Category: LGBTQ+

A Son (二十歳の息子, Ryuichi Shimada, 2022)

Posted on by

“It is simply how it should be” the father of the protagonist of Ryuichi Shimada’s documentary A Son (二十歳の息子, Hatachi no Musuko) remarks, explaining a concept of unconditional love to the 20-year-old man his own son has just adopted. The documentary never quite answers the question of exactly why Yuki made the decision to legally adopt Wataru aside from perhaps suggesting it’s a way of rejecting his own indifference to injustice, but otherwise attempts to draw comparison between the prejudice faced by members of the LGBTQ+ community and that towards children who grew up in the care system.

As Yuki later says, both LGBTQ+ people and foster children develop a habit of scanning people’s faces and watching out for any offhand remark they may make that would tip them off to the fact they are not a safe person to be open with. As he later relates, Wataru never knew his birth parents and suffered abuse in the care system. Looking for a place to belong, he ended up joining a biker gang, getting involved in petty crime, and being placed in juvenile detention which has left him with a criminal record. Even so, Yuki seems to have unshakeable faith in Wataru and is determined to provide him with a safe space and sense of permanency he hopes will allow him to feel a greater sense of confidence and security. 

In an outreach session, Yuki reveals that he knew he was gay from around 14 years old struggled to accept his sexuality after seeing the word “abnormal” listed under the dictionary definition of homosexuality. He too became violent and considered taking his own life which might explain why he empathises so strongly with Wataru, only he chose to come out to his parents instead who didn’t care at all and continued supporting him just the same. As his father later says, that’s just the way it should be. Yuki didn’t suddenly stop being their son just because he told them he was gay and all they ever wanted was his happiness. As parents, they support their children in whatever they want to so so if Yuki believes in Wataru then they’ll believe in him too immediately welcoming him to the family as their grandson much to Wataru’s mystification. He admits he’s not sure he could be so universally accepting should he one day have children of his own. 

Later in questioning his relationship with Wataru, Yuki explains that he’s also trying to teach him how to be a father in case he eventually becomes a parent but obviously struggles with the difficulties involved in becoming a father figure to man who is already a legal adult who may have ideas of his own and not always want to listen. Wataru can’t quite give a clear answer of why he accepted the adoption either aside from suggesting he wants to escape the social prejudice of being a man without a family, but perhaps also hints that family is what he’s been looking for or at least a place to belong that he can anchor himself to and go for help whenever he might need it. Yuki seems to think that by offering him a literal bed that it will help him turn his life around knowing that he will always have a safety net to fall back on. 

One of Yuki’s relatives nevertheless suggests she thinks Wataru’s optimism is merely “naive” as he pins all his hopes on a showbiz career, doing modelling gigs while working part-time in a cafe. He claims he wants to make something of himself by buckling down and working hard, insisting that his painful past can become a strength in lending him a unique profile rather than remaining something that will always drag him down. Yuki’s desire to become a father figure might also be branded as naive by some while he struggles with trying to find the right approach to allow Wataru to find his own way safe and secure that he’ll always have a home to go to. The documentary ends before it’s really possible to know how well the arrangement has worked out for either party and sometimes struggles to unify its twin themes of the abuses of the care system and a more generalised take on social prejudice towards minorities such as the LGBTQ+ community and orphans but nevertheless presents a broadly inspirational tale of intergenerational solidarity and the power of unconditional parental love. 

A Son screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection. 

Original trailer (English subtitles)

I Am What I Am (そばかす, Shinya Tamada, 2022)

Posted on by

Part way through Shinya Tamada’s empathetic social drama I Am What I Am (そばかす, Sobakasu), the heroine’s sister remarks that she wishes she could live as if the world did not concern her as she assumes her sister does. In many ways, it’s an incredibly ironic statement because Kasumi (Toko Miura) finds herself constantly at the mercy of a world which refuses to acknowledge her, certain that the truth she offers freely of herself must be a lie or at least a cover for some other kind of shame. 

The fact is that Kasumi is asexual and has no interest in love or dating. As the film opens, she appears to be on some kind of awkward double date but seems isolated and aloof, as if deliberately left out of a conversation as she will be several times throughout the course of the film because of the centrality of “romance” in most people’s lives. She’s constantly asked about her “type”, or what she finds attractive in a man with a clear presumption of heteronormativity in also in play. Not wanting to get into it, Kasumi finds herself just nodding along offering some vague, stereotypical comment to smooth things over. When one of the men does strike up a more interesting conversation to which Kasumi can enthusiastically contribute, he doesn’t even listen to her but abruptly gets up to chase her friend. She ends up going to ramen bar on her own to decompress before running the gauntlet at home between mum, sister, and grandma who are all very confused by her lack of interest in marriage. 

