Category: LGBTQ+

A Useful Ghost (ผีใช้ได้ค่ะ, Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke, 2025)

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Right at the beginning of Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s A Useful Ghost (ผีใช้ได้ค่ะ, Phi Chaidai Kha), we see a man creating a classical-style relief that’s positioned in a tranquil spot surrounded by nature. It features people from all walks of life, a mother and her child, a monk, a scholar, a soldier, a labourer and so on, as well as a goat, and is later revealed to have the title “democracy monument”. But as soon as it’s put up, it’s brought violently down as developers move in to replace this oasis of peace with a modern shopping mall. 

The construction gives rise to more “dust” which is what’s polluting the country, directly linking rampant capitalism with the erosion of democracy. Even the home lived by the self-proclaimed “Academic Ladyboy” (Wisarut Homhuan) may one day be consumed as the traditional streets are replaced by yet more upscale shopping opportunities. In an effort to get rid of the dust that’s plaguing him, he buys a vacuum cleaner, but it turns out to be haunted and coughs in the middle of the night, spitting out all the dust he made it swallow. 

“Dust” is also a term that’s come to stand in for those exploited by this increasingly capitalistic society whose lives are afforded little value, such as factory worker Tok who died after being exposed to too much dust while working at a factory producing vacuum cleaners. Meanwhile, the factory owner’s son has just lost his pregnant wife, Nat (Davika Hoorne), to a respiratory illness caused by dust. Nat has also possessed a vacuum cleaner and reunites with her broken-hearted husband, March (Witsarut Himmarat), but finds herself increasingly compromised after sucking some of the dust out of a government minister’s eyes.

Nat’s desire to stay in the mortal realm longer than is proper is reminiscent of the classic ghost Nang Nak, but what she also becomes is a kind of class traitor increasingly involved with the oppressive regime and betraying her own people to ensure her personal survival. Government minister Dr Paul gets her in on his programme chasing ghosts through dreams and banishing them from people’s memories in order to erase their existence and history. When people refuse to give up their ghosts, he has them given electroshock therapy so that they forget them, as he once tried to do to March before Nat made herself useful to him. And so “dust” and “ghosts” have now become metaphors for those who resist as the souls killed not only during the 2010 massacre but Thammasat University massacre in 1976 rise again to make their presence felt. 

According to the Academic Ladyboy, that these ghosts came back at all is itself an act of resistance, as if these memories themselves could become reminders that resistance is possible and things weren’t always this way. He loathes Nat for the choices that she made in turning on her own, but she was also facing other kinds of oppression in never being accepted by her husband’s upperclass family who in themselves become a symbol of autocratic elitism. Her mother-in-law, Suman (Apasiri Nitibhon), who owns the factory and is unsympathetic towards Tok insisting his death was nothing to do with the working environment, submits herself to them too because like Nat she didn’t belong either and felt she had no other choice. Her eldest child Moss was taken away from her because she spoke a Northern dialect and they feared the child wouldn’t learn standard Thai. Now she tries to talk to her son’s Australian husband in Teochew, only for Moss to roll his eyes and say no one knows how to speak that outside Thailand. Just as they rejected Nat for being an outsider, they rejected Moss for being gay until he became useful to them.

The longer Nat stays beyond her allotted time, the more it corrupts her so on restoring her corporality she would betray even March, who has come to sympathise with the ghosts, in order to be allowed to stay and maintain her position. She’s the “useful ghost”, from a certain point a view, but from another, all the others are “useful” too in keeping the spirit of resistance alive. Quirky and surreal with its tales of haunted hoovers, obsessive bureaucracy, and factories where singing is randomly banned, not to mention truly awesome shoulder pads, Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s deadpan absurdist drama is deadly serious where it counts right until its intensely cathartic conclusion.

A Useful Ghost screens as part of this year’s BFI London Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Man Without a Map (燃えつきた地図, Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1968)

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Hired to find a missing person no one really wants found, a detective begins to chase his own tail amid the impersonal vistas of the contemporary city in Hiroshi Teshigahara’s The Man Without a Map (燃えつきた地図, Moetsukita chizu). The fourth and final in his series of Kobo Abe adaptations and the only one in colour, the film’s Japanese title “burned-up map” may also, in its way, refer to the city of Tokyo which appears blurred out and indistinct in the sepia-tinted opening and is thereafter frequently shot from above as a depersonalised space where anonymous cars shuttle along highways like so many ants moving in rhythm with the momentum of the metropolis.

We follow a nameless detective (Shintaro Katsu) as he’s charged with investigating the disappearance of a 43-year-old salaryman, Hiroshi Nemuro, who turns out to have myriad other personalities and hasn’t been seen for six months. The man’s wife, Mrs Nemuro (Etsuko Ichihara), is not terribly helpful and the detective comes to wonder if the investigation itself is intended to further disguise the man’s whereabouts and prove that he really is a “missing person”. Yet this Tokyo is full of “missing people” including the detective who, we later learn, is a kind of fugitive himself. He apparently walked out on his wife (Tamao Nakamura), the owner of a successful boutique, because he couldn’t find his place there any more. He was once a salaryman too, and became a detective because it was the furthest thing he could think of from a regular job. 

