Category: Uncategorized

Danger Point: The Road to Hell (Danger Point: 地獄への道, Yasuharu Hasebe, 1991)

Posted on by

A pair of hitmen find themselves conflicted when their latest target dies gripping the photo of an innocent-looking nurse. Who was this man, what’s his relationship to the woman in the photo, and why did he have to die? Asking questions is taboo when you’re a hired killer, and you’re probably better off not knowing anyway, but there’s something that’s bugging veteran executioner Joji (Jo Shishido) and it’s not just the missing 20 million dollars.

Nikkatsu veteran Yasuharu Hasebe’s V-Cinema noir Danger Point (Danger Point: 地獄への道, Jigoku e no Michi) is a classic tale of nihilistic fatalism in which the bond between the two assassins is tested by the intervention of greed and mystery. Shishido’s Joji is the more old-fashioned of the pair yet fascinated by the mystery behind Sakai’s death, not necessarily wondering if he bears any culpability but confused about why he had to die despite not actually having the missing money. This puts Joji partially at odds with the younger Ken, a more dynamic and less morally ambivalent figure played by the contemporary star Show Aikawa who’d come to represent for V-Cinema what Shishido once had for Nikkatsu action. Together, the chase the various clues they’ve been given looking for the person behind the job and, of course, the missing money.

But the money presents a problem too. Ken begins to wonder if Joji will abandon him and take the prize for himself, though that doesn’t seem to be something that Joji is actively considering. The relationship between the two men is more brotherly than paternal, though Joji does scold Ken for his treatment of Yumi (Nana Okada), the nurse from the hospital and their key witness. He beats and sexually assaults her, though it’s less his lack of chivalry that Joji criticises than the wisdom of bringing a woman into their business. He’s suspicious of Yumi in a way Ken does not seem to be, though they both agree that eventually she’ll have to go before she does them any harm because now she knows too much.

Ultimately, the money turns out to be from a bank job in the Philippines that the American criminals were hoping to convert to US dollars in Japan, though predictably everyone wants the whole amount for themselves, not least Joji and Ken along with the kingpin’s horse-loving girlfriend Saeko (Miyuki Ono) who is playing her own side of the game. Neither Saeko nor Yumi do very well out of this particular affair and are each constrained by the men around them. While Yumi was apparently seduced and abandoned by corrupt cop Sakai, Saeko is hemmed in by her gangster boyfriend Takamura (Hideo Murota) and seeks escape through stealing the money with the help of Sakai, one way or another, at least. Though this world doesn’t seem to want to let either of them have it while the  men fight over the spoils in a desperate struggle to assert dominance over the situation.

As the ironic “Dead End” sign at the film’s conclusion implies, however, that chasing money is a fool’s errand and leads only to hell. A chase past the no entry signs into an industrial complex suggests that this world is not quite fully formed or in the process of falling apart. The ironic and strangely obvious product placement for Perrier sparkling mineral water might hint at a more sophisticated world the hitmen are on one level trying to inhabit, but in other ways their presence is incongruous. They belong to an earlier time as does this hidden world of bank robberies, smuggled cash, criminal gangs and fixers that seem out of place amid the tail end of the Bubble era. Or in that sense at least, perhaps it’s Japan heading for a crash desperately chasing the riches that seem only slightly out of reach. Nevertheless, there’s a genuine sense of mystery that leads Ken and Joji to their final destination in which they discover that it might not be greed that does for them after all, but in an odd way, love. Their desire for togetherness and fear of separation in the end can have only one conclusion and as much as it is the money that leads them to their doom, it’s loneliness and brotherhood that eventually seal their fate.

Bayside Shakedown 3: Set the Guys Loose (踊る大捜査線 THE MOVIE 3 ヤツらを解放せよ！, Katsuyuki Motohiro, 2010)

Posted on by

It’s all change at Wangan police station in the third instalment in the Bayside Shakedown series, Let the Guys Loose (踊る大捜査線 THE MOVIE 3 ヤツらを解放せよ！Doru Daisousasen the Movie 3: Yatsura wo Kaihou seyo!). Seven years on from the previous film, many things have changed. Aoshima (Yuji Oda) is now in charge of his team and the precinct is set to move to new purpose-built premises boasting the latest high-tech security systems which will aid them in combating potential terrorism and safeguarding local dignitaries. Even so, the gang will have to deal with some unfinished business from the past before they can fully move on as the circular tale takes us right back to the original film’s villain. 