Kasumi’s mother tells her that she has to get married someday, unable to accept that not to do so is also valid choice. Whether she does this because she feels embarrassed to have a 30-year-old unmarried daughter fearing that it reflects negatively on her parenting, is genuinely worried that Kasumi is lonely and unable to progress romantically because of shyness, or has a practical concern that she’ll be alone when she’s old, remains unclear though it does seem that her quest to marry Kasumi off is more to do with herself than her daughter. But with grandma apparently having had three divorces of her own, Kasumi’s sister Natsumi (Marika Ito) paranoid her husband’s cheating on her while she’s pregnant, and the parents’ marriage strained by her father’s depression it’s only natural she may wonder what’s so great about marriage anyway. 

In any case, though Kasumi constantly tells people quite directly that the issue is she has never experienced romantic desire and is fine the way she is they refuse to believe her assuming either that she is shy, stubbornly rebellious, or as her sister later suggests, gay. “No one would judge you for that,” she spits out less than sympathetically even while quite clearly judging her for this, as if it denies a basic fact of biology as unthinkable as someone claiming not to breathe the air. Her friend, Yashiro, who introduces her to a new job at a kindergarten, reveals that people did indeed judge him for being gay which is why he’s returned to his hometown. Not even he really believes Kasumi though eventually develops a sense of solidarity with her when her attempt to update Cinderella for a new, more inclusive generation leaves her both exposed and humiliated with a conservative politician visiting the school remarking that he thinks “diversity” is all very well but it only confuses the children and perhaps they should learn about it after developing “solid values”. 

The irony is that Kasumi is remarkably unjudgemental and accepting of all those around her, Yashiro remarking that he just knew she would be a safe person to disclose his sexuality to while she also bats nary an eyelid on reconnecting with a middle school friend (Atsuko Maeda) who turns out to have become a famous porn star in Tokyo only keen to protect her from the unwanted attention of star struck teenage boys and the accusatory eyes of those around them. Each of her attempts to find platonic friendship also fails because sooner or later romance gets in the way. She hits it off with the guy at the omiai marriage meeting her mother tricked her into attending because he also reveals that he has no desire to date or get married, but as much as she thinks she’s found a kindred spirit it turns out that his issue was a more conventional reluctance to enter a serious relationship. When he develops feelings and she has explain again that she meant it when she said she had no interest in romance he takes it personally, insisting that she’s lying and resentful that she doesn’t find him attractive. An attempt to get a flat with a female friend also hits the rocks when she decides to get back together with an ex instead. 

When questioned about dating activities and giving the unoriginal answer of the cinema, Kasumi had mentioned a fondness for Hollywood remake of the War of the Worlds starring Tom Cruise. She later elaborates on her statement that she likes the way he runs to explain that in most of his other films, Tom Cruise is usually running towards something but in this one he’s just a regular guy running from trouble which something she can relate to because she’s been running away all of her life too. Yet the unexpected discovery that her mini stand over Cinderella might have done some good after all along with encountering someone who might indeed be a kindred spirit gives her the courage to start moving forward, less concerned by the world and more confident in herself. An empathetic tale of one woman’s attempt to live her life the way she wants frustrated by a conformist society, Tamada’s gentle slice of life drama is a refreshingly empathetic in its fierce defence of its heroine’s right to chase happiness in the way that best suits her.

I Am What I Am screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Images: ©2022 “I am what I am” film partners

Thorns Of Beauty (恋のいばら, Hideo Jojo, 2023)

Posted on by

“Can two women who like the same guy become best friends?” A loose remake of Pang Ho-Cheung’s 2004 Hong Kong comedy Beyond our Ken, Hideo Jojo’s Thorns of Beauty (恋のいばら, Koi no Ibara) finds a jilted ex teaming up with the current squeeze against a no good guy who has compromising photos of each of them he could potentially expose online anytime he feels like it. Not quite everything is as it first appears, yet as they plot revenge against the caddish Kentaro (Keisuke Watanabe) the pair begin to discover a bond that runs deeper than their shared quest for validation.

Momo (Honoka Matsumoto), a mousy librarian, first accosts Riko (Tina Tamashiro), an aspiring dancer who works at a nightclub, on a bus, staring at her intensely until she finally removes her earphones. In truth, Momo never quite shakes an edge of possibly dangerous eccentricity and there is always an underlying doubt that she is telling the truth when she explains to Riko that she and Kentaro were previously an item and he has private photographs of her she fears he may intend to post online. For whatever reason, Riko decides to hear her out and though insisting that Kentaro’s not that sort of guy seems to think there may be something in it. A photographer by trade, Kentaro has in the past photographed her without her consent claiming that he spends all day photographing things other people find beautiful and wanted capture something for himself in his free time. 

Much of the story is filtered through a version of Sleeping Beauty that Momo finds at the library where she works. As the two women bond in their shared quest for revenge, Jojo often plays with the image of them as “witches” lighting them in an eerie green while they dress in black with hats that cast shadows over their faces. Yet we also find ourselves wondering who the sleeping beauty is in this scenario, an unexpected candidate turning out to be Kentaro’s elderly grandmother who has dementia and spends her days collecting shiny things to build a vast fairytale castle. Momo comes to see herself as hoping to wake Riko from a moment of romantic fantasy with a man who in the end doesn’t really care for her which she likely knows but has allowed the relationship to continue mainly out of a sense of inertia. 

