Category: LGBTQ+

Manila by Night (Ishmael Bernal, 1980)

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Contemporary youth is swallowed by the darkness of the Marcos-era capital in Ishmael Bernal’s meandering nocturnal epic, Manila by Night. So bleak was its vision that it was blocked from release by first lady Imelda Marcos who objected to the film’s characterisation of her beloved city and insisted that all references to Manila be removed which is why the film was retitled City After Dark in an attempt to distance itself from the realities of urban life under the authoritarian regime. 

Bernal opens however with a scene of aspirational suburban living at the home of a wealthy family as they prepare for an evening out attending a live gig by eldest son Alex (William Martinez), an aspiring folk singer. In a quiet city bar he performs a wholesome cover of the ’69 Crosby, Stills & Nash classic “Teach Your Children”, but the otherwise serene atmosphere is abruptly shattered by gunshots ending the performance and scattering the spectators. The choice of song is in itself instructive in hinting at the generational divide between the apathetic Alex and his respectable middle-class suburban mother Virgie (Charito Solis) who we later discover is carrying a degree of shame over her past as a sex worker and has perhaps overcompensated in her desire to ensure her children become successful members of a conservative society. 

As the song says, Alex too is incapable of understanding his parents’ youthful suffering and finds himself lost in the nighttime city. On the one hand he’s dating a young woman of a similar social class who may be joking when she talks about their marriage but is evidently more serious about the relationship than he is while they retreat to a hotel room experimenting with sex and drugs. On the other hand he’s also experimenting with a gay man, Manay (Bernardo Bernardo), who is also in an awkward relationship with bisexual taxi driver Pebrero (Orestes Ojeda) who has two children and a wife while simultaneously dating naive and innocent country girl Baby (Lorna Tolentino ) currently working as a waitress at a diner where a sleazy pimp keeps hassling her to become a sex worker promising megabucks from wealthy Japanese clients. 

The presence of the Japanese as external economic force is in its own way a reflection of the desire many of the young people have to leave the Philippines, such as that of blind sex worker Bea (Rio Locsin) who is also involved with Alex but hoping to move to Saudi Arabia with her boyfriend Greg (Jojo Santiago) who has been offered employment there but later discovers that he’s been scammed, temporarily stranded in Bangkok until managing to arrange his passage home. Mass unemployment is a constant spectre, Baby’s father also out of work but lamenting the only job prospect he’s found pays so little and is so far away as to be economically pointless. Lack of other options later causes Greg to attempt to manipulate Bea into participating in live sex shows without her full consent while many of the women are forced into sex work in order to support their families. When Baby falls pregnant, realises Pebrero won’t marry her, and is sacked from the diner she too is pushed into accepting the sleazy customer’s offer but ultimately cannot go through with it. Meanwhile, Pebrero’s wife Adelina (Alma Moreno) is also exposed as a sex worker catering to wealthy Japanese clients rather than the nurse she had claimed to be leaving every day in a crisp white uniform for the hospital and later paying a heavy price for her duplicity. 

The crowded tenements inhabited by Baby and Adelina where several members of a large family share a single room stand in stark contrast to Alex’s well-appointed suburban home complete with servants his mother makes a point of talking down to, but what may start for him as a reckless curiosity rebelling against his comfortable life becomes a self-destructive odyssey through midnight Manila in which he eventually becomes addicted to drugs. In a climactic scene, Virgie and her husband batter him with nearby objects while the camera cuts ironically to a series of religious icons and a large statue of Jesus looking down on the scene of chaos before Alex abandons his family to reunite with Manoy. The capture of his friend Kano (Cherie Gil), a tomboyish lesbian in love with an unreceptive Bea, by the police is framed as a kind of crucifixion, the torturing of youth by an implacable authority which restricts its freedom and presents it only with despair. 

Adelina had tried to warn Baby that in order to survive Manila she would need to become “wiser than the men”, but the city is itself full of duplicities and secrets and Baby perhaps ironically the only one finally able to escape its false promises. The perhaps more hopeful coda in which a less curious Alex appears to awaken from his slumber lying peacefully in the light of a new dawn was apparently a concession to the censors but still leaves him lost in a kind of limbo neither in one place nor another but perpetually wandering. At once a portrait of a city lively and free with its series of gay discos and drag nights, weird cults in parks, and nighttime callisthenics classes, and of a place marred by exploitation and hopelessness, Bernal’s odyssey through through Manila by night finds only an elusive hedonism born of internal despair in the intense repressions of authoritarianism.

Trailer (dialogue free)

Moneyboys (金錢男孩, C.B. Yi, 2021)

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“Who doesn’t sell themselves to make money?” a young man asks in C.B. Yi’s melancholy mainland-set drama Moneyboys (金錢男孩, Jīnqián Nánhái) relating the story of a relative who worked as a tanner all his life, became ill from the effects of the chemicals, and died alone far from home. He may suggest that the exploitative nature of contemporary capitalism will eventually consume you, but it’s an older set of social codes that do for Fei (Kai Ko) who consumes himself in a pathological desire for self-sacrifice as if constantly trying to prove himself worthy of acceptance.