Following the familiar formula, Motohiro opens with a gag sequence in which Aoshima prepares to give a briefing only it’s not about a case it’s about the logistics of moving offices of which he is in charge and characteristically vowing to do the best job possible. Hindering his progress, however, are two bizarre crimes, the first a bank robbery investigated by his colleague/long-term love interest Sumire (Eri Fukatsu) in which no money is stolen, and a bus hijacking he investigates himself in which the hijackers simply left the scene again without stealing anything. Ironically enough a theft does take place during the move involving three pistols which happen to belong to Aoshima, Sumire, and a new recruit from China, Wang (Kenichi Takito). Soon enough a body turns up on a boat along with Aoshima’s gun sending the gang on the chase for the mysterious thieves. 

The thing we’re constantly told about the new building is how secure it’s going to be, which makes the theft even more ironic, but the truth is that in true franchise style pretty much anyone and everyone is walking in and out carrying moving boxes so nothing is ever really “secure” even in the police station, harking back to the minor villain in the first film who was able to sneak in because he was wearing a fake cosplay police uniform and no one noticed him. Inevitably, this invisible vulnerability eventually comes back to haunt them when the criminals are simply able to steal the manual for the security system and replace it with one of their own to render it unusable to the police later trapped inside the building. Meanwhile approaches to public safety become a matter for debate when it arises that the criminals’ demand is that all of the villains we’ve seen Aoshima arrest so far including psychopathic serial killer Manami (Kyoko Koizumi) who still has a sizeable following online should be released. Counter-intuitively, the police bigwigs are in favour of acquiescing with only Muroi (Toshiro Yanagiba), who has now been promoted to sit at the table himself, objecting on the grounds that it simply isn’t safe to release such dangerous criminals back into society. 

Rather than simply bureaucracy and funding concerns, Bayside Shakedown’s third instalment is more directly critical of the interplay between politics and justice as it becomes clear that the majority of police chiefs care more about public opinion than the law while also mindful of the upcoming general election. Meanwhile the same problem arises with the local police being sidelined by the elites from HQ, a smooth liaison officer Torikai (Shun Oguri) arriving to solve any disputes insisting that the locals be fully respected and allowed to turn their jobs only to turn dark and authoritarian after suffering a catastrophic injury on the job. Once again, Aoshima is forced to consider if his work has real value not only because of the way he’s treated by the cops from HQ but subjected to a healthcare crisis which leads him and many others to assume he’s not long to live. It’s later discovered that he’s been misdiagnosed during his annual checkup, but his boss unethically decides to keep that from him noticing he’s become depressed and lost his mojo, hoping that he’ll be easier to manager but quite the reverse turns out to be true. Again mimicking their previous heart-to-hearts throughout the series, Aoshima perks up after some encouraging words from Sumire in addition to some words of wisdom from the late Waku presented by his rookie nephew and decides to live as if there’s no tomorrow going flat out for justice while caring nothing for his safety. 

Even more than ten years on from the TV series and first big-screen outing, the romance between Aoshima and Sumire still hasn’t quite blossomed despite their respective brushes with death. Many things seem set to change for the Wangan police, the new building acting as a kind of reset while Muroi prepares to move into a more political role and a new, somewhat surprising, local police chief is selected to lead them into a new future just as dedicated to compassionate local policing defined by fairness and justice as they have ever been. 

Trailer (no subtitles)

Fantasia International Film Festival Confirms Complete 2025 Programme

Posted on by

The Fantasia International Film Festival returns for its 29th edition taking place once again in Montreal from July 17 to Aug. 3. As usual this year’s programme includes a host of new and classic features from East Asia:

China

  • Contact Lens – Experimental drama in which a young woman longs to break free.
  • The Girl Who Stole Time – Animation in which a young girl gains the ability to control time.