But in teaming up with Riko, Momo also begins to awaken from her own low self-esteem in believing herself to be inferior to someone like her. There are times when we wonder if this is going to turn into a Single White Female-style bid at identity theft as Momo seems to idolise her new friend possibly planning to eliminate her and reclaim her place in Kentaro’s life. In the end, however, both women are throughly awakened from their romantic illusions in realising that Kentaro is indeed that sort of person with a hard disk full of pictures of other women just like them while their friendship also begins to take on a distinctly homoerotic quality that clearly runs beyond simple friendship or female solidarity. 

As Momo reflects, Sleeping Beauty is a passive heroine who is asleep for the entirety of her own story. When she’s born, the fairies give her various gifts that turn her into a stereotypical figure of idealised femininity and leave her with nothing to want or strive for. Momo wonders if that doesn’t make her a little boring and if Sleeping Beauty actually wanted any of those things or in the end they were just burden to her. Momo would only be grateful for things she actually wanted like the ability to totally become herself, while Riko reflects on a “past life” as a woman living happily with her two sons by a lake in Switzerland. Cutting through the thorns of their illusions, they awaken each other to a sense of possibility each of them may long have forgotten. Strangely poignant in the touching quality of its central romance along with fairytale allusions, the film in the end allows both women to reclaim an image of themselves from a man who tried to take it from them without ever really bothering to look at it. 

Thorns Of Beauty screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

International trailer (English subtitles)

To The Supreme! (もっと超越した所へ。, Santa Yamagishi, 2022)

Posted on by

Is it worth staying in a dissatisfying relationship just so that you’ll have someone to carry your rice? The idealist in all of us might want to say no, but it’s undeniably a strong argument. The four heroines of Santa Yamagishi’s To the Supreme! (もっと超越した所へ。, Motto Chouetsushita Tokoro e), adapted from the stage play by Shuko Nemoto, find themselves asking just this question as their relationships with a series of narcissistic, selfish men reach a crisis point on the eve of the coronavirus pandemic. 

Opening in early 2020, the film finds costume designer Machiko (Atsuko Maeda) reconnecting with middle school friend Reito (Fuma Kikuchi) who abruptly announces he’s moving in because he’s worried about her given the tone of her late night tweets. Former actress turned variety star Suzu (Shuri) lives with her gay best friend, Tommy (Yudai Chiba), after ending a 10-year relationship with petulant former child star Shintaro (Takahiro Miura) who is now seeing sex worker Nanase (Mei Kurokawa). Miwa (Marika Ito), meanwhile, is in a relationship with vacuous hipster Taizo (Reiji Okamoto) who spent an exorbitant amount of money on gold grills as a present and seems to be very concerned about this new virus going around. 

None of these men have a full-time job and all are (or were at one time or another) supported by their partner who is shouldering the responsibility for rent and domestic bills singlehandedly, not that there’s anything wrong with that in itself if were not such a blatant attempt to take advantage of the women they claim to love. In a flashback to 2018, we discover that Miwa was previously in a relationship with Reito and she’s carried on giving him pocket money every month for the last two years despite having moved on romantically. In his sudden announcement to Machiko that he’ll be stying by her side for the foreseeable future, it’s difficult not to wonder if he’s simply looking for a free place to stay especially as he largely continues to mooch off her while doing so claiming his live streaming channel is sure to take off soon. 

Shintaro had similarly been supported by Suzu during the time they lived together and put on a big show of letting her kept the apartment when he left even though the apartment was hers anyway because it was her name on the lease and she paid the rent while he wasn’t working. More practically minded, Suzu had been taking jobs that paid in light entertainment and variety only to be branded a sellout by Shintaro who was nevertheless jealous of her success. A former child star, he feels humiliated taking bit parts and even working as an extra but talks a big game to Nanase whom he often brands “stupid” and looks down on for being a sex worker. He makes her shout out that he’s the best actor as she climaxes and quizzes her about foreign directors when she says she struggles to watch the films of Shunji Iwai because they make her wonder if there’s something wrong with her eyesight. When she genuinely tells him that she enjoyed his “performance” after spotting him as an extra in a movie, he tells her that a sex worker’s opinion doesn’t count despite having been paying for just that kind of validation the entire time. 

Suzu runs into a similar problem in developing feelings for Tommy who rejects her in an incredibly insensitive way when she tries to make a move on him. During a heated argument, Tommy yells at Suzu for ruining all his plans because he wants to start a family and was intending to marry a woman Suzu being a prime candidate. The film flirts with but does not really get into Tommy’s internalised homophobia in which he seems to regard his sexuality as a barrier to achieving the life he wants given the still conservative culture has not yet legalised same sex marriage and makes life difficult for same sex partners who want to raise children together. He lets himself off the hook suggesting that his sexuality permits him to be “selfish” while admitting that he too has taken advantage of women’s feelings for him without really giving much thought to their own. 