As we first meet Fei he introduces himself as “Jackson”, a naive country boy in the city seeking a means to support his struggling rural family which he finds in sex work. Through his job, he encounters the swaggering Xiaolai (JC Lin) who introduces himself as “Max” and takes him under his wing. Soon they fall head over heels in love, but Xiaolai fears Fei’s desperation and lack of judgment in his choice of client, an anxiety which is later borne out when Fei is badly beaten by a local gangster. Filled with rage, Xiaolai attacks him with a metal bar but ends up badly beaten himself and thereafter sought by the police. Not wanting any trouble, Fei skips town and five years later has started a new, apparently much more successful life, in another city. 

“You’re always living for others” he’s later told by a childhood friend, Long (Bai Yufan), whose long-term crush on him Fei seems to be wilfully ignoring, “the way you sacrifice yourself, you constantly hurt yourself and sometimes others too”. Fei’s self-sacrificing nature does indeed seem to have a masochist component as he wilfully puts himself in dangerous situations to get money to provide for his family. His family, however, reject him precisely because of the nature of the sacrifices he is making. Returning to his home town after being unjustly hassled by local police who attempt to entrap him by getting an undercover officer to pose as a client and searching his home for drugs, Fei is physically attacked by a belligerent uncle who can’t stop ranting about Fei’s marital status beginning by berating him that his family is embarrassed because he has no wife before revealing that they all know about “what you did in the city” and are shamed by it. His father barely looks at him, though his sister appears to know and encourages him to find the right person and hold on to them because life is long and she doesn’t want him to be lonely. 

Later, another woman reassures him that he is “someone who deserves love” though he struggles to accept it. He feels indebted to Xiaolai because he lost a leg for him, unable to move past the transactional nature of love to accept it from someone who wants only the same in return. Consumed by internalised shame he struggles to let go of outdated traditional social codes and unlike Long is unwilling to abandon them in order to live the life he wants. One of his sex worker friends in his new city eventually enters into a sham marriage with a woman who is fully aware of the realities and later pledges to move back to the country and raise a child as a conventional husband and father while tearfully explaining that six years with the gay community have been the best of his life. He too has made a sacrifice of himself for his family but is already torn apart with disappointment and resentment. 

Fei’s tragedy is that he tries to please everyone but himself, revelling in his self-sacrificing suffering and barely noticing when others are caught in the crossfire. Unable to let himself go, he is left only with the memory of the one time he was happy, which wasn’t the one he originally thought it was, and the simultaneous knowledge that he has lost It forever through his own thoughtlessness. Trapped in the past both by the traditional social codes and his thwarted romance with Xiaolai he envisions an ironically progressive compromise but is unable to see the selfishness in his desires perhaps for once putting himself first in failing to consider the feelings of those around him. A neon-lit vista of loneliness, C.B Yi’s melancholy tale of self-imprisonment and the commodification of love discovers only unhappiness in the midst of a repressive social culture defined by the twin poles of rampant consumerism and the filial imperative. 

Trailer (English subtitles)

Love in the Big City (대도시의 사랑법, E.oni, 2024)

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“How can being yourself be your weakness?” asks a young woman who, more than anything else, is defiantly herself, to a young man who indeed is anything but. The heroes of E.oni’s Love in the Big City (대도시의 사랑법, Daedosiui sarangbeop), adapted from the acclaimed novel by Park Sang-young, are in some ways on parallel journeys that somehow weave through and around each other as they each try to navigate an often hostile society that has no place either of them.

For aspiring writer and in the film’s early stretches student of French literature Heung-soo (Noh Sang-hyun), his “weakness” is that he’s gay and though he seems to have accepted this about himself is firmly in the closet. Free spirited Jae-hee (Kim Go-eun) who spent her teenage years abroad in France catches him making out with their professor but couldn’t care less though Heung-soo rebuffs her attempts at friendship fearing they’re akin to a kind of blackmail or that she plans to out him to their fellow students. It’s not until Jae-hee is publicly shamed when it’s rumoured a topless photo being shared online is of her that the pair finally become friends. Sick of the curious stares and covert giggles, she lifts her shirt in front of the class to prove it isn’t her, earning the nickname “crazy bitch”.

Her response is the exact opposite of Heung-soo. She claims her freedom by baring all, being defiantly herself and outwardly at least little caring for what others think of her while Heung-soo makes himself invisible and says nothing harbouring intense fear of being exposed. They are each in their way pariahs. Heung-soo because of his sexuality which is still unacceptable to many in the fiercely conformist society of South Korea in which Christian religious bodies still have huge influence and loudly oppose LGBTQ+ rights and freedoms. Heung-soo’s widowed mother is also intensely religious and having stumbled on one of his stories about a crush on a classmate is aware that he is gay but does not speak of it and continues to believe he will be “cured”. This is perhaps why she keeps urging him to do his military service believing it will make a man out of him.