It confuses him that no one really seems to be interested in where Nemuro is or if he’s alright, only in the reason behind his disappearance. The more he chases him, the more he begins to take on Nemuro’s characteristics as if he were intended to slide into the space Nemuro has vacated. Toru Takemitsu’s eerie harpsichord score only seems to add to the hauntingly gothic quality of this quest. The question is whether such a thing as identity even exists any more. The detective puts on Nemuro’’s jacket, though it’s too small, and is mistaken for him, while a colleague of Nemuro’s insists that he’s seen him in the street and is sure it was Nemuro simply because of the unusual colour of his suit without ever seeing his face. Tashiro (Kiyoshi Atsumi) tells the detective that Nemuro had a secret hobby taking nude photos at a specialist club that caters to such things. The two of them are confident they’ve identified the woman in the picture based on her haircut, but the girl they speaks laughs and takes off her wig explaining that she was merely asked to wear it, so the woman in the photo could be anyone, including Nemuro’s own wife.

Nemuro apparently had a series of hobbies for which he’d obtained certificates because he said that having them helped him to feel anchored in his life, though he’s apparently unmoored now. Like the detective, he may have been trying on different personalities from car mechanic to school teacher looking for the right fit and a place he felt he belonged in rebellion against the depersonalisation of the salaryman society in which one man in a suit is as good as another. The detective finds an opposite number in the missing man’s brother-in-law (Osamu Okawa), a very modern, apparently gay gangster connected with a network of male sex workers sold on to influential elites, and a commune of similarly displaced people working as casual labourers that is overcome with corporate thugs and eventually trashed.

The trashing of the commune may have something to do with a man named Maeda who is a councillor in a town no one’s heard of, but was possibly involved in some shady business over which Nemuro may have been intending to blackmail him or blow a whistle with the assistance of his brother-in-law who helped him land a big contract at work. The more the detective investigates, the more confused he becomes. It’s impossible to follow the case as we might expect in a conventional noir thriller, but we’re not supposed to be looking at Nemuro’s disappearance so much as the detective’s gradually fracturing sense of self as he becomes lost in the anonymous city. He sees himself bury Mrs Nemuro in leaves only for her body somehow reduce itself to its component parts and sink into the street. Later her face is superimposed on the buildings as if she were looking down on him while he is lost and alone. Nemuro’s face also appears on buildings, though more as a metaphor as if the salaryman and the office building were one and the same and the reason the detective can’t find him is because he doesn’t really exist as a concrete identity. The detective spots a dead cat in the road and laments that he never thought to ask its name, but will try to think up a good one later. He might as well be talking about himself, now displaced, unmoored, and pursued among the city streets, a man without a map lost amid the simulacrum of an imaginary city.

Amoeba (Siyou Tan, 2025)

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Choo (Ranice Tay) wonders what it’s like to be the Merlion. Being made to stand there while everyone makes up stories about you, like you’re trapped in an aquarium and can only look out on the world. In an odd way, it reflects her own experience as an “ungovernable” young woman contending with an authoritarian culture led by entrenched patriarchy as mediated through her overly strict elite girls high school which is intent on producing “respectful daughters and students of virtue”.

The fact that Choo doesn’t quite it in here is signalled on her very first day in which she’s humiliatingly forced to drag her own desk from one classroom to another as a result of some sort of clerical error. A stern-looking teacher measures the diameter of the face on her wristwatch, decides it’s too large and, therefore, too masculine, and takes it away from her. They measure the length of her skirt above her knee and say it’s too short, while her hair is too long. Or rather, the style is wrong and she should make sure it doesn’t touch her collar by the following Monday. The teacher even pulls at her shirt as if she were about to tear it off to confirm the colour of her bra, though it is in no way visible and therefore presumably makes no real difference anyway.

Above the whiteboard in their classroom, there’s a sign reading “purity, moral uprightness, diligence, and filial piety,” all qualities Choo derides during her speech having been entered as a candidate to become class monitor against her will. She ends up ironically being made “Good Citizen” representative instead by her teacher, Mrs Lim, who takes an instant dislike to her and seems to regard Choo as a potential source of resistance. On the one level, the girls are all being encouraged to become proper young women and as Choo says despite her very feminine name, it doesn’t really suit her. Later, she becomes friends with another group of girls who ironically describe themselves as a “gang”, having realised the great figures they learn about in school and have streets named after them made their money peddling opium, only to be accused of actively participating in organised crime when their teacher finds a video of them dancing around to a street music video featuring a guy with tattoos and having fun in one of the girl’s bedrooms.