Taizo is much the same. On the surface, it looks like he is genuinely solicitous of Miwa though it’s really more that he doesn’t want to get sick himself or be responsible for looking after someone who is ill. When Miwa goes to the hospital thinking she may be pregnant, she gets some other distressing news but all Taizo can do is focus on himself not wanting to accept the responsibility of becoming a father. When she looks to him for comfort, he fixates on his own relief. These men are selfish, self-involved, proud and fragile in their masculinity requiring the women in their lives to take care of all their basic needs without lifting a finger to help. But the film doesn’t quite let the women off the hook either, a sudden coup de théâtre bringing them together to reconsider making clear that they themselves enable the men’s behaviour by forgiving them if in part because they expect little better and having someone around who could theoretically help out, for example by carrying heavy bags of rice home from the store, might make life easier even if they never actually do it. Witty and slickly edited, Yamagishi ends with a sudden intrusion of eijanaika dancers as if literally to say “what’s wrong with that?”, which might present a rather cynical view of contemporary romantic relationships but one that is also admittedly difficult to argue with. 

To The Supreme! screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Egoist (エゴイスト, Daishi Matsunaga, 2022)

Posted on by

If love is unselfish, is it really love at all? Based on a semi-autobiographical novel by Makoto Takayama, Daishi Matsunaga’s deeply moving romantic drama Egoist (エゴイスト) asks if all love is in the end transactional and if to deny its “selfishness” is akin to denying love itself because it would mean denying a basic human need for connection and reciprocity. In the end, perhaps selfish is what we should be with love because we are always running out of time and if we aren’t careful it will slip away from us unnoticed.

An “extreme realist”, fashion editor Kosuke (Ryohei Suzuki) is already full of regrets and many of them linking back to the early death of his mother from illness when he was only 14. It’s clear that his financial wealth helps to fill an emotional void but also that he’s lonely and longs for a sense of family that’s long been absent from his life. He rarely visits the conservative hometown where he was bullied for being different, and seems to have a strained relationship with his widowed father (Akira Emoto) who doesn’t know that Kosuke is gay and continues to ask him about getting married and settling down. Early on in his courtship with Ryuta (Hio Miyazawa), a personal trainer he met through a friend, Kosuke remarks that he’s never met a lover’s mother before hinting at the landmarks of a relationship such as marriage that LGBTQ+ people often miss out on in a conservative culture in which such things cannot always be discussed openly.

Later, Ryuta’s mother Taeko (Sawako Agawa) tells Kosuke that knew from that first meeting that they were more than just friends and was happy that her son had someone he loved who loved him regardless if they were a man or a woman. But just when the relationship had seemed to be blossoming, Ryuta had abruptly tried to break up with Kosuke explaining that he had been involved in sex work since his early teens in order to support his mother who was unable to work due to illness. Now that he’s experienced real romantic love he finds sex work “painful” but has no other means of supporting himself and so gives up love for economic necessity. “I’ll buy you,” Kosuke unironically counters adding a note of literal transactionality to their relationship which is already fraught with disparity in the respective differences in their ages along with Kosuke’s wealth and Ryuta’s poverty. 

Kosuke later describes his gesture as “pure”, something he’d previously called Ryuta while also remarking that he found him too “polite” in bed and would rather he be a little more “selfish”. In a way it’s altruistic, he isn’t really trying to trap Ryuta into a compensated relationship only to help him while simultaneously ensuring that he stays in his life. His wealth fills a void, but it’s by giving pieces of it away that he feels that void decreasing. Kosuke first gives Ryuta gifts for his mother, knowing that it’s easier for him to accept them because doing so is unselfish when the gift is for someone else. Even so as he later acknowledges sometimes the gift is more for himself than the recipient, a means not of manipulation but of healing. Kosuke claims not to know what love is and largely mediates it through money along with additional acts of care, but as Taeko later tells him it doesn’t really matter if he doesn’t know because they felt his love anyway. 

Matsunaga frequently cuts backs to visual motifs such as door numbers, envelopes, and dropped coins to hint at the transactionality of love but eventually reflects that love is an act of exchange in which the desire to be loved is an essential component. Kosuke eventually asks his father how it was for him when his mother was dying and he recalls a conversation in which she said she wanted to leave him because she couldn’t bear to see him suffering for her, a request which could in itself be read as “selfish” even in its “selflessness” with his reply implying that it’s alright to be selfish in love because in way it might be its ultimate expression. Filming with handheld realism, Matsunaga captures the rhythms of contemporary gay life along with the easy giddiness of burgeoning romance and the poignancy of profound loss tempered only by a fleeting feeling of warmth and the jealous memory of a “selfish” love. 