For all of these reasons, it’s not surprising that Heung-soo is unwilling to live his life openly as a gay man because of the prejudice he knows he will face from those around him. Jae-hee, by contrast, refuses to hide and lives the way she wants to but is shamed by those who feel a woman should live in a certain way which is to say quietly, politely, and obediently. A man she thought was a boyfriend while he thought of her as a bit on the side publicly slut shames her and asks what sort of idiot would want to date a woman like her. Though we first meet her as a confident, rebellious student we see her gradually beaten down by the world around her and the demands of corporate culture. Considering marrying a man she may not actually like because it’s what you do, she stares sadly at a middle-aged woman opposite her on the train dressed in a near identical outfit and the comfortable shoes that are psychologically at least uncomfortable for Jae-hee in representing her capitulation to the properness of mainstream society. 

Her degradation continues to the extent that she finds herself in a relationship with a domineering, intensely patriarchal man who later turns violent when she tries to leave him. E often cross cuts and juxtaposes Heung-soo’s and Jae-hee’s experiences as they each suffer similar blows and indeed violence from a macho society if in different ways and for different reasons while having only their intense bond as fellow outsiders to rely on. This really is the love in the big city, a deeply felt platonic and unconditional love between two people who essentially have no one else. It’s through this love that each comes to love and accept themselves, Heung-soo eventually gaining the courage to fully embrace his authentic self while Jae-hee finally regains her independent spirit and refuses to let others shame her while standing up both for the LGBTQ+ community and the young woman she once was at the mercy of a male-dominated corporate culture. Warm and often funny, the film paints contemporary Seoul as an outwardly oppressive city of enforced conformity but equally discovers small pockets of freedom and joy along with the wholesome comfort of true friendship and self-acceptance.

Love in the Big City screened as part of this year’s London Korean Film Festival.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Concerning My Daughter (딸에 대하여, Lee Mi-rang, 2023)

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The unnamed mother (Oh Min-ae) at the centre of Lee Mi-rang’s Concerning My Daughter (딸에 대하여) has only one wish, that her daughter will find a nice man to marry and have a few grandchildren. But Green (Im Se-mi) is gay and has been in a relationship with her partner Rain (Ha Yoon-kyung) for the last seven years though her mother doesn’t seem to accept that what they have together is “real” believing it to be some kind of delusion that’s holding Green back from her happy maternal future. 

When she suggests Green move back in with her after her attempt to secure a loan to help her out with the rising cost of housing is denied, it doesn’t seem to have occurred to her that Rain would be coming too while it perhaps seemed so natural to Green that it didn’t occur to spell it out. Green can at times be obtuse and insensitive, unfair both to her mother and to Rain who bears the unpleasant atmosphere with grace and tries her best to get along with her new mother-in-law who is openly hostile towards her and makes no secret of the fact she would prefer her to leave. Of course, some of these issues may be the same were it a heterosexual relationship as the mother-in-law struggles to accept the presence of the new spouse in the family home and the changing dynamics that involves, but Green’s mother’s resentment is so acute precisely because her daughter’s partner is a woman. She cannot understand the nature of their relationship because it will produce no children and to her therefore seems pointless. 

While her attitude is in part determined by prejudice and a sense of embarrassment that her daughter is different, it’s the question of children which seems to be foremost in her mind. Another woman of a similar age at her job at a care home remarks on her maternal success having raised her daughter to become a professor, but she also says that only by leaving children and grandchildren behind you can die with honour. Green’s mother is the primary carer for an elderly lady, Mrs Lee (Heo Jin), who had no children of her own though sponsored several orphans none of whom appear to have remained in touch with her. Now ironically orphaned herself in her old age, Green’s mother is the only one who cares for her while the manager berates her for using too many resources and eventually degrades Mrs Lee’s access to care Green’s mother suspects precisely because she has no family and therefore no one to advocate for her. 

It’s this fate that she fears for her daughter, that without biological children she will become a kind of non-person whose existence is rendered meaningless. Of course, it’s also a fear that she has for herself and her tenderness towards Mrs Lee is also a salve for her own loneliness and increasing awareness of mortality. Green is her only child, and she may also fear that she will not want to look after her as she might traditionally be expected to because her life is so much more modern as exemplified by the bread and pasta the girls bring into her otherwise fairly traditional Korean-style home. On some level she is probably aware that if she continues to pressure Green to accept a traditional marriage they may end up becoming estranged and she will be in the same position as Mrs Lee, wilfully misused by a cost-cutting care industry because they know there’s no one to kick up a fuss about her standard of care.