Hong Kong

  • The Battle Wizard – Zany Shaw Brothers fantasy in which a man is imbued with the knowledge of kung fu and the ability to shoot lasers after biting a snake.
  • Bullet in the Head – 4K restoration of the John Woo classic in which a trio of friends flee Hong Kong only to be trapped in Vietnam.
  • A Chinese Ghost Story III – 4K restoration of the Tsui Hark /Ching Siu-Tung classic in which the arrival of a young monk destabilises a community of fox vixens.
  • Good Game – With business declining, a middle-aged internet cafe owner sets his sights on an esports championship.
  • Stuntman – A legendary action choreographer gets a second chance on a retro movie but finds himself out of step with modern filmmaking in Herbert Leung & Albert Leung’s elegiac drama. Review.

Indonesia

Japan

South Korea

  • Fragment – Drama in which the children of a murderer and their victim live in the same village.
  • Hi-Five – Five people receive super powers after receiving an organ transplant.
  • Holy Night: Demon Hunters – The mighty fists of Ma Dong-seok punch the Devil right back to hell in Lim Dae-hee’s supernatural action drama. Review.
  • The Last Woman on Earth – A film student writes a vengeful satire against men.
  • Noise – A woman investigates her sister’s disappearance.
  • Omniscient Reader: The Prophecy – Isekai drama in which an office worker is thrust into the world of the web novel he’s been reading.
  • The Woman – A woman suspects a man she was trying to buy a second-hand hoover from may have murdered her friend.

Taiwan

The Fantasia International Film Festival runs in Montreal, Canada, July 17 to Aug 3. Full details for all the films along with scheduling and ticketing information are available via the the official website, and you can also keep up with all the latest news via the festival’s official Facebook page,  X (formerly Twitter) account, Bluesky, Instagram, and Vimeo channels.

BFI to Host “Myriad Voices: Reframing Taiwan New Cinema”

Posted on by

Throughout April 2025, the BFI will be hosting a season of films exploring Taiwanese New Cinema from new perspectives including a selection of films from lesser known filmmakers alongside those of heavy hitters such as Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao-hsien.

Duckweed (aka Floating Weeds)

Edward Yang’s television debut after returning to Taiwan, Duckweed was part of the Eleven Women TV series produced by Sylvia Chang and Chen Chun-tian, and follows a young woman who moves to Taipei from the countryside to become a model.

In Our Time

1982 anthology film featuring instalments directed by Tao Te-chen, Edward Yang, Ko I-chen, Chang Yi.

The Boys from Fengkuei

1983 drama from Hou Hsiao-hsien following a group of young men who leave their fishing village after getting into trouble with gangsters and try to make new lives for themselves in Kaohsiung.

Chen Kun-hou, who was the film’s cinematographer, will introduce the screening on 11th April.

The Sandwich Man

Tripartite anthology film featuring instalments by Hou Hsiao-hsien, Tseng Chuang-hsiang, and Wan Jen adapting short stories by Huang Chun-ming.

Out of the Blue

1984 drama from Chen Kun-hou in which teenagers Jielong and Tangmi spend a single night together before she disappears and Jielong must return to university.

Director Chen Kun-hou will be present for a Q&A following the screening on 10th April.

Ah Fei

Drama adapted from a short story by Liao Hui-ying and following a woman over several decades after the Chinese Civil War.

Kuei-mei, a Woman

A woman’s stoical endurance of hardship as she travels towards hard-won prosperity mirrors that of her nation in Chang Yi’s allegorical maternal melodrama. Review.

My Favorite Season

1985 Chen Kun-hou drama starring Sylvia Chang as a woman who conceives a child with her married boss but wants to break up with him and raise the baby on her own.

Director Chen Kun-hou will be present for a Q&A following the screening on 11th April.

Taipei Story

An ambitious young woman is determined to keep pushing forward while her more traditional boyfriend remains trapped in the past in Yang’s melancholy urban drama. Review.

A Time to Live and a Time to Die

Semi-autobiographical drama from Hou Hsiao-hsien following a young man in Fengshan from 1947 to 1965.

This Love of Mine

Psychological drama from Chang Yi adapted from the novel by Hsiao Sa in which a woman must re-evaluate her life after learning of her husband’s affair.

The Terrorisers

Landmark drama from Edward Yang in which a doctor and his novelist wife teetering on the brink of divorce, a voyeuristic photographer, and a rebellious teen are connected by a single event.

Strawman

Satirical comedy set at the end of the war in which two farmers find an unexploded bomb in their field and decide to carry it to the Japanese police in the hope of a reward.