Choo and her friend Nessa (Nicole Lee Wen) had been worried about the video for another reason, that even though as Choo says they “technically didn’t actually do anything,” the video she shot of them messing around while trying to catch the ghost in her room could cause each of them a lot of trouble in the extremely conservative country where homosexuality was only decriminalised in 2022. In any case, the teacher doesn’t seem to pay any attention to that part of the video, which comes as a relief to both of them even if it’s made them guarded and awkward in the way they interact with each other. Nessa wants to quit swimming and try football instead, but doesn’t necessarily feel she has the freedom to make that decision and is fearful of its implications. “Can’t sleep, cannot eat, cannot freaking pee, can’t do anything,” another of the girls laments. “We can’t even study what we want.”

But having banded together over their shared sense of alienation, Choo’s friends are also separated by their socio-economic disparities. They mainly hang out at the house of the richest girl, Sofia (Lim Shi-An), whose father is a construction magnate. After deciding they all want to go to the same junior college, they struggle to agree on a destination as Sofia has her sights set on an elite institution the other girls think is out of their league given their current academic performance. Though she agrees to go to a less prestigious school with them, in reality Sofia can’t let go of her privilege or the expectation that goes with it and has secretly applied to the other school while trying to cajole the other girls to apply there too. Later it transpires that she’s already been given the answers to the exam questions by the tutor her wealthy mother hired, so there was never any doubt of her getting in because her money will always open doors. She shares the answers with the other girls to parrot back during in their oral which involves describing a picture of the iconic seafront to which the only “correct” answers are that the Merlion represents prosperity and national identity. Choo gives this answer too, but only to subvert it in asking what the point of this test is if they’re just supposed to give the “correct” answer while making it clear that she won’t go along with this charade even if it might be advantageous for her to do so.

The girls had taken refuge in a cave on the land being developed by Sofia’s father and created their own secret den, but when it’s taken down, erasing their history in the name of progress, it’s like they’re losing their last safe space where they can embrace these subversive thoughts and express their sense of frustration with the authoritarian culture around them as corporate forces seek to bury and obfuscate the past. Choo wonders how they can escape this “aquarium” and see a future for themselves when their history is constantly being revised and repackaged to reflect a certain ideology and they’re given so little freedom to think for themselves or to be who they really are in the culture where conformity is king. Yet though her camera and friendships, Choo does seem to have discovered a way to go on seeing, and speaking, the truth even if everyone else is content to ignore it.

Amoeba had its world premiere as part of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Hidden Face (히든페이스, Kim Dae-woo, 2024)

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The obvious irony in the title of Kim Dae-woo’s erotic thriller Hidden Face (히든페이스), is that it refers both to the heroine, Su-yeon (Cho Yeo-jeong), who conceals herself within a secret bunker in her home to spy on her indifferent social climber boyfriend Sung-jin (Song Seung-heon), and to the sides of themselves that people choose not to reveal to others. As Su-yeon’s mother (Cha Mi-kyung) says, it’s what people see that matters, but the hidden corridors of Su-yeon’s home symbolise the ways in which she has imprisoned her true self or at least has locked a part of herself away from prying eyes while continuing to pry into the secret lives of others.

It’s in this forbidden space, apparently added to the house by the previous father’s owner who was a member of notorious Japanese Unit 731 during the war and feared exposure, that Su-yeon first kissed fellow student Mi-ju (Park Ji-hyun) with whom she’s been in a long-term, but apparently secret, relationship. While Mi-ju is patiently renovating the house she thinks they’ve bought together, Su-yeon has decided that she wants a “real life that people recognise”, which she evidently doesn’t believe a same-sex relationship can be. The forbidden space of “cold room” is then where she’s locked her queerness, and a manifestation of her fears of the consequences of exposure. The problem is that she doesn’t even like Sung-jin and the points of attraction he seems to hold for her are that he doesn’t like her either and is otherwise easy to manipulate because of the vast class difference between them. 

Part of the reason that Sung-jin keeps Su-yeon at arms’ length is that he resents the power that she holds over him. He resents both her and himself in knowing that he’s really only with her for material reasons, while simultaneously aware that his current success has nothing to do with his own talent and everything to do with Su-yeon’s privilege. Su-yeon’s mother congratulates him on working hard to build an image of himself, while otherwise needling him about his working-class background in which his mother ran a small restaurant and really knows nothing of this elite world of classical music, mansions, and honeymoons to resorts that charge some people’s annual wage for a single night’s stay. But the facade can’t really cover up Sung-jin’s insecurity and the fear that he couldn’t make it on his own though he so desperately wants to be a part of this world and to feel himself worthy of it. He feels emasculated and humiliated in assuming that other people can see that he’s just a puppet while Su-yeon, her mother, and their advisor discuss policy decisions he’s technically responsible for out in the open, he assumes to deliberately embarrass him and keep him under control. 

Yet the truth is that these kinds of hierarchal power structures of class and gender are less relevant when it comes to desire than otherwise might be assumed. Su-yeon refers to Mi-ju as her slave or underling and adopts a dominant role in the relationship yet eventually has the tables turned on her when Mi-ju decides to rebel. The power dynamic of desire is a push and pull between the desire and the desired mediated by the depth of yearning. It may seem to Su-yeon that she is in control, but equally Mi-ju derives power from her willing submission and can overturn the dynamic at any time she chooses upending Su-yeon’s delusion that Mi-ju is a mere plaything, or “tool”, she can take out and put away at will. 