Even so, it doesn’t seem to occur to her that Rain could care for her daughter into their old age. Resentfully asking her why they “have to” to live together, Rain patiently explains that in a society which rejects their existence, in which they are unable to marry or adopt children, togetherness is all that they have. Green is currently engaged in a battle with her institution which has fired her colleague on spurious grounds but really because of her sexuality with claims that some students are “uncomfortable” with her classes. The violence with which the women are attacked is emblematic of that they endure from their society while even colleagues interviewing her invalidate Green’s concerns because she too is “one of them,” in their prejudicial way of speaking. 

Green’s mother had also, rather oddly, said that her daughter wasn’t like that when Rain reluctantly explained her difficulties at work and again resents that she’s making waves rather than keeping her head down and getting on with her career. Her decision to jump in a car with boxes of biscuits intending to smooth things over with Green’s boss by apologising on her behalf bares out her old-fashioned attitudes, though she too is shocked by the violence directed at Green and her colleague. When her lodgers ask about Rain, she tells them she’s her daughter’s friend, while she avoids the question when her colleagues ask, still embarrassed that her daughter has not followed the conventional path as if it reflected badly on her parenting. 

Yet through her experiences with Mrs Lee and Rain’s constant, caring patience she perhaps comes to understand that her daughter won’t be alone when she’s old and that she too does not need to be so lonely now. There’s something a little a sad in the various ways Green’s mother is told that her attachment to Mrs Lee is somehow inappropriate as if taking an interest in the lives of those not related to us by blood were taboo even if it’s also sadly true that it’s also in Mrs Lee’s best interests to ask those questions to protect her from those who might not have her best interests at heart. What the film seems to say in the end is that we should all take better care of each other, something which Green’s mother too may come to realise in coming to a gradual, belated acceptance of her daughter-in-law if in part through recognising that they aren’t alone and that it’s a blessing that her daughter is loved and will be cared for until the end of her days.

Concerning My Daughter screened as part of this year’s London Korean Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Escape (탈주, Lee Jong-pil, 2024)

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Lee Jong-pil’s existential action drama Escape (탈주, Talju) opens with scenes of a man running. He runs his way through the rest of the film, continually on the move and chasing a dream of freedom outside of the oppressive society in which he is otherwise trapped. The man who chases him, meanwhile, is himself running away. His movements are slow, calculated, and cold but also somehow tender and almost it seems an act of self harm. 

The fact that the oppressive regime is North Korea is almost irrelevant and the film is less about Communism than it is lack of autonomy that may be found in any other democratic or developed nation in which people are driven to erase a part of themselves in order to fit in or to prosper amid rigidly defined social codes. Nevertheless, there is a direct criticism of the Democratic People’s Republic in the ironic signage, a car ploughing straight through a sign that reads “for freedom and happiness of people”. But then, even if deserter Kyu-nam (Lee Je-hoon) finds happiness in the South we can’t be sure it’s really any better. The welcome message blasted through loudspeakers over the wall that marks the border doesn’t sound all that different from the propaganda messages on Kyu-nam’s radio, while the deserter’s phone positioned to appeal to men like him appears to be out of order. 

But to Kyu-nam, “the South” is only really an idea and it’s clear he intends to transcend those borders too, venturing on to the wider world and wherever it pleases him to go. What he rails against is fate, that his life is dictated by forces outside of his control or more accurately by Field Officer Hyun-sang (Koo Kyo-hwan) from State Security who takes him under his wing and tries to make something of him as a loyal soldier of the North. What becomes clear is that Hyun-sang is a man who fears freedom and that the presence of a man like Kyu-nam is a threat to him because he awakens his own deeply buried desire for liberation. 

From the longing looks he directs at a man with whom he studied abroad in Russia we infer that Hyun-sang is gay and the suppression of his authentic self in order to keep himself safe in a repressive culture has made him cruel and vindictive. Unfortunately, this presumably unintentionally plays into a homophobic trope which aligns queerness with sadistic villainy, but does nevertheless lend a kind of poignancy to Hyun-sang’s otherwise vindictive quest to prevent Kyu-nam’s escape precisely because he himself desires to be free but is too afraid to free himself. From a wealthy and prominent family and with an important position within the regime, this system otherwise works out well for Hyun-sang but he is also imprisoned by it and will forever be prevented from becoming his authentic self or gaining what he truly wants so long as he remains within North Korea. 

A homoerotic charge exists between the two men though what Hyun-sang may really be chasing is himself and half-hoping he’ll be caught. Kyu-nam meanwhile has a single-minded desire for autonomy and individuality, to live and die on his own terms rather than live with no right or power to decide his future. There are those who’ve found other ways to reject the system, a group of mostly female nomads seeking a new place to belong after being kicked out of their village but seemingly with no intention of leaving the country, but for Kyu-nam there is no freedom inside the walls and his determination to find it is what makes him so dangerous to Hyun-sang for whom the very idea of freedom is so painful he’s sublimated himself entirely into an oppressive regime.