Autumn Tempest

Huang Yu-shan’s 1988 narrative film debut in which a young man retreats to a mountain temple to study but enters an affair with a young woman who subsequently becomes pregnant.

Director Huang Yu-shan will be present for a Q&A following the screening on 12th April.

A City of Sadness

Historical drama from Hou Hsiao-hsien set immediately after the liberation from Japanese colonial rule following a family who become embroiled in the White Terror following the February 28 incident.

Myriad Voices: Reframing Taiwan New Cinema runs at the BFI Southbank throughout April.

The Last Dance (大病人, Juzo Itami, 1993)

Posted on by

A self-involved film director gets a lesson in what it is to live when he discovers that he has terminal cancer in a lighthearted melodrama from Juzo Itami, The Last Dance (大病人, Daibyonin). Itami was apparently inspired by his own stay in hospital after being attacked by yakuza offended by his previous film Minbo and like his debut The Funeral the film has a few questions to ask about the nature of death along with the functioning of the medical system. 

That’s partly because film director Buhei Mukai (Rentaro Mikuni) is not initially told of his diagnosis. His well-meaning doctor, Ogata (Masahiko Tsugawa) a old university friend of his wife, elects to tell him only that he has a stomach ulcer in keeping with an old-fashioned policy that worries patients may lose hope and give up too easily on discovering the extent of their illness. Buhei meanwhile continues to obsess about his condition, convinced it must be cancer and that his wife, Mariko (Nobuko Miyamoto), and the medical staff are lying to him, at one point pretending to be his own uncle in order to tease the truth out of Ogata over the phone and attempting suicide when he accidentally implies that Buhei may not have long left. 

His distress is compounded by the irony that in the film he was working on when he became ill he was starring as a composer with advanced cancer whose wife has also been diagnosed with a more aggressive form of the disease. Whatever we might think about Buhei, it’s fair to say that the film’s sexual politics have not aged well. Not only was he having an affair with the actress playing his wife, but continues to flirt inappropriately with the medical staff and at one point even tries to force himself on his wife who was in the process of leaving him when he was first diagnosed. His lechery seems primed to appeal to men of a similar age while hinting at his virility and desire for life, but is nevertheless crass and often uncomfortable. Nevertheless, as Mariko says he’s like a child inside cheekily joking with the doctors about his drinking and smoking habits while running away from anything unpleasant and trying to get out of having to undergo treatment. 

Itami had often remarked on the weaknesses of Japanese men who “can’t stand loneliness, can’t make decisions alone, can’t face anyone who disagrees with them and can’t accept responsibility for their mistakes,” Buhei seemingly possessing all four. In part regretting her decision to keep the seriousness of his illness from him, Mariko reflects that in the end all they did was leave Buhei alone in his fear and anxiety as the only one who didn’t know the truth, engineering a kind of conspiracy as they cheerfully told him to “soldier on” knowing there was no hope. Yet during his time in the hospital, Buhei is also confronted by the ethical dilemmas of medical treatment on witnessing doctors desperately try to resuscitate a man who was miserable, in pain, bedridden, and unable to communicate, just waiting for the end. As even his grieving wife calls out to the doctors to let him go, Buhei wonders if it’s right to preserve life at all costs especially when the patient has not been given a choice in his treatment and may not have been informed that they have no possibility of recovery. 

Coming to a new realisation he challenges Ogata’s conviction that death is his enemy, telling him that he should see it less as defeat than acceptance reflecting on the irony that he never felt so alive as when dying. Whimsical if occasionally maudlin, Itami throws in a surrealist dream sequence in which Buhei approaches the other side and comes to realise that death might not be so frightening after all even as he watches himself from above in an out of body experience witnessing the accidental violence inflicted on his body by those trying to save it. In some senses, Buhei is fairly unredeemed, winking at his indifferent mistress even on his death bed, but is in others humbled as he looks back on his life with its regrets and unfulfilled promises, repairing his relationship with his long suffering wife while admitting that under different circumstances he and Ogata might have become good friends. Offering a sometimes critical view of medical practice and ethics, Itami’s poetic meditation on what it is to die loses none of his ironic humour even in its unfolding tragedy. 