Egoist screens in Frankfurt 9th June as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

International trailer (English subtitles)

The Cornered Mouse Dreams of Cheese (窮鼠はチーズの夢を見る, Isao Yukisada, 2020)

Posted on by

It’s quite a potent image somehow, a mouse caught in a trap unable to reach out and touch the cheese they’ve risked their life for yet continuing to dream of it as if nothing else really existed. Perhaps love is much the same, at least according to a young woman who warns against falling in love too deeply worrying that in the end you won’t be able to keep it together and so will fall apart. Adapted from a popular Boys Love manga by Setona Mizushiro, Isao Yukisada’s The Cornered Mouse Dreams of Cheese (窮鼠はチーズの夢を見る, Kyuso Wa Chizu No Yume Wo Miru) is in someways in dialogue with his earlier tale of triangulated love between two women Luxurious Bone, if sharing some of that film’s perhaps outdated attitudes towards sexuality. 

The titular mouse is office worker Kyoichi (Tadayoshi Ohkura) who is halfheartedly having an affair with a colleague seemingly just because he can. Unbeknownst to him, his wife has hired a private detective who just happens to be an old friend from university, Wataru (Ryo Narita). Wataru warns him that he’s got pictures of him and his mistress but agrees not to tell his wife, if Kyoichi agrees to accompany him to a hotel for some low level intimacy. The abruptness of the overture seems to hint that the two men had some kind of history in university but this appears not to be the case and Kyoichi continues to struggle with his sexuality partly it seems out of a degree of self-loathing that convinces him he’s not the sort of person anyone should love.

In Luxurious Bone, the problem had been that the two women could not quite accept the validity of their desire for each other and instead ended up having vicarious sex with the same guy. Something similar occurs between Kyoichi and Wataru each in their own way unable to accept the way they feel. Kyoichi repeatedly states that he doesn’t want to cause someone else pain but in fact hurts everyone around him because of his own inability to reckon with his feelings. He continues to womanise, but eventually asks Wataru to move into the grey industrial bachelor pad he gets when his marriage breaks down while keeping him at arm’s length. Wataru is jealous in a direct sense, resenting Kyoichi’s various girlfriends, but also on deeper level lacking faith in his homosexuality or at least ability to accept it fearing he will always in the end choose to be with a woman. 

Both men are imprisoned by an internalised homophobia, Kyoichi most obviously in rejecting his desire for Wataru. “A straight guy can’t handle it” he tells him in an ironic choice of words, earlier having told him that guys like him belonged “in another world”. The film seems to present Kyoichi’s sexuality as a binary choice, men or women, precluding the idea that he might simply be bisexual while inviting the inference that his womanising is an attempt to mask his latent homosexuality and that he is in fact living a lie in betrayal of himself in denying his desire for Wataru. But then Wataru is consumed by insecurity, as if on some level believing he is inherently inferior to a woman and that Kyoichi will always “choose” to be straight while simultaneously certain that he does in fact return his feelings. He tells him that his problem is that he passively accepts love from others but in the end doesn’t trust it and continues to look for it in the next person who shows any interest in him, but it seems Wataru doesn’t have much faith in love either pulling away just as Kyoichi draws closer and unable to accept the validity of his love for him. 

The film maintains some of the more frustrating aspects of BL literature in that it never really considers why Kyoichi rejects his same sex desire nor does it address what the potential complications of his life maybe if he were fully to accept his sexuality and attempt to live openly with Wataru. On the other hand, it perhaps lessons the impact of the darker elements of the interplay between the two men in which Wataru effectively stalks Kyoichi and then blackmails and bullies him into sex which the film justifies on the basis that Kyoichi must on some level want to be liberated from his repressed desire while Kyoichi in turn manipulates and tortures Wataru through his womanising and reluctance to enter a full sexual relationship even while living together. The film’s ambiguous closing scene in which Kyoichi sits on Wataru’s stool and places his yellow ashtray, looking oddly like a wedge of cheese, on his grey coffee table the only splash of colour in his exquisitely decorated yet desolate grey room may also uncomfortably hint that their love is always impossible because it is a love between two men rather than accepting that the only barriers to it lie in internalised homophobia and emotional vulnerability. Even so it is a fairly touching love story of a man learning to accept his sexuality even if in the end it leads to a re-imprisonment rather than a liberation. 

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Memento Mori (여고괴담 두번째 이야기, Kim Tae-yong & Min Kyu-dong, 1999)

Posted on by

Internalised shame leads to tragic, unforeseen consequences in landmark South Korean horror Memento Mori (여고괴담 두번째 이야기, Yeogogoedam Dubeonchae Iyagi). The second in a thematic series of high school ghost stories, the film was radical for its time in its presentation of same sex romance in demonising not the love but the world that would not accept it while otherwise painting a fairly bleak picture of the educational landscape in which teachers are only ever symbols of a corrupt authority intent on enforcing oppressive patriarchal social codes.

The film’s heroine is in many ways an audience member, or at least a fairly passive observer of the ongoing drama who only later inserts herself into the narrative. Min-ah (Kim Min-sun) discovers a mysterious “diary” near the sports ground and is quickly hooked on its cryptic contents even before realising that it details a lesbian relationship between two of her classmates who were at one point “close” but have since “drifted apart”. The author, Hyo-shin (Park Ye-jin), is already considered “weird” by her classmates and does seem to have an otherworldly quality, most particularly in her tendency to speak in an uncanny manner. She is also accused of being a “lesbian” by an obnoxious fellow student laying bare the way these teens already enforce a social prejudice which oppresses them all. 

