Night of the Assassin (살수, Kwak Jeong-deok, 2023)

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The vagaries of the times take a toll on the heart of a killer for hire in Kwak Jeong-deok’s low budget historical drama, Night of the Assassin (살수, Salsu). Set in feudal Korea, the film takes place in a world in which “human lives have no meaning” and corrupt authorities fight amongst themselves while exploiting the suffering people for their own gain. As someone later says there is no end to a person’s greed in this constantly uncertain society. 

Inan (Shin Hyun-joon) is regarded as the best assassin in Joseon seeing as his targets always end up dead, but it seems the moral duplicities of his life as a sword for hire have begun to weigh on him and resulted in a heart that is in effect broken. His doctor warns him that his body can no longer support martial arts (or sleeping with women) while the only thing that might help him is a mythical herb, Mahwangcho, he isn’t really sure actually exists. Weakened as he is, knives are quickly out for Inan though somehow he manages to escape living a quiet life searching for the herb and reflecting on the dark deeds of his life. 

A year later he fetches up in a village where he’s taken in by a widow, Seon-hong (Kim Min-kyung), after making a non-violent intervention on seeing her bullied by local guards. Soon he becomes a waiter at her roadside restaurant and becomes a surrogate father figure to her young son, Chil-bok, who ironically enough wants to become an assassin when he grows up having become obsessed with a martial arts serial while determined to get revenge for his father who was killed by bandits while searching for a herb. 

The bandits are the reason Inan can’t just go and look for the Mahwangcho himself seeing as they pretty much own the mountain and are not so secretly in league with the guards where corrupt official and former gang boss Ibang (Lee Moon-sik) has made a bundle getting the local peasants hooked on opium so he can press them into debt and then take their land. Only, Ibang has had enough of working with bandit chief Baek Ga and figures he may as well use Inan, after learning his true identity, to take him out and put a weaker willed subordinate “in charge” while running things from behind the scenes. 

Inan is fighting a battle on several fronts, the first being his health and his reluctance to fight because of it which is also a symbolic manifestation of his moral conflict with his life as a hired killer. As he tells Chil-bok, they weren’t all bad guys even if he rationalises to himself that every one dies some day so today is as good tomorrow. Ibang justifies himself that he’s appeasing the bandits by containing them in the mountain while simultaneously peddling opium to the local population to make it even more difficult for them to resist him. Then again, Inan doesn’t rise up to free the villagers nor even to take out the bandits to get access to the mountain but only in defence of Seon-hong and her son when Ibang uses them to manipulate him into killing Baek Ga.

The film is framed as a kind of fable much like that in the serial Chil-bok is reading only related by an old friend of Inan’s who’s retired from the underworld and is attempting to live a quiet life in the country though as he points out real life doesn’t always have a neat ending. As such, the film works in a minor hook for a sequel in the mysterious identity of whoever it is sending assassins after Iban and the reasons why they want him dead though there may be a kind of explanation in the flashback scenes to his life as a young assassin. Likewise, the film has a kind of episodic structure in which Iban battles with a coldhearted mercenary much like himself and a female assassin with red eyes who seems to have some kind of hypnotic superpower. Though obviously constrained by budgetary limitations, Kwak’s attention to costuming and architecture help lend a potent sense of place to the feudal-era setting while the visceral quality of the action scenes reinforces Inan’s existentialist questioning in a land in which human life has little value.

Night of the Assassin is available to stream now in the US via Hi-YAH! and will be released on DVD & blu-ray Aug. 8 courtesy of Well Go USA.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Under the Turquoise Sky (ターコイズの空の下で, KENTARO, 2021)

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An aimless young man unexpectedly embarks on a spiritual journey after being sent to Mongolia to look for the daughter his grandfather left behind 70 years previously when he was a prisoner of war in the dreamlike debut feature from actor KENTARO, Under the Turquoise Sky (ターコイズの空の下で, Turquoise no Sora no Shita de). A circular tale of longing and abandonment, the film is both a charmingly surreal road movie and a poetic meditation on time and memory amid the infinite expanses of the Mongolian Steppe. 

Our guide is “horse thief” Amaraa (Amarsaikhan Baljinnyam) who cheerfully rides off on a stallion owned by the ageing Saburo (Akaji Maro) only to be chased down by police officers in much the same way he will be again on his return to Mongolia. Saburo jokingly asks him if he meant to ride all the way home and perhaps he did, in a way. Falling asleep in the van he later shares with Saburo’s grandson Takeshi (Yuya Yagira) he dreams of stealing an old lover away from her wedding to another man replying only that he’s been “busy” when she asks why he made no attempt to contact her during the previous three years. One might also ask why Saburo never returned to Mongolia and the woman and child he left behind, but perhaps there is no real reason save life and then it was too late. Now close to the end of his days, Saburo charges Amaraa with the mission of tracking his now 70-year-old daughter down taking the spoilt and selfish Takeshi with him in the hope that he will spontaneously discover purpose in his life. 

There is something quite poignant in the melancholy strains of My Dear Companion accompanying the van’s passage along a lonely Mongolian road, a song that at least in its more modern version is a lament for lost love and a yearning for one who seems to have disappeared to a distant land no longer caring for those they once loved. The other frequent refrain is that of Beautiful Dreamer which similarly hints at the impossibility of romantic resolution particularly as it plays over Amaraa’s fantasy of reclaiming a love he once left behind. On arrival in Mongolia, Amaraa quickly reverts to traditional dress, dismissing the driver Saburo has hired for them along with his fancy car to take off in a much more ordinary van stopping every so often to ask everyone they run into if they’ve ever heard of a woman named “Japanese Tsermaa” until getting some helpful directions from a traditional shaman with a surprisingly familiar face. 

Unable to speak the language, Takeshi mostly looks on amused but soon discovers that words are often superfluous. Amaraa even at one point has a totally wordless negotiation with a fellow nomad over borrowing his motorbike and sidecar when the van inevitably breaks down. Suddenly left alone in the expanses of the Mongolian Steppe, Takeshi enters a kind of dreamscape and almost lives his grandfather’s life over again after being taken in by a pregnant woman who gives him Mongolian clothing and shares with him the local food, but the outside world soon comes calling and just like his grandfather he leaves behind a woman and child along with the sea and the sky having experienced some kind of enlightenment that shakes him out of his hedonistic aimlessness. 

But then it’s almost as if it never happened at all. He simply takes his grandfather’s place while the wheel keeps on turning. Workers in his grey office block shuttle about like ants in an ant farm even if, as we gradually realise, united under the turquoise sky that stretches from Mongolia though fading as if goes. Unexpectedly moving in its moments of reunion, the film makes the most of the beautiful Mongolian landscape shot a stunning 8K while exploring the warmth and hospitality of the local people who share their culture with a bemused stranger who finally gives himself over to their dance. “What’s important is that we’re together now” Amaraa tells the woman in his dream, hinting at the impossibility of his circular journey and the poetic yearning that underlies these various stories of lost love some eventually recovered at least in part but others left to echo on the breeze as faint memories of other lives painfully unlived.

Under the Turquoise Sky screens in New York Aug. 4 as part of this year’s JAPAN CUTS.

International trailer (dialogue free)

The Possessed (妖婆, Tadashi Imai, 1976)

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Shinto priests, black magic, and demonic possession. As the opening voiceover of Tadashi