Crocodile Island (巨鳄岛, Simon Zhao & Xu Shixing, 2020)

Posted on by

Monster movie streamer Crocodile Island (巨鳄岛, jù è dǎo) became a surprise hit in the early days of the pandemic as people increasingly preferred to entertain themselves at home, though of course in a way it may be somehow comforting to see people battle more obvious threats that they can actually see and physically resist. In any case, the film never promises much more than its nature as fodder for online streaming would suggest while admittedly pinching plot elements from other similarly themed movies such Train to Busan and positioning the central conflict as effective paternity rather than the monster itself.

A brief prologue finds American pilots flying through the Dragon Triangle during the Second World War while ominously carrying cargo labeled as containing dangerous radiation though the reason they later crash on an uncharted island is that they are suddenly attacked by what appear to be pterodactyls. Nevertheless, the radiation is later given as an explanation as to why all the creatures on the island have evolved into huge and terrifying monsters including the titular crocodile.

Flash forward to the present day and grumpy middle-aged man Lin Hao (Gallen Lo Ka-leung) is escorting his estranged 19-year-old daughter Yiyi (Liao Yinyue) home to China following the sudden death of her mother in Australia where the pair had been living. Yiyi has secretly been accompanied by her university student boyfriend Cheng Jie (Wang Bingxiang) of whom Lin clearly does not approve, not yet able to shift his perspective on the daughter he hadn’t seen in five years to realise she is no longer a little girl. Family bonding will however have to wait as the plane they’re travelling on alongside a pregnant lady and her husband, an influencer, and an obnoxious man travelling home for a heart transplant, is pulled into Dragon’s Triangle by magnetic interference and crash lands on the island where several of the survivors are quickly swallowed by the crocodile. 

Those who remain are therefore faced with a series of dilemmas as to whether to help each other or prioritise their own survival with Cao Fang (He Qiwei), the heart transplant candidate, actively pushing several of his fellow passengers towards the crocodile so that he can get away. Lin meanwhile quickly takes charge and is more or less unchallenged as they try to explore the island in search of clues hoping that the radio equipment in the ‘40s plane they read about in a diary one of the pilots left behind will allow them to make contact through the outdated tech of radio waves. 

This is might be something of a plot hole seeing as it obviously didn’t work for the American pilot though perhaps there just weren’t any ships in range given the circumstances, and it seems he too might have come to a sticky end. But thanks to his sudden promotion to father of the group, Lin begins to reassess his role as a father to Yiyi in beginning to cede ground and actually listen to some of her ideas along with accepting support from Cheng Jie to help him protect her not lease because he realises he may not survive. There are also a few other giant and very hungry monsters on the island who in this case turn out to be more of a threat than other people who with the exception of Cao Fang are more community minded than individualistic. 

A mild social message is conveyed through Yiyi’s eventual discarding of the cigarettes she secretly smoked, symbolising the end of her rebellion and the re-acceptance of her father along with his patriarchal authority as if shifting back onto the right path thanks to the experience of fighting a giant crocodile together and realising that he really did stay to protect her instead of just going off on his own. Some undeniably ropey special effects and a general lack of coherence in the film’s internal logic frustrate its ability to maintain momentum though English-speakers aside, the performances are strong even if the plot developments at times feel unoriginal. Even so the film sells its message of family reunion and perhaps less palatably patriarchal social conventions as Lin Hao steps up to protect his daughter and community from the threats that surround them be they giant crocodiles or otherwise.

Crocodile Island is out now in the US on Digital & DVD courtesy of Well Go USA.

US release trailer (English trailer)

Dodes’ka-den (どですかでん, Akira Kurosawa, 1970)

Posted on by

By the late 1960s, Akira Kurosawa was in the midst of a creative crisis having spent two years working on the Japanese segments of the Hollywood war film Tora! Tora! Tora before he was eventually let go by the parsimonious US producers who feared he was spending too much money and making too little progress. Meanwhile, the studio system which had supported his career was collapsing and could no longer offer the kinds of budgets necessary for his personal brand of epic cinema. Teaming up with Masaki Kobayashi, Kon Ichikawa, and Keisuke Kinoshita, he formed the Club of the Four Knights production company but the first and only film they produced, Dodes’kaden (どですかでん), was not perhaps the kind of film many were expecting.