Min-ah’s friend Yeon-an (Kim Jae-in) has been fasting for the last few weeks to try and get her weight down before the school’s physical health check up, while Ji-won (Gong Hyo-jin) is similarly concerned with her chest measurement. This is an all girls school, and there is a clear preoccupation with the ability to conform to notions of conventional femininity while all of the teachers that we see aside from the school nurse are male and enforce discipline with quite shocking levels of violence. Yeon-an and Ji-won land up in trouble for playing around with a video camera they’d brought in to record choir practice when it’s discovered by a teacher who reacts as if he thinks the girls are on some kind of whistleblowing mission. He clearly feels that his authority has been questioned, which also implies that he knows his behaviour is “wrong”, and punishes the girls for their “rebellion” against him. 

After Hyo-shin dies in an apparent suicide, it is rumoured that she may have been pregnant which would certainly explain her desire to get out of the health check. In a flashback, she suggests that she may have drifted into an inappropriate sexual relationship with a dejected teacher, Mr. Goh (Baek Jong-hak), who claims that he doesn’t get on with his “materialistic” colleagues while fed up with the vacuous teenage girls he’s supposed to be teaching. Yet Mr. Goh appears to have suffered little after Hyo-shin’s death despite being the apparent father of her unborn child, leaving only Hyo-shin’s vengeful spirit to enact some kind of justice. 

It’s Mr. Goh who did in some way disrupt the relationship between Hyo-shin and Shi-eun (Lee Young-jin) who seems to feel on some level betrayed while deepening her inner conflict as regards her sexuality. Unlike the other girls, Shi-eun presents in a slightly more masculine fashion, not least because of her athleticism, and is filled with an internalised shame about her relationship with Hyo-shin which she otherwise does not share. In the dreamlike scene which opens the film, Hyo-shin and Shi-eun are plunged into water tied at the ankle by the red string of fate which in popular mythology signifies a true romantic connection. But as they fall together, Shi-eun begins to panic and unties herself. She violently pushes Hyo-shin away who then continues to sink into the murky depths below. This act of physical rejection is repeated several times, most notably when Hyo-shin kisses Shi-eun in front of their classmates shortly after she has been struck in the face by their teacher. Shi-eun pushes her away, and thereafter ignores her before directly stating that she is “ashamed” and does not care what Hyo-shin decides to do with her life. 

It’s this rejection that the film posits as the cause of Hyo-shin’s suicide, though the romance itself is constantly overshadowed by death. Obsessed with the diary, Min-ah eats a “magic” sweet stuck inside which is described as some kind of love poison for which Hyo-shin has an antidote, only in the climax of the film it seems to be the reverse and a kind of prelude to a double suicide. In the dreamworld created by Hyo-shin’s spirit, the schoolgirls assemble for something that looks a lot like a wedding though ostensibly a birthday party in which the couple is accepted by the world around them only in reality it can never happen in part because Shi-eun herself does not permit it to. 

Directors Kim and Min hint at the feverish atmosphere with blown out whites and strange angles even before entering the menacing dreamscape of Hyo-shin’s revenge, lending a note of unsteadiness to Min-ah’s obsessive investigation of the diary that perhaps reveals something of herself even as it draws her towards a dark spiritual destiny. In any case, what it leaves behind is a deep sense of melancholy for the tragedy of the teenage lovers who in the end maybe the ones haunted by the world around them.

Memento Mori screened as part of this year’s Queer East .

Trailer (English subtitles)

Stateless Things (줄탁동시, Kim Kyung-Mook, 2011)

Posted on by

“We looked everywhere for a place for us to stay, but we could not find it anywhere” one of the twin heroes of Kim Kyung-mook’s indie drama Stateless Things (줄탁동시, Jooltak Dongshi) confesses. As the title suggests, Kim’s eventually surrealist drama follows those who no longer have a home and are instead condemned to wander the margins of an unforgiving city. Finding only loneliness and exploitation they long for an escape and perhaps find one if only in a moment of eclipse. 

Shooting in a more naturalistic, documentary style, Kim first focusses on the figure of Jun (Paul Lee), a young North Korean refugee who lost his mother in the crossing and his father to another woman in Busan. He works in a petrol station but is treated with disdain by his boss who has his eye on his female colleague, Soon-hee (Kim Sae-Byuk), who is a member of the Korean minority in China where most of her family reside. Though originally hostile towards each other, each wary of their mutual isolation and concurrent vulnerability, the pair later bond in a shared resentment of their boss who exploits Jun physically for his labour and seeks to exploit Soon-hee sexually. After each saving the other from the nefarious boss, the pair have no choice but to go on the run taking in a series of tourist spots while looking for another place to settle. 