With pulsing synth scores, Lee keeps the tension high as Kyu-nam runs and runs through minefields and bullets while pursued by the full force of the North Korean army and the steely Hyun-sang who always seems to be one step ahead. His passage takes on an existential quality, risking death rather than continue to live a “meaningless life” in which he has no power to decide his own fate. His escape is finally self-liberation, taking the decision to free himself because no one else is going to, while Hyun-sang remains a prisoner too afraid of freedom to actively pursue it though perhaps tempted by his encounter with Kyun-nam, a man free in his mind if nowhere else.

Escape screened as part of this year’s London East Asia Film Festival.

US trailer (English subtitles)

Worlds Apart (違国日記, Natsuki Seta, 2024)

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Adapted from the manga by Tomoko Yamashita, Natsuki Seta’s quietly empathetic drama Worlds Apart (違国日記, Ikoku Nikki) eventually reveals the private lonelinesses and hidden sorrows that everyone has which isolate them from others. The film’s Japanese title plays on a homonym for the word for “foreign country” instead using the character for “different” which in itself suggests each person is an entire world often unable to make contact or be fully understood by those who cannot after all ever travel there. 

Perhaps that’s something most people feel every once in a while but becomes acutely obvious to 15-year-old Asa (Ikoi Hayase) when her parents are killed in a surreal traffic accident in the film’s opening scenes. She sits struck dumb and vacant at the funeral, having no idea what’s going to happen to her now while other relatives crassly describe her as having been cast adrift like an “unwanted barrel”. It’s this insensitive phrase that seems to drive her aunt Makio (Yui Aragaki), a novelist, into an impromptu decision to offer to take her in though they had only met briefly long in the past and had no real relationship with each other. Makio had been estranged from her sister for many years and never makes any attempt to disguise her utter loathing and resentment towards her for having been so cruel and judgemental when they were children. 

It’s refreshing, in a way, that the film doesn’t encourage her to change her feelings after her sister’s death. She doesn’t discover another side to her through bonding with Asa nor are her feelings invalidated much as Asa originally tries to make her like her mother as a means of reclaiming her. In fact, what Makio does is normalise whatever way Asa is feeling telling her at the hospital when forced to identify her parents bodies that it’s alright not to know how she feels. The two sisters were it seems very different, though the grandmother eventually offers an explanation that Makio’s sister had once been seriously ill and therefore unable to live a “normal life” which might explain why she was so enraged by Makio’s decision to chart her own course and wilfully spurn conventionality. 

These are also hints to the hidden world contained with the diaries Asa’s mother left behind to opened when she graduated high school. Makio wrestles with whether or not to pass the notebooks on and when, unsure if Asa is ready to receive the knowledge that might be inside them. Though she settles in to Makio’s home quite comfortably, Asa keeps her grief and occasional bouts of resentment to herself. Seta often frames her as standing alone in vast empty spaces or total darkness, isolated and lonely, now displaced by her liminal status no longer anybody’s daughter but not quite independent. 

Yet this isolation also blinds her to that of others. She doesn’t quite pick up on it when she clumsily attempts to talk about boys with her best friend Emily (Rina Komiyama) who directly tells her she has no interest in them and deflects the question when she asks if she likes girls instead. Emily is also lonely and isolated in feeling anxious to reveal her sexuality to Asa who in any case reacts clumsily when she eventually does. A similar thing happens with a girl in their class who studied hard to apply for a special programme only to be told the organisers are looking for a male student because it requires “physical strength,” while Asa also seems to develop a fascination with a bass player in the school music club who declines an offer to collaborate because she doesn’t want to get her hopes up only to be disappointed in the end. 

Makio hadn’t previously wanted to share her life, separating from an old boyfriend she still seems attached to out of an apparent fear of intimacy but nevertheless opens herself to Asa in deciding to respect her as an adult giving her agency over her own choices along with good, empathetic advice while simultaneously being clear that she doesn’t know if she can come to love her given the depth of hatred and resentment she bore towards her sister. But what the pair of them realise is that good or bad they can each share their memories rather than being forced into a frosty silence even if as Makio points out Asa will never understand her hurt and she will never understand Asa’s loneliness. Gentle and wholesome, the film ironically lays bare how opening up to others can in fact expand the world inside you instead filling the space rather than leaving you isolated inside it and returning light to a world that might otherwise have seemed dark and lonely.

Worlds Apart screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Kalanchoe (カランコエの花, Shun Nakagawa, 2017)

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The truth is, most people genuinely mean well but they often make mistakes. They make them because they don’t think things through, fail to consider perspectives outside of their own, or act on assumptions that they later realise were incorrect (or tragically do not). Most people will come to understand where they went wrong and resolve to do better in future, but you don’t always get a second chance and a momentary lapse in judgement can do untold and sometimes irreparable harm.