Inspired by a novel by Shugoro Yamamoto, the film like The Lower Depths focuses on a small community living in a slum only in this case on the edge of the modern city. Shot in classical 4:3, it was also Kurosawa’s first foray into colour and makes the most of his painterly eye with its surrealist backdrops and exaggerated sunsets. Once again there is the feeling that these people are already dead or trapped in a kind of purgatory unable to escape their desperate suffering, the slum as much of a mindset as a physical place. “Life is nothing but pain to me” one man claims, stating his hope that he die as quickly as possible while relating the sad story of his life: falling into depression when his sons were killed in the war and losing his wife, business, and finally home to the Tokyo air raids. Yet he is reminded that his family live on in him as long as he does and to kill himself is to kill them too, rediscovering a desire to survive even in his suffering. 

Another man, Hei (Hiroshi Akutagawa), dresses in a soldier’s uniform and wanders around like a zombie with, as one person puts it, the eyes of a dead man. Later a woman comes to find him, but he is seemingly unable to reawaken himself and move on from his trauma, now numbed to life, an already spent force. A young woman, Katsuko (Tomoko Yamazaki), is little different. Never speaking she has been raised by her uncle who begins sexually abusing her while her aunt is in hospital. She says that she wants to die, stabbing the only boy who showed her kindness because she feared he’d forget her. 

These people have largely been forgotten, living almost in another era and entirely cut off from mainstream society in a kind of etherial purgatory. Like the residents of The Lower Depths, a degree of fantasy is necessary for their survival a case in point being that of a beggar and his son who live an abandoned car and fantasise about the kind of house they’d build, a vast modernist building in white with a swimming pool. Like Katsuko, the boy is let down by his father who remains the car and sends him out to beg for food, telling him off when he lights a fire to boil fish as the man at the sushi shop had told him to do insisting, with disastrous results, that as it’s pickled it doesn’t need to be cooked. The furthest out of the residents, the pair have an almost grotesque appearance, their faces tinged with a morbid green. 

But then the couples living at the centre seemed to have found an antidote to despair in a surreal process of wife swapping now unable to remember whose husband is whose despite being neatly colour coded in matching outfits. A man with a nervous tic defends his grumpy yet fiercely loyal wife, and another man raises several children who may not be biologically his but are loved all the same. The old man who acts as a kind of confidant giving out advice and settling disputes through benevolent trickery has evidently learned how to live in this world and gets by as best he can while the son of the melancholy woman who runs the tempura stall drives an imaginary train through the slum the rhythm of which gives the film its name in its slow and certain progress towards nowhere at all. Heartbreakingly there are moments where the young man can hear the train in the distance, but it remains forever out of reach. Dodes’kaden didn’t do very well at the box office or with critics, its lack of success of cited as a factor in Kurosawa’s attempt to take his own life the following year, yet had perhaps set him on a new artistic course of colour and light which would define the further direction of his later career.

Dodes’ka-den screens at the BFI Southbank, London on 15th & 16th January 2023 as part of the Kurosawa season.

The Mole Song: Final (土竜の唄 FINAL, Takashi Miike, 2021)

Posted on by

“He’s horny and looks like a fool but you can count on him” according to top mob boss Todoroki and it’s as good a description as any of the hero of Takashi Miike’s adaptation of the manga by Noboru Takahashi, The Mole Song: Undercover Agent Reiji. Billed as the conclusion of the trilogy each of which is scripted by Kankuro Kudo, The Mole Song: FINAL (土竜の唄 FINAL, Mogura no uta Final) arrives almost 10 years since the series’ first instalment and five years after the second as Reiji (Toma Ikuta) proceeds towards his ultimate target and staves off the next evolution of organised crime.

To rewind a little, as film frequently does in flashbacks to the earlier movies, Reiji was a useless street cop facing a host of complaints not least for being a bit of a creep upskirting the local ladies until offered the opportunity to go undercover in the yakuza in order to break a drug smuggling ring run by ageing boss Todoroki (Koichi Iwaki). No longer technically a law enforcement officer because undercover operations are apparently illegal in Japan, Reiji has begun to find himself torn between his ultimate mission and the codes of gangsterdom not least in his relationship with sympathetic, old school yakuza Papillon (Shinichi Tsutsumi) so named for his love of butterflies many of which adorn his brightly coloured suits. 