Meanwhile, across town, a young gay man, Hyun (Yeom Hyun-Joon), is a virtual prisoner in the home of his wealthy, married and closeted lover. He looks out across the midnight city and dances sadly alone in a luxury apartment in the sky while occasionally venturing out to meet other men, mostly older, who similarly only intend to exploit his body. “You have nowhere to go.” the exasperated Sung-woo/Sung-hoon (Lim Hyung-Guk) insists, thrown into jealous anxiety on visiting the flat and finding Hyun absent, yet he cannot really offer him a “home” and is all too aware of the transactional nature of their relationship. Though Hyun is also in a sense “stateless”, he has a power over Sung-woo and is able to wield his youth and beauty like a weapon if one he may not fully be able to control. In any case, he too is excluded from the mainstream society by virtue of his sexuality and socio-economic background. 

When Soon-hee and Jun visit a temple, he remarks on the incongruity of seeing a painting that features both a sun and a moon. She explains a folktale to him in which sun and moon are embodiments of siblings who climbed a rope into the sky to escape a hungry tiger. In his diary, Hyun also envisages a pair of twins one opening a door with his right hand as the other closes it with his left. In the surrealist sequence which closes the film, after a title card that appears 90 minutes in, the two men blur into one another as if they shared the same soul in an almost literal eclipse of the self. Kim nevertheless characterises them as sun and moon who cannot ordinarily share the same space. Jun occupies a world of street level sunniness until the light finally begins to dim leaving him alone in a dusky, rain-soaked city. Hyun meanwhile lives by night in his high rise apartment, a prisoner of luxury who flirts with danger for a sense of escape. 

Then again we might ask if Jun and Hyun are two sides of one whole, a sun and moon protecting the king who finds himself an exile. Kim shifts to scenes of emptiness, rooms without presence and streets without life as if the two men were ghosts of themselves hovering above a rootless Seoul, the sense of eeriness only deepened by Kim’s lengthy takes as he follows Jun walking a lonely path towards nowhere in particular because in the end he too has nowhere to go. Departing from the realism with which the film opened, the final sequence gives way to a kind of rebirth if only one of wandering that leaves its heroes at the mercy of a society continually unwilling to recognise their personhood. 

Stateless Things screened as part of this year’s Queer East .

Trailer (English subtitles)

Rebels of the Neon God (青少年哪吒, Tsai Ming-Liang, 1992)

Posted on by

Towards the end of Tsai Ming-liangs’s Rebels of the Neon God (青少年哪吒, Qīngshàonián Nézhā), a young man exasperatingly stuffs a series of rags into the busted drain in his kitchen which has been relentlessly leaking water all over the apartment. In many ways it’s a kind of metaphor for his life as he attempts to staunch the flow of “bad luck” he’s been experiencing over the last few days, but like so many things for him it does not quite go to plan. 

As to why, it’s not exactly clear except that A-tze (Chen Chao-jung) is a kind of outcast beneath the neon skies of a changing Taipei. He and his friend A-ping (Jen Chang-bin) earn their money breaking into telephone boxes and vending machines for loose change before at one point stealing the motherboards from arcade consoles and unsuccessfully trying to sell them back to the person they stole them from. All they get for their pain is a literal battering while A-tze’s frustrated romance with sometime girlfriend Mei-kuei (Wang Yu-wen) similarly flounders in the wake of his ennui. 

The karmic debt he bears is however mainly down to a random act of pointless violence in knocking the wing mirror off a taxi driver’s car for no real reason save momentary impulse. Even so, the taxi driver’s son Xiao-Kang (Lee Kang-sheng) had already been watching him and soon discovers a fascination with the rebellious young man that is ambiguous in quality. What becomes obvious is that Hsiao-kang is at odds with the world in which he lives. His mother (Lu Yi-ching) reveals that a fortune teller told her he is the reincarnation of “Neon God” Nezha, a chaotic child who later killed the authoritarian father with whom he could not get along. Hsiao-kang’s mother tells this to her husband (Miao Tien) as a kind of warning, advising that his authoritarian parenting style is doing his son no good, but Mr. Lee isn’t minded to listen. Finding out that Hsiao-kang has dropped out of cram school and kept the refunded tuition money for himself, Mr. Lee throws him out which of course leaves him free to follow A-tze all around Taipei day and night before childishly damaging his motorcycle. 

In disabling the bike, Hsiao-kang perhaps hoped to ruin A-tze’s freedom, symbolically taking from him independence and a sense of possibility. Then again, perhaps in another way he hoped to engineer a friendship. Riding around on his own scooter, he draws up behind A-tze pushing his to a garage and offers help but A-tze tells him to buzz off. In fact, A-tze never acknowledges Hsiao-kang. He never recognises him or realises that he’s being followed though he does later remember Mr. Lee and is struck by guilty futility not really knowing why he decided to arbitrarily ruin someone’s day while reflecting that all his days are ruined. The water in his apartment continues to rise all around him as if emphasising his mounting sense of despair. Mei-kuei tries to break up with A-tze before asking him to go away with her. They ask each other where they would go, but neither has any answer. 

