simple stories where good triumphs over evil specifically because the real world is not really like that and a lot of the time the bad guys end up winning. But does that mean then that all his stories are “lies” and he’s irresponsible for depicting the world not the way that it is but the way he wants it to be? 

Fumihiko Sori’s Hakkenden (八犬伝) is on one level an adaptation of the famous tale probably most familiar to international audiences as The Legend of the Eight Samurai, and also a story of its writing and the private doubts and fears of its author. In dramatising the tale, Sori plays fantasy to the max and revels in Bakin’s outlandishness. An unusually picky Hokusai (Seiyo Uchino), Bakin’s best and he claims only friend and unwilling collaborator, points out that his use of guns is anachronistic because they didn’t come to Japan until 60 or 70 years after the story takes place but Bakin doesn’t care. He says people don’t notice things like that and all they really care about is that good triumphs in the end, so he’ll throw in whatever he feels like to make a better story. In any case, the tale revolves around magical orbs, evil witches, dog gods and good fairies, so if you’re worrying about there being guns before there should be, this isn’t the story for you. 

Hokusai is also shocked that Bakin has never been to the place where the story is set, but as he tells him it all happened long ago and far away so going there now would be pointless. Even so, Hokusai needs to see what he draws which is why he spends half his life on the road costing him relationships with his family. Whatever else anyone might say about him, and he admits himself to being a “difficult” person, Bakin is very close to his family even if his wife yells at him all the time for being rude to influential people and not making any money when he could have just taken over her family’s clog-making business rather than carry on with this writing malarkey. His biggest ambition is that his son become a doctor to a feudal lord and thereby restore their samurai status which on one level points to a kind of conservatism that doesn’t matter to Hokusai and singles Bakin out as a tragic figure because the age of the samurai is nearing its end anyway. 

In his fantasy, however, he hints at and undoes, up to a point, injustices inflicted on women in the romance between Shino (Keisuke Watanabe) and Hamaji (Yuumi Kawai) who is almost forced into a marriage with a wealthy man because of her adoptive parents’ greed but is finally revealed to be a displaced princess and returned to her father who is thereby redeemed for having accidentally killing his other daughter in a mistaken attempt to control her after accidentally promising her in marriage to a dog god without really thinking about what he was saying. A neat parallel is drawn in a brief mention of Hokusai’s artist daughter Oi and Bakin’s daughter-in-law Omichi (Haru Kuroki) who did not receive an education and is almost illiterate but finally helps him to complete the story by transcribing it in Chinese characters he teaches her as they go after he loses his sight.

As his literary success increases, Bakin’s own fortunes both improve and decline. He becomes wealthier and moves to nicer houses in samurai neighbourhoods, but his son Shizugoro’s (Hayato Isomura) health declines and he never opens his own clinic like he planned while remaining committed to the idea that his father is actually a great, unappreciated artist. In a way, completing the story gives Bakin a way to say the world could be kind and just even if it has not always been so to him. He needs to maintain the belief in a better world in order to go living even if he feels it to be inauthentic while his life itself is a kind of fiction. On a trip to the theatre, he ends up seeing Yotsuya Kaidan and is at once hugely impressed and incredibly angry. The world that Nanboku sees is the opposite of his own. People are selfish and greedy. The bad are rewarded and the innocent are punished. Yet perhaps this is the “reality” of the way the world really is, where as his work is a wishful fantasy. All he’s doing is running away from the truth. But then, as his son’s friend tells him, if a man devotes himself to the ideal of justice and believes in it all his life, then it becomes a reality and ceases to be fiction. There is something quite poignant about the dog soldiers coming to take Bakin to the better world he dreamed of where bad things happen but good always triumphs in the end, which has now indeed become a reality if only for him.

Hakkenden screens 13th June as part of this year’s Toronto Japanese Film Festival.

Original trailer (no subtitles)