Reiji’s inner conflict may ironically mirror the giri/ninjo push and pull central to the yakuza drama as he begins to realise that in completing his mission of taking down Todoroki he will end up betraying Papillon who once saved his life at the cost of his legs. Papillon meanwhile is presented as the idealised figure of the traditional yakuza in his fierce opposition to the drugs trade in the conviction that all they do is make people’s lives miserable and destroy families. He alone maintains the traditional ideas of brotherhood that underpin the underworld society in which a boss is also a father and betrayal is a spiritual if also in a sense literal act of suicide. His opposite number, meanwhile, Todoroki’s son Leo (Ryohei Suzuki), is the evolution of the post-Bubble yakuza, highly corporatised and essentially amoral. Papillon compares him to a mutant butterfly fed on coca lives that will eventually kill all of those with which it is confined while Leo himself claims that he intends to redefine the concept of the yakuza for the new generation. 

Caught between policeman and gangster, Reiji’s identity confusion is mediated through his relationships with Papillon on the one hand and pure-hearted love interest Junna (Riisa Naka) on the other. Each of them at one point tells Reiji that he is dead to them, thereby exiling him to the other side temporarily or otherwise. His yakuza traits which include the perversity which plagued him before endanger his otherwise innocent love for Junna in his inability to control his impulses, upsetting her by revealing a possible fling with a local woman while working on the drug deal in Italy, while his inclination towards police work that informs his sense of “justice” places him at odds with Papillon even though they are in many ways pursuing the same goal in keeping Japan free of dangerous drugs and the crime at surrounds them while purifying the contemporary yakuza of the pollution they have caused and restoring it to the pure ideal of another kind of “justice” advocated by Papillon which Todoroki has in a sense betrayed. 

As the film makes clear, the traditional yakuza is in any case on its way out with successive law enforcement initiatives that perhaps unfairly in some senses prevent them from living their lives. Todoroki’s guys defend their choices to the more idealistic Papillon under the rationale that they can’t open bank accounts, rent apartments, or even make sure their kids have lunch to take to school, so they have to dirty their hands with these less honourable kinds of work. Leo is simply a turbo charged version of their determination to survive. As eccentric cat-like gangster Nekozawa (Takashi Okamura), making a shock reappearance, explains it isn’t as if they can go straight either because who’s going to hire a former yakuza for a regular job? 

There may be in a sense a sympathy for those caught out by their choices with no real way back, a more liberal view of “justice” leaning either towards that by their own code or a simple rejection of the amoral selfishness of those who think nothing of ruining the lives of others for their own gain. With plenty of call backs to earlier instalments, Reiji once again opening the film buck naked with in this case a vase for modesty, Miike maintains the same slapstick sense of humour frequently employing zany animation and even a puppet show to express Reiji’s sometimes simplistic way of thinking. The film even unexpectedly shifts into tokusatsu in its closing sequence, bearing out the similarity in the titular “mole song” to the classic Mothra refrain, while placing Reiji and Papillon back into their respective roles having perhaps exchanged something between them in continuing to pursue their shared goal of a drug-free society. 

The Mole Song: Final streamed as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Images: Ⓒ2021 FUJI TELEVISION NETWORK/SHOGAKUKAN/JSTORM/TOHO/OLM ⒸNOBORU TAKAHASHI/SHOGAKUKAN

Maggie (메기, Yi Ok-seop, 2018)

Posted on by

Maggie poster 1“When we fall into a pit, what we need to do, is not dig any further but quickly climb out” according to a mysterious post-it discovered by a nurse when picking up the laundry (apparently inexpertly performed by her preferred cleaning service). The aphorism turns out to belong to Doctor Lee (Moon So-ri), the head physician at Love of Maria hospital where the titular Maggie (메기), a catfish, lives in a small tank observing the life around her and sometimes predicting earthquakes and other earth shattering events. A surrealist odyssey across the “pitfalls” of modern society, Yi Ok-seop’s quirky debut feature ponders the ramifications of distance as her various heroes weigh up the nature of “truth” as an absolutist concept.

Narrated by Maggie, the drama begins when the radiographer and her boyfriend are unexpectedly snapped during an intimate moment in the X-Ray room. The picture is then stolen and held up for everyone to see, at which point nurse Yoon-young (Lee Joo-young) worries that she and her boyfriend Sung-won (Koo Kyo-hwan) have been caught out using the privacy of the X-ray booth for unintended purposes. As Maggie says, no one pays much attention to who took the photo only to who might be in it, which is why the entire hospital, except Doctor Lee, ring in sick the next day with only Yoon-young turning up in the morning with the intention to resign. Figuring out what must have happened (and seeing as she’s the only one not embarrassed we can guess who took the photo), Doctor Lee is very upset to realise that the entirety of her staff has probably lied to her. With her intense belief in humanity shaken, Doctor Lee decides to engage in a trust game with her new best friend, Nurse Yoon-young, and simply choose to believe what they’re told, testing their hypothesis by visiting a random employee to verify if they really are “sick”.

Meanwhile, as a result of the earthquakes Maggie intermittently predicts,  mysterious sinkholes have begun appearing all over the nation. This is good news in one sense because it provides lots of extra work for otherwise unoccupied young men like Sung-won who have lost out in Korea’s insanely competitive economy. Like Sung-won, the other men on his team are also well-educated types who otherwise wouldn’t be considering manual work and are hoping for something better once the sinkhole business finally clears up. Mistrust, however, also works its way into their relationship when Sung-won loses a precious white gold ring given to him by Yoon-young, later becoming convinced that one of his colleagues has swiped it.

The loss of the ring leads to an increasing unease between Yoon-young and her boyfriend which is deepened by a visit from Sung-won’s ex who suggests there may have been problems in their relationship which she feels Yoon-young ought to be aware of. Though Sung-won seems sweet natured and laidback, never having acted in any way that would have given Yoon-young cause for concern, she begins to doubt him – suddenly worried by his overly violent crushing of a can out in the street. Doctor Lee’s advice is to simply ask Sung-won directly if the accusations are true, but Yoon-young can’t seem to do it and continues living along side him somewhat resentfully as she eventually comes to the decision to “believe” her friend at face value without investigating further.

“The truth cannot exist wholesomely”, according to Maggie’s “father” (Kwon Hae-hyo). It will always be polluted by self-interest and personal bias. As Doctor Lee says, there will always be people who believe you and people who don’t, so perhaps a healthy level of cynicism is something you need to accept in order to go on living in the world. Even Love of Maria Hospital is not immune to the disease of misrepresentation – a former convent given over as a place of healing it was later bought by an arch capitalist and is now run as a private hospital business (not that it appears to have many “customers”), despite Doctor Lee’s rather amusing ad which proclaims it “of the patients, by the patients, for the patients”.

Finally Yoon-young concedes she’ll need to simply ask Sung-won about his past and gets an honest response, but his honesty only seems to see him falling into a deep pit of despair, calling out from the bottom in the hope of being understood. A surreal exploration of contemporary social woes from the rabidly capitalist society to the growing distance between people in an increasingly interconnected age, Maggie attempts to find the emotional honesty sweet spot but discovers that trust, like everything else, is a complicated business.

Maggie screens on 13th July as part of the 2019 New York Asian Film Festival. It will also be screening as part of the 2019 Fantasia International Film Festival on 17th/18th July.

Interview with director Yi Ok-seop from the Busan International Film Festival

A Day Makes UK Premiere at Nottingham’s Mayhem Film Festival

Posted on by Leave a comment

A Day posterCho Sun-ho’s time-loop drama A Day (하루, Haroo) will make its UK premiere at Nottingham’s genre leaning film festival, Mayhem.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAJun-young, a successful surgeon but less than successful father, witnesses a car accident involving his daughter only to wake up as if it were just a dream. Realising that the events of his dream are proceeding as he saw them, Jun-young tries to save his daughter only to fail and have the exact same events repeat themselves over and over again until he meets another man in the same position who has been trying to save the life of the other victim. Together, the two men unite to save the lives of their loved ones and escape the nightmarish temporal loop in which they are both trapped.

Fantasia film festival trailer

A Day screens at 1.45pm on 14th October.

The festival will also play host to Sion Sono’s surreal sci-fi/horror odyssey Tag which receives a long awaited UK DVD/blu-ray release from Eureka this November.

tagTag screens on 14th October at 12pm. Check out our review of the film here.

Mayhem runs at Nottingham’s Broadway cinema from 12th – 15th October, 2017. You can find the complete lineup as well as ticketing information on the official website and you can also keep up with all the latest festival news via the official Facebook page, and Twitter account.