A remorseful Mr. Lee later comes home and makes the point of leaving the front door ajar, symbolically open to his son’s return while Hsiao-kang remains lost. He visits a telephone dating service having heard Mei-kuei moonlight by answering one while working at the ice rink, but in the end cannot even pick up the phone. Staring at a picture of James Dean, he longs for the sense of rebellion he is drawn to in A-tze but is still the chaotic boy, dancing wildly like a wheelless Nezha and seemingly with no further sense of direction. In the end, it’s the city of Taipei which is the “neon god” of the title, arbitrarily ruling over each of the boy’s lives even as it ironically emerges from the authoritarian past into hypermodern urbanity. Hsiao-kang is little better off than the cockroach he ironically skewers on the point of his compass, and A-tze little than that which circles his overflowing drain carried inexorably on the current on a circular journey towards nowhere in particular. Many of Tsai’s key themes are already here, urban alienation, loneliness, futility, and the crushing sense of emptiness of life in the contemporary era even as he turns his gaze to the overcast skies of a city lit only by despair.

Rebels of the Neon God screened as part of this year’s Queer East .

Trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

King and the Clown (왕의 남자, Lee Joon-ik, 2005)

Posted on by

The feudal order conspires against everyone from minstrel to king in Lee Joon-ik’s Shakespearean historical epic, King and the Clown (왕의 남자, Wang-ui Namja). The Korean title might translate to the equally ambiguous “The King’s Man”, but in any case invites the question of who it is that is the “king” and who the “clown” though in practice it might not matter because their roles are to a degree interchangeable. Nevertheless, a minstrel’s attempt to transgress class boundaries eventually leads to tragedy but also perhaps defiance in his seizing of the little freedom that is given to him. 

The oppressiveness of the system is emphasised in the opening text which explains the historical background and reveals that the king of this story was considered a tyrant, though also thought to be sensitive and intelligent, while permanently damaged by the early death of his mother who was forced to take her own life because of machinations in the court. The King (Jung Jin-young) himself rails at the system complaining that he has no real power and is largely unable to overrule the advice of his courtiers who remain loyal to his late father and simultaneously force him to obey the rule of a man who is already dead. In this internecine feudal society, not even the king is free. 

This might in a sense explain his tyranny, borne both of an anxiety over the precarity of his rule (the text also reveals that he was deposed by his courtiers shortly after the film concludes) and is otherwise engaged in a kind of frustrated boundary pushing. At heart, he is a wounded and petulant child. His eventual decision to participate in the clown show put on by Jang-saeng (Kam Woo-sung) and his troupe of jesters hints at his mental instability and growing inability to discern reality from fantasy, or to a point perhaps there is no true “reality” for a king and so the distinction no longer matters as there is no real difference for him between a man “dying” in a play and dying for real. 

For Jang-saeng, however, there is a difference. He and his brother-in-arms Gong-gil (Lee Joon-gi) are technically on the run after Gong-gil ended up killing their manager to defend Jang-saeng who had tried to protect him from exploitation in being pimped out as a male sex worker to earn extra money for the company. It’s Jang-saeng who hits on the lucrative opportunities of satire after teaming up with three other minstrels in the capital and hearing tales of the King’s scandalous sex life. This obviously gets him into hot water with the authorities, though Jang-saeng talks himself out of trouble by convincing conflicted courtier Cheo-seon (Jang Hang-seon) to allow them to perform before the King who actively enjoys being mocked and brings the clowns into the palace to entertain him at his pleasure causing a further rift with his conservative courtiers who do not enjoy having their dirty dealings exposed through bawdy street theatre. 

The repeated visual motif of the tightrope emphasises the fine line Jang-saeng is walking as a commoner in the court. Cheo-seon had hoped their performance would show the King the extent of the corruption among his courtiers, but the results leave Jang-seong conflicted as he sees men die as a result of his comedy while failing in his primary goal of protecting Gong-gil from exploitation as he quickly becomes a favourite of the King again endangering their position as they become a target for the King’s mistress (Kang Sung-yeon), a former sex worker who had like them used her natural gifts to transgress the boundaries of class. Cheo-seon complains that it’s the King’s “lust for a boy” which has corrupted the court, while Jang-seong’s resentment may otherwise be unwarranted as Gong-gil appears to like and pity the King and may have come to his own decision about advancing his fortunes despite Jang-seong’s assertion that there are some things that should not be sold.  

But as Jang-seong comes to realise, all around the tightrope is an abyss. “Never knew a fool who knew his place” Jang-seong wrote in one of his plays and that is in someways his tragedy, that he dared to challenge the social order but in the end could not overcome it and neither could the King. Even so he may find a kind of freedom in seeking escape from a cruel and oppressive society in the only way that is available to him. “The world’s but a stage. Kingly is he who struts for a while, then exits in style” Jang-seong exclaims, a “sightless fool” who finally knows where he stands.

King and the Clown screened as part of this year’s Queer East .

Trailer (English subtitles)