Perhaps that’s just a lesson you learn as a part of growing up, but it doesn’t make it any less painful or indeed shocking at least for the heroine of Shun Nakagawa’s 40-minute mid-length film Kalanchoe (カランコエの花, Kalanchoe no Hana). The film’s title refers to a bright red plant that in the language of flowers means “I will protect you.” But protection can be a double-edged sword, and Tsuki’s (Mio Imada) later attempt to do just that for her friend seriously backfires well meaning though it may have been. The same is true of an ill thought out decision by the school nurse to give a mini lecture on LGBTQ+ issues to Tsuki’s class when their English teacher’s off sick. Because it was only their class that received this talk, some of the students assume it must mean that one of them is gay and begin a kind of witch-hunt trying to figure out who it might be which is completely the opposite of the reaction the talk was supposed to provoke.

Of course, the nurse meant well but it probably should have occurred to her to make sure the class wasn’t singled out and support was available for any students who might be experiencing anxiety surrounding their sexuality or gender identity rather than doing something essentially superficial to make herself feel better. Though most of the students are indifferent to the talk, the class clown bears out the latent homophobia of the current society in badgering the nurse to find out if there are any gay people “or other creeps” in their class while vowing to root them out and making it a kind of game to catch one. The girls, meanwhile, engage in some aggressive heteronormativity talking about boys and pretty much making it impossible for any of them to declare themselves for whatever reason uninterested. 

As it turns out, one student overheard the conversation in the nurse’s office that provoked the talk and knows that one of the students is indeed gay, perhaps inappropriately telling Tsuki who it is in an effort to relieve the burden on herself of carrying this explosive information. When Sakura (Arisa), the student in question, begins to tell Tsuki that she’s gay, Tsuki firstly reacts well patiently waiting rather than admit she already knows though in the end Sakura cannot go through with it despite having said that Tsuki was the person she most wanted to understand. Sakura had admired Tsuki’s red scrunchie that she herself had worried was too bold, prompting her to turn over in her hands and consider it as if thinking over how she intends to react to this information and how she herself may or may not feel.

But on her second opportunity she missteps. Fearing Sakura has been outed, she loudly and clearly says it isn’t true even though she knows it is in a mistaken attempt at “protection” as if she were clearing her name which is also an expression of her own latent belief that it being true is in someway bad. In its way, it echoes the fateful moment in William Wyler’s The Children’s Hour in which Shirley MacLaine tells Audrey Hepburn there’s some truth in the rumour, but Audrey Hepburn tells her she’s lost her mind and though the outcome may not be quite as devastating it’s still a crushing blow with the brutal conclusion implying nothing more than Tsuki will have to live with her bad decision and the pain it caused for the rest of her life. Nakagawa skips between idyllic scenes of the girls on a bike, head gently resting on a shoulder, and scenes of regular high school life but ends on a note of quiet tragedy that feels somehow casually cruel.

Kalanchoe is available to stream via SAKKA from 20th September.

Fish Memories (（真）新的一天, Chen Hung-i, 2023)

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The sometime narrator at the heart of Fish Memories (（真）新的一天, (zhēn) Xīn de tiān) says that she wishes her memory were like that of a fish, no longer than seven seconds, and that she were able to be free of her traumatic past by forgetting it. But of course, she is unable to forget and like her boyfriend, Shang, and the middle-aged man with whom the pair eventually form a twisted relationship, a kind of orphan drifting in the wake of parental failure.

Businessman Zi Jie (Frederick Lee) also seems to drifting, seemingly dissatisfied with his financially comfortable but emotionally empty existence. He later says that his own parents only cared about about money and sent him away to Singapore when he was a teenager only for their business to then fail. He feels as if he’s done better than them, at least, but when asked how to avoid loneliness he answers only “earning money, spending money, earning money”. He has a girlfriend of around his own age, but bristles when she expresses a desire for greater intimacy and ends up pushing her away while beginning to bond with Shang (Hank Wang), a teenager he meets in a convenience store while picking up a parcel. He runs into the boy a few more times and ends up developing a friendship with him and also his same age girlfriend Zhen Zhen (Lavinia) who is still in high school and claims to have been sexually assaulted by one of her teachers who’s apparently done the same thing to several other girls with no apparent consequences.

Zi Jie’s relationship with the teens straddles an awkward divide, partly parental and partly friendly. He seems to partially regresses in their company, drinking incredibly expensive wine but also sitting around playing video games and agreeing to childish dares such as the one in which he ends up swapping places with Shang, waking up in his walkup apartment and dressing in his clothes. Shang’s living environment is not ideal, Zi Jie balks at the stairs while the place is cramped and filled with junk and Shang evidently rarely does no laundry but to Zi Jie it represents a kind of freedom. Of course, he can always return to his luxury apartment which still has power even during an outage which is an option not open to Shang who nevertheless seems to increase in confidence while wearing Zi Jie’s fancy tailored suit. Several times he approaches his rundown apartment block and looks to the sky as if echoing his sense of aspiration though that turns out not to be the reason he’s interested in Zi Jie. 

When he first gave him a car ride, Shang blunts told Zi Jie he wouldn’t sleep with him because he liked girls, remarking that Zi Jie looked “a bit gay”, but a sexual relationship does eventually evolve between the trio even as they also form an unconventional family unit. When they sit down to breakfast together with the doors onto the courtyard open and the sun drifting in with idyllic view behind, Zhen Zhen remarks that it’s the kind of moment she’s been waiting for all her life despite the awkwardness of this quasi-incestous and definitely inappropriate relationship given that the teens are underage and Zi Jie is a wealthy middle-aged man keeping them in his apartment.

But it’s perhaps when the streams start to cross that things begin to go wrong, Zi Jie making a huge miscalcutation while in the teens’ world that provokes a tragic event biding each of them together though only in the darkest of ways. The three of them are each in their way trapped in a tank, no more free than the fish they place inside it and in the end able to find freedom, of one kind or another, by remembering and acknowledging the truth. Repressing his sexuality and chasing only empty financial success has evidently left Zi Jie a hollow, broken man seeking to reconnect with his younger self through his relationship with Shang which in its way also prevents him from acknowledging the vast gulf that exists between them in their differing circumstances but also unites them in a shared feeling of irresolvable loneliness and the legacy of parental abandonment in a sometimes indifferent society defined by economic success.

Fish Memories screens 8th September in Melbourne as part of this year’s Taiwan Film Festival in Australia.

Original trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Successor (抓娃娃, Yan Fei & Peng Damo, 2024)

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Embodying the contradictions of the modern China, Successor (抓娃娃, zhuā wáwa), the latest from the FunAge team sees a billionaire father recreate a utopian vision of crushing poverty amid the socialist values of China pre the 90s reforms but only so that his son can develop a desire to become a capitalist fat cat. For all that, however, it’s also a reaction against micromanaging parents, life under oppressive state control, and a high pressure, conformist society obsessed with very narrowly defined visions of success that are increasingly at odds with what a younger generation might want.

The surprising thing is how easily the young boy, Jiye, is able to straddle these two worlds while only gradually beginning to realise that it’s odd his neighbours keep asking him complex maths questions and he’s always running into foreigners who conveniently want to know the way to the local post office. Ostensibly, the Ma family live in an old-fashioned courtyard that according to the sign over the front entrance was constructed in 1958. As the film opens, Jiye’s teacher has brought a wealthy man to their home, in fact the father of one of Jiye’s classmates, who offers to sponsor his education while each of them look mystified around the flat which seems to exist in a kind of time warp. Jiye’s father, Chenggang (Shen Teng), sends them the packing explaining that they live exactly as they want to and don’t need anyone’s help. 

Yet Jiye is fascinated by his friend’s iPad and aware of the world outside works even as his parents try live like it’s the 1960s, sitting round reading good socialist literature which is also recommend to Jiye by the man who owns the bookshop downstairs and is actually one of Changgang’s many hidden “teachers”. But unbeknownst to him, there’s a lift behind his parents’ closet door that leads to a huge control centre where his every move is being monitored. Chenggang is actually a fantastically wealthy businessman who wants Jiye to develop good character so that he can take over his business after getting into a prestigious university.

In a very high tech and invasive way, it’s a reflection of the confused ideology being forced on Jiye by unseen external forces. Once he’s a little older and able to see that his world is definitely not normal, he begins to feel as if some mysterious force is indeed controlling his life but attributes it to vague notions of fate or cosmos rather than wider authoritarianism or parental manipulation. Chenggang is convinced this is the proper way to educate his son, to give him both old-fashioned socialist values and a heathy desire to overcome his poverty and live in a fancy mansion. He feels this way in part due to his dissatisfaction with a grown-up son from a previous relationship who failed his exams and was sent to America in disgrace. Somewhat uncomfortably, one of the reasons Chenggang is so disappointed in Dajun (Zhang Zidong) who continues to crave his approval is that he’s gay and in a committed relationship with an American man who probably should have given more thought to his Chinese name. 

In order to keep up the pretence, Chenggang never tells Jiye that he has a half-brother though he does allow him to see his maternal grandparents on occasion though they, evidently very wealthy themselves, do not approve of Chenngang’s parenting and resent being unable to spoil their grandson in the way they’d like. Chenngang may have a point here, though his chief objection being that the little Jiye was already quite chubby from being relentlessly pampered lands in the realms of fat shaming rather than a serious questioning of indulgent parenting in the wake of the One Child Policy.. He didn’t want him to grow up to be selfish and entitled or to have a distorted sense of the value of money but also seems to have a conviction that the boy will just laugh and say thank you when he finds out his entire life has been a lie and his parents made him suffer needlessly when they were in reality vastly wealthy. 

But what Jiye emerges with is, perhaps surprisingly, a more wholesome sense of rebellion, stepping out from the cosseted false reality his parents had given him and prepared to chart his own course. In an undercutting of the apparent homophobia which surrounds Dajun, the film also refreshingly, and perhaps subversively given the usual treatment of LGBTQ+ themes in mainstream Chinese cinema, suggests that he has done the same and was right to do so validating his relationship with Peter while a kind of solidarity emerges between the brothers in the shared defiance of the path their parents had set down for them. Often hilarious in its surreal humour and penetrating in its satire, the film echoes a sense of dissatisfaction amid contemporary youth no longer so hung up on outdated ideology and craving more individual freedom in a society in which lives can ultimately feel oppressively micromanaged by shady, unseen forces.

International trailer (Simplified Chinese / English subtitles)

All Shall Be Well (從今以後, Ray Yeung, 2024)

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There’s nothing that breaks a family apart as quickly as an inheritance. As a cynical lawyer points out, even mothers and sons fall out when it comes to money, so there’s nothing like it to to focus minds with an us and them mentality to clearly define who is and isn’t included under the umbrella of family. But why is it that meaningless pieces of paper hold so much sway over us when we ought to by be governed by the emotional truths that until a moment earlier ruled our lives?

Angie (Patra Au Ga Man) had been fond of saying “because we’re family.” She never doubted her place in that of her partner who all appear, at least outwardly, to love her and accept her relationship with Pat in the way they’d accept any other marriage. But when Pat (Maggie Li Lin Lin) suddenly passes away in her sleep after one last family celebration the situation changes. Well-meaning family members step in to help with the work that must be done when someone dies, but perhaps unwittingly begin to take over slowly erasing Angie from their lives as not really one of them after all.

Her problems are two-fold. The biggest being that Pat never got round to making a will, nor did she think to put Angie on the deeds to the apartment they shared together or leave her financially provided for seeing as she’d managed all the money they’d made when they owned a factory and ran it together. The secondary problem is that Hong Kong does not recognise same sex marriage and so their relationship was not legally recognised. Had Angie been legally married to Pat, she should have inherited everything anyway because she was her spouse even without a will but with things the way they are she’s at the mercy of Pat’s brother Shing (Tai Bo). She never thought this would be a problem, because they’re family, but slowly realises that perhaps they don’t actually see her that way and with Pat gone no longer feel the need to include her.

Her sister-in-law Mei (Hui So Ying) insists on using a feng shui expert to plan the funeral who quickly puts the kibosh on Angie’s desire to have Pat buried at sea as she’d requested. Leaving aside the possibility that the feng shui master is conning them and receiving financial incentives from the people who run the columbarium, the family quickly begin to ignore Angie’s concerns swayed by the claims that interring her ashes will be more beneficial for her descendants which are Mei and Shing’s children seeing as Angie and Pat had none of their own.

A little disappointed in her kids, Mei at one point insensitively remarks that Angie is lucky not to have any though we’re also told that she almost gave in to parental pressure to marry a man in order to become a mother. Daughter Fanny (Fish Liew) makes lowkey racist remarks about her Indian neighbours as a way of expressing her frustration with her moribund marriage and unsatisfying living arrangements, while son Vincent (Leung Chung Hang) struggled to find employment and now works as an Uber driver thanks to the gift of a car from Angie and Pat which allows him to earn a living. He’s originally upset with his family’s suggestion of kicking Angie out of the apartment, but is also in a difficult position himself when his girlfriend becomes pregnant and they can’t find anywhere habitable to live on the kind of salary an Uber driver can earn. Though in her 60s, Mei is still doing a physically strenuous job as a hotel maid while Shing has taken a position he finds degrading as a nightwatchman at a carpark following the closure of his restaurant some years previously. 

The implication is these socio-economic pressures encourage them the abandon their responsibility to Angie as the beloved aunt they’ve known all their lives. But then there’s also the mild homophobia that rears its head, introducing Angie as Pat’s “best friend” and not allowing her to stand in the front with family at Pat’s funeral as if their relationship wasn’t really real because they were both women. Of course they may have behaved the same way had Pat been a man, squeezing Angie out because she had no legal claim as a common-law spouse, but it certainly seems to make it easier for them to abandon her and take everything she worked so hard to build with Pat as if they were really entitled to it. Shing justifies himself that he has to look after “his” family, which doesn’t include Angie, while cruelly implying that it’s what Pat would have wanted. 

In the end, Angie is left with no other option than to sue for her “rightful” share as a ”dependent” in an effort to force the family to recognise the legitimacy of her relationship with Pat. Thankfully she has another family in her community, though her own still living parents only partially accepted her relationship with Pat again referring to her as a “best friend” and making cracks about how she never married. But her family was Pat, and Pat is gone. Yeung paints a touching picture of grief as Angie reacts all the things she did with Pat but now alone, accompanied only by a sense of absence and comforted by her memories while otherwise exiled from a world that had seemed until then filled with familial love.

All Shall Be Well screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)