Nevertheless, the question is whether anyone could be content with this shadow life or if Su-yeon, vain, psychopathic, and probably incapable of understanding other people’s feelings, is content to imprison herself within the hidden corridors of her home which come to stand in for the need to conform to the heteronormative, patriarchal, class-based social codes other people see as “real” and “normal”. Sung-jin is apparently all too willing, considering just leaving Su-yeon trapped behind their walls to continue enjoying this life of privilege with a little more freedom without considering that without Su-yeon he has no entitlement to it as her mother later suggests after becoming worried on realising that Su-yeon hasn’t used her credit in days which is extremely uncharacteristic behaviour.

Sung-jin would trade his pride as a man, his sense of self-worth, and even betray his moral code to appear wealthy and successful and deny his working-class origins. Su-yeon would also, it seems, rather be in a conventional marriage to a man for whom she feels only contempt and resents for not liking her, than live an authentic life as a lesbian and face her internalised homophobia along with that of the wider society. Thus she confines Mi-ju to a forbidden space of her mind in an attempt to have her cake and eat it too, while Mi-ju seemingly fulfils herself in wilfully becoming a prisoner of love, even if it may only be in Su-yeon’s fantasy. Perhaps they get what they wanted all along, affirming the primacy of privilege, but only at the cost of their authentic selves and trapped inside the prison of their own self-loathing.

Hidden Face is released Digitally in the US on September 16 courtesy of Well Go USA.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Angel Guts: Red Flash (天使のはらわた 赤い閃光, Takashi Ishii, 1994)

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Sent to cover a pornographic movie shoot, a young woman finds herself confronted by the teenage trauma that continues to haunt her in the final instalment in the Angel Guts series, Red Flash (天使のはらわた 赤い閃光, Tenshi no harawata: Akai senko). Adapting his own manga, Ishii draws on giallo and classic noir as the heroine attempts to reclaim herself from the spectres that are haunting her even as Japan itself seems to be a land of predatory and dangerous men.

Nevertheless, as the film begins, Nami (Maiko Kawakami) seems to be holding her own aside from an apparent problem with alcohol that sees her drink far to much and end up in vulnerable, potentially dangerous situations. She has a job as an editor and ad hoc photographer where she’s regularly subjected to extreme imagery, while her sleazy boss is also sexually harassing her and in fact attempts to force himself on her in the lift. It’s being sent to take photos at a porno shoot featuring intense rape scenes that awakens her buried teenage trauma of having been abducted and raped on her way home from school.

Nami is haunted by the spectre of her attacker, though as her new ally Muraki (Jinpachi Nezu) tells her it’s only by killing this ghost that she might be able to “erase” the harmful memories of her rape and overcome the repulsion she feels towards sex with men. Perhaps problematically, the film then phrases Nami’s journey as one of repair in which the ultimate goal is being able to enjoy heterosexual sex which seems to be something Nami herself desires to the extent her inability to do so leaves her feeling as if there’s something wrong with her. Even so, it seems she is able to have successful and enthusiastic sex with bar owner Chihiro (Noriko Hayami) who seduces, or perhaps takes advantage of, Nami after bringing her home because she’d had too much to drink at the bar.

On another drunken occasion, Nami is ushered into a love hotel where she wakes up naked several hours later with no recollection of how she got there. Looking around, she spots not only a bloody knife in the sink, but the body of a middle-aged man hidden under the duvet, and camera which has apparently been filming the whole thing. The act of watching her assault, of which she has no memory, echoes the out of body experience of her rape in which she sees another version of herself save her by killing the attacker. What Nami is essentially trying to do is kill the attacker in her mind through discovering what really happened in the hotel room. As Nami has developed a fear of sex of men, she has a tendency to kick and punch violently in self-defence which, coupled with her drunkeness, lead her to fear that she killed this man after waking up during the assault. In another kind of haunting, Nami begins receiving unpleasant phone calls from someone using a voice disguiser who knows she was at the hotel and attempts to blackmail her in exchange for sexual favours. 

Her first suspect is Muraki, which makes sense because he was at the bar and saw her leave with the other customer so could easily have followed her and either observed her entering the hotel and put two and two together after seeing the crime on the news, or actually committed the murder himself while she was unconscious. She’s also been given a negative impression of Muraki by her jealous boss who tells her that his wife killed herself because his constant infidelities. But Muraki is also carrying traumas of his own in his guilt over his wife’s death which he acknowledges was influenced by his behaviour even if because of a misunderstanding or irrational jealousy rather than sexual or emotional betrayal. Thus, Nami becomes to him a means of atonement in the form of a woman he could save in place of the wife he could not.

Which is to say, Nami is pulled towards trusting the improbable presence of a “good” man even as Chihiro insists that they don’t exist. After they made love, Chihiro deepened the intimacy between them by revealing that she had been abused by her stepfather, though it does not prompt Nami to reveal her own traumatic memories of her rape and abduction. She is reluctant to go to the police not because she fears she is guilty of the crime and wants to avoid punishment, but feels ashamed and can’t bear the idea of the police watching the tape which would amount to a kind of second rape. She does eventually allow Muraki to watch it, but on realising that it may exonerate her is still reluctant to let the police see it while torn by her civic duty in knowing that she has evidence that may help catch the “real” killer. She and Chihiro wonder why it is men like to watch the rape videos she was sent photograph, but can’t come up with much of an answer though it hints and an ingrained misogyny, a desire for control and dominance of a woman and her sexuality. The fact that she was sent to photograph it all by this otherwise mainstream company again hints at a kind of desensitisation amid an overly sexualised atmosphere even as her boss tells her the UN has been critical of Japanese attitudes to sex. Nevertheless it seems that Nami is able to overcome her trauma, to an extent, through reclaiming her identity even if she still has the occasional red flashes of violent fantasy.

Angel Guts: Red Flash is available as part of Third Window Films’ Takashi Ishii: 4 Tales of Nami boxset.

Babanbabanban Vampire (ババンババンバンバンパイア, Shinji Hamasaki, 2025)

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It turns out immortality’s not all it’s cracked up to be in Shinji Hamasaki’s adaptation of the manga by Hiromasa Okujima, Baban Baban Ban Vampire (ババンババンバンバンパイア). At 450 years old, Mori Ranmaru (Ryo Yoshizawa), one-time lover of Oda Nobunaga (Shinichi Tsutsumi), is working as an attendant in a bathhouse in an attempt to, as he says, “live an ordinary life earnestly,” while staving off the darkness of an existence free of the spectre of death. 

Yet, there is an uncomfortable darkness at the centre of this otherwise humorous and ironic tale in that what Mori Ran is actually doing is grooming a child so that he can enjoy him when he judges that he is “ready.” There’s an obviously unpalatable reading of the film that renders it as an allegory for paedophilia, while there’s also an undeniable poignancy in likening the figure of the vampire of that of a gay man in an oppressive society. Mori Ran accosts his victims in dark alleyways and his assignations with other men are necessarily short and secretive. They also result in death, while Mori Ran describes most of his victims as tainted and disgusting as if echoing an internalised sense of self-loathing. He continues to hold up Rihito (Rihito Itagaki) as a figure of innocence and purity because he once saved his life when he was baking in the heat of an usually hot spring when the boy was only five years old. 

Mori Ran’s internalised homophobia is somewhat mirrored in that of the teacher Sakamoto (Shinnosuke Mitsushima) who is also a vampire hunter but bewitched by Mori Ran and longing to be initiated by him, though Mori Ran declines to give him what he sees as a curse. Imbued with a gothic sensibility, Mori Ran believes that humans are beautiful because they die, while vampirism is debased and ugly. He refuses to condemn someone he admires to his own fate which he describes as a kind of inescapable hell in which he is unable to die. He no longer believes in love, though is haunted by his loss of Nobunaga, and sees humans merely as food. 

Nevertheless, it seems he has found purpose in his present life of living with Rihito’s family and working in their bathhouse despite convincing himself that he’s only biding his time until Rihito is ripe for the picking. According to Mori Ran, the sweetest blood belongs to that of 18-year-old male virgins which is why his goal of ensuring that Rihito remains virginal and pure is becoming more difficult now that he has entered adolescence. Much of the comedy derives from Mori Ran’s emotional cluelessness and paranoia on discovering that Rihito has fallen for a girl, Aoi (Nanoka Hara), with whom he had a stereotypical meet cute on his way to his high school entrance ceremony. Knowing that he has to nip this in the bud as soon as possible, he pays a visit to Aoi to warn her off but fails to realise that not only did she barely notice Rihito let alone fall in love with him, but that she is actually obsessed with vampires and is keener on him. 

But then again, there’s something additionally troubling about Rihito’s immediate classification of Mori Ran as a “love rival” in the mistaken belief he’s after Aoi too rather than as someone who should probably be reported to some kind of authority. After all, even if he were not 450 years old but the 25 he claims to be, hanging around exclusively with high schoolers is odd and bordering on inappropriate in itself. Having misunderstood his intentions, Aoi also believes that Mori Ran is waiting for her to be “ready,” in a partial recognition that this is wrong because she’s a child but also prepared to wait for the mysterious vampire without considering the implications of his being interested in a 15-year-old girl if that actually were the case. 

Nevertheless, what Mori Ran discovers is really a different kind of love in his gradual integration into the human world and the the friendships he forms not only with Rihito, but Aoi, her muscular brother Franken (Mandy Sekiguchi) who also has a crush on Mori Ran, and the lovelorn teacher Sakamoto, even if he’s still focused on his mission of keeping Rihito pure so he can drink his blood on his 18th birthday. His attempts to prevent a relationship forming between Rihito and Aoi are all countrerprodcuteive and would like end up bringing them together if it were not for the fact of Aoi’s crush on him of which he remains oblivious. The inherently zany humour of the situation with its series of concentric love triangles along with the warmheartedness of Rihito’s homelife when contrasted with the “mysterious” serial killings on the news cannot completely overcome the unpalatable undercurrent of Mori Ran’s pederastic quest, if glossing over it with admittedly delicious irony and absurdism.

Babanbabanban Vampire screens 27th July as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Daughter’s Daughter (女兒的女兒, Huang Xi, 2024)

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Never having fully dealt with the trauma of her teenage pregnancy and decision to give her child up to be raised by a family friend, 64-year-old divorcee Jin Ai-xia (Sylvia Chang Ai-chia) finds herself in an eerily similar position on on learning that the daughter she raised in Taiwan has been killed in a car accident in New York where she was receiving fertility treatment. The process resulted in a healthy embryo of which Ai-xia now finds herself the “guardian”. She is given four options, keep the embryo in storage and pay to renew the contract when it runs out, find a surrogate to carry to it term, donate it to another couple, or have it destroyed.

The fact that there are eight months left on the contract that her daughter Zuer (Eugenie Liu Yi-er) signed makes this almost another pregnancy which Ai-xia must decide whether or not to continue. Keeping the embryo in storage only defers the decision and traps it in the same mental space in which Ai-xia thinks of Emma (Karena Lam), the daughter she did not raise and tried to put out of her mind. In its consideration of motherhood, the film does shy away from suggesting that it is a kind of burden and requires sacrifice whether willing or not. Later confronted, if gently, by Emma who has unbeknownst to her become a single mother who chose to keep her child, Ai-xia justifies herself that she was 16 and afraid. Most of all, she was afraid the baby would trap her in New York’s Chinatown and that her life would never change after that. She wanted more, so she went along with her mother’s proposed solution of giving her daughter to a childless couple to raise while she returned to Taiwan and never looked back.

Yet it’s Emma who seems to haunt her while she’s in New York trying to sort out Zuer’s affairs while mired in her grief. It’s clear that she feels that she failed both her daughters as her unresolved trauma over separating from Emma left her unable to fully bond with Zuer whom she raised at arms’ length. When Zuer and her same-sex partner Jia-yi (Tracy Chou Tsai-shih) decide to have a child, Ai-xia is against it. It seems there may be some lingering prejudice in her about their relationship as she tells Zuer that the baby won’t be able to explain their family situation, but it’s also partly that she doesn’t want her to be trapped by motherhood as she felt herself to be. She asks her why she and Jia-yi don’t just enjoy their life together rather than complicate with a child. Ai-xia tells Emma that she wanted to live her own life, while expressing the same desire now that she has become a second mother to her own mother, Yan-hua (Ma Ting-Ni), who is living with dementia. Once her mother passes away, she’s looking forward to enjoying her freedom for once. 

Ai-xia rails that no one ever really considered her feelings and that she’s been given this burden without ever really being given an opportunity to ask herself if she wanted it. There’s a minor irony in Yun-hua’s segueing back into the past to tell the 64-year-old Ai-xia that she can’t raise a child at this age as if she were still a pregnant 16-year-old. As an older woman, she reflects that Yun-hua probably didn’t make that decision solely because she was embarrassed by the stigma of teenage pregnancy but genuinely thought it was best for both her daughter and her granddaughter. But now Ai-xia is facing the same choice at the other end of her life knowing that if she chooses to raise Zuer’s baby she may not live long enough to see it to adulthood, nor may she have the energy to look after a small child even if she has the time. 

But Ai-xia carries Zuer’s ashes around with her holding them in front of her belly as if they were the embryo and she were already carrying it. Placing the square black container on the airport scanner and watching it travel through the tunnel is oddly like an act of rebirth. Attempting to come to terms with her own complicated maternity, she thrashes out the past with Emma but also really with herself in trying to decide whether or not to continue this maternal legacy despite the sacrifices and compromises it entails. For her, motherhood becomes an act of self-forgiveness in which she learns to understand both her own mother and her daughters along with their shared connection in this ever-increasing line.

Daughter’s Daughter screens 18th July as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Extremists’ Opera (過激派オペラ, Junko Emoto, 2016)

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Junko Emoto ironically explores Tokyo’s fringe theatre scene in adapting her semi-biographical novel. Shot with a roving, handheld camera, The Extremists’ Opera (過激派オペラ, Kagekiha Opera) situates itself within an all female, avant-garde experimental theatre company but quickly makes plain that even those with high-minded artistic intentions are not free of the usual human flaws as the borderline abusive, womanising female director finds herself sabotaging everything she’s built through a mix of hubris and wandering desire. 

Blanket Cult are a popular company on the fringe theatre scene with a small following devoted to their art. Former banker Ayako bursts into their office determined on an audition and subsequent career change precisely because she can’t get enough of director/playwright Nao’s experimental plays which, she explains, she believes can stop wars. Nevertheless, it’s not Ayako the team are struck by, but the intense young woman who came in behind her, Haru, who more or less demands to be taken on. Nao is captivated, hiring both women on the spot and vowing to write a new piece with Haru in the lead. Of course, she does this partly for not altogether altruistic reasons. Immediately after the first script meeting she asks Haru to stay behind and then propositions her, directly declaring her love with the justification that she’d rather be upfront rather than waste time during the rehearsal process. Haru tells her that she’s not into women, but Nao doesn’t take no for an answer seemingly oblivious to the fact that what she’s doing is harassment and really she’s no better than any other sleazy male director handing out parts to women she wants to sleep with. 

Nevertheless, her persistence even with its undignified pleading eventually pays off. Haru relents, either because she’s fed up of fending off Nao’s advances or discovering that she is on some level receptive, finding that she does in fact enjoy sex with another woman. She agrees to start dating Nao who declares Haru her muse and the pair move in together but their relationship is threatened by their working environment with its petty jealousies and temptations. Emoto opens the film with a graphic sex scene of two naked women 69-ing, rolling around in the empty environment of the garage the troupe uses to rehearse. The two women are Nao and her previous squeeze, a former leading lady she throws over because of her attraction to Haru whose own desire is perhaps signposted after she walks in on them going for a second round and makes a passive aggressive scene that leads the other woman to warn her that Nao is a heartless womaniser with a habit of bedding her leading ladies, sometimes in the wings. 

Yet it’s not only Nao’s misplaced desire that endangers the troupe but her arrogance and abusive directing style. After their play proves a success, she unwisely gives in to ambition and sells out by allowing a mainstream professional actress, Yurie, to join the troupe, a move which disrupts their dynamic while also inflaming Haru’s jealousy as she begins to wonder if she’s already being replaced. Nao snaps at her team and stops giving them proper direction in favour thinly veiled insults. She repeatedly instructs an actress to lose weight while increasingly allowing Yurie to dominate the rehearsals, accepting all of her ideas even while the other members sceptical. She even goes so far as to abandon her usual thriftiness, purchasing elaborate props such as a large vertical tank which leads her into another possibly inappropriate relationship with an older woman who had been pursuing her. Needless to say, the whole thing blows up in her face, ruining not just her relationship with Haru but that with her theatre company who are now all thoroughly fed up with her mistreatment and have entirely lost respect for her as a person and an artist. 

“If you want to pick a fight with society live in it first,” her benefactor irritatedly tells Nao after she’s thoughtlessly caused offence, reminding her that she lives in a kind of bubble that is the fringe theatre scene. Her only real interaction with someone outside of it is with the estate agent who finds her and Haru a flat and is extremely confused as to why they only need one room if they’ll be living together, concerned that female roommates are a liability because sooner or later one gets a boyfriend and leaves the other in the lurch unable to make the rent alone. Unable to learn her lesson, Nao has furiously energetic sex with an apparently wealthy starstruck fan and then immediately asks for money, perhaps getting a taste of her own medicine when she assures her there’s plenty more where that came from as long as she sees her again and also gives her a part in a play. Playfully ironic with its whimsical score and slightly detached gaze, Emoto’s refreshingly explicit drama is both a mild satire of the avant-garde fringe theatre scene and a takedown of its self-involved director whose inability to separate the creative from the carnal proves her downfall both artistic and emotional. 

Trailer (English subtitles)

Edhi Alice (에디 앨리스: 리버스, Kim Il-ran, 2024)

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“I’m Alice, who is living in the present,” one of the two protagonists of Kim Il-ran’s documentary Edhi Alice tells the camera when asked to introduce herself. A transwoman in her 40s, Alice got her name from film director Lee Joon-ik while working on Dong-ju: The Portrait of a Poet, a film inspired by the life of a poet who died as a political prisoner yearning for freedom and authenticity in a Japanese jail during the colonial era. 

Freedom and authenticity are both things that Alice has found in her transition and is continuing to seek. As a child, she had a consciousness of herself as female until her sister remarked in a phone call that she was becoming a man after noticing that her voice was breaking. Surrounded by an intensely patriarchal society, Alice convinced herself to conform to common notions of masculinity, even getting married in an attempt to live as a man and prove herself as one by having a child. Only after the marriage ended did she begin to embrace her authentic self by undergoing surgery which, she points out, is somewhat unusual in that she chose to remove her genitals right away because she couldn’t bear to live with the reminder of her masculinity. However, she has avoided other kinds of medical interventions such as plastic surgery stating that she doesn’t see the point now that she is already in her 40s and has no plans to date. 

She does, however, live in a more liminal space in which her transness is not immediately apparent while working in a stereotypically masculine industry as a lighting director for film and TV in which, as she points out, her height and strength are definite advantages. Though she says she has not experienced much prejudice and discrimination while working on films, she reveals that she was dismissed from a TV project because the producers were “ultra-conservative” and did not want to work with her. Meanwhile, there’s a genuine poignancy in the crew’s visit to a public bath as Alice reflects that she probably won’t ever have the opportunity to visit one again, suggesting that she most likely won’t be admitted to the women’s bath given her gender presentation and fears may make people uncomfortable if she were. 

Edhi doesn’t have the same trouble, but has not yet completed her transition having visited a fortune teller and been advised to wait until a more auspicious time. Working as a councillor for LGBTQ+ youth, she assumed she must have been gay because she liked men but only later came to realise after joining an LGBTQ+ choir that the gay men around her did not experience the same kind of discomfort in their bodies and that she must be trans. But like Alice, she originally tried to conform to what it means to be a man in Korean society. When she tried to explain her identity to her mother, she had dismissed it by saying that it was only because she didn’t want to serve in the military. Trans people are not welcomed in the armed forces and Edhi reflects on the death of Byun Hui-su who fought for her right to serve by beginning her transition while on leave from military service. Her desire to continue being a member of the armed forces was denied and she was dismissed. She later took her own life.

While affected by the deaths of so many people around her who could not find a way to survive amid the intensely conformist pressures of Korean society, Edhi does her best to live her life while taking care of her parents and nephews. Though her father might use male pronouns and continue to refer to her as his son and her mother, though supportive, worries that she might regret her choices later, Edhi was surprised by the ease with which her nephews simply accepted her explanation of her transness and agreed that “Edhi is just Edhi,” agreeing to call her by her name rather than uncle or aunt. She fears being forgotten and regrets having thrown away photos of her other life but continues to pursue her dream of living in a house with her mother and opening a cafe. While never shying away from the physical pain involved in transitioning, the film reinforces the sense of liberation it can bring if tempered by the realities of life in contemporary Korea.

Edhi Alice screens at the ICA 18th May as part of this year’s Queer East.

Bel Ami (漂亮朋友, Geng Jun, 2024)

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In the opening scenes of Geng Jun’s Bel Ami, a middle-aged man poses for a series of nude photos. The pictures and the poses echo a long history of queer iconography, but at first the man stands with his back to us. We can’t see his face, and he is hiding from us who he really is even as his nakedness suggests a desire for authenticity and a demand that we recognise his identity. “It’s repressive,” another man sighs, complaining that like everyone else he is forced to keep a part of himself hidden and is painfully lonely because of it. 

Like Geng’s other films set in Heilongjiang, Mainland China, the film’s queer themes would not play well with the censor’s board who are notoriously squeamish of any reference to the LGBTQ+ community and has found success only by screening in Taiwan where it won several categories at the Golden Horse Awards. There is a minor irony in play as a certain character makes clear in his rendition of the Internationale that the queer community in China has long referred to each other as “tongzhi” or “comrade” but do so to express solidarity against the oppressive authoritarian government which isolates and others them, preventing them from living authentically as full and free members of society. 

When Zhiyong spots a man he assumes to be gay in a cafe, he addresses him as “tongzhi”, but the man first denies his identity and responds to Zhiyong’s question about why he’s dressed in what he sees as a stereotypically gay manner if he’s not actually gay by saying that his son is really into rock music so he’s trying to look “cool”. He later confirms that he is actually gay and is annoyed his outfit is giving him away while similarly worried that Zhiyong will expose him. By contrast, a pair of lesbians sit in the next booth over and are overt and open in their relationship. They remark that the men behind them appear to be hiding something, while one insists that men have no morals or integrity. 

Xuanyu is, however, the most authoritarian of all as she keeps gay barber Quan, the prospective father of their child, under total surveillance. She insists on micromanaging his life, stalking him and installing a camera hidden in a clock in his barber shop. Her partner tells her love is freedom and asks if that’s what they give each other when they receive little of it from elsewhere, though it’s a question with no answer. Xuanyu is happy with the way that things are. She’d rather adopt than involve a man in their desire for a child and suggests just eloping while her partner says her parents would never accept it. Shooting in a crisp black and white that adds to the film’s breezy, deadpan humour, Geng switches to colour only once as Jing poses in a wedding dress only to be joined by a reluctant Quan suggesting a possible marriage of convenience that will satisfy both of their families and their filial obligations in the birth of their child. Quan leaves the frame as soon as possible, taking his flowers with him, for Xuanyu to enter now dressed in a black suit and occupying the space the groom.

Quan had been the lover of the man in the nude photos, Gang, but abruptly broke up with him. A baker who likes to strike back against an unforgiving society by hiding stands of his hair in his bread, Gang is also isolated and lonely, fearing he won’t be able to find another partner. He ends up meeting Zhiyong at an exclusive and very weird gay membership club run by “K” for King who gives Zhiyong the “codename” “Apollo” and immediately embarks on a sadomasochistic game pressuring Zhiyong for sexual favours as a means of joining the community expressing the way in which the oppressed oppress each other. While semi-stalked by an incredibly lonely and socially awkward restaurant owner, Zhiyong first runs from his queer identity but eventually finds a kind of hope and freedom in his relationship with Gang. They are each searching for connection and the freedom to love and be loved which is also in its way a means of resistance against entrenched authoritarianism. Don’t lose hope, they encourage each other while basking in the isolated patch of sunshine of the freedom they have found. 

Bel Ami screened as part of this year’s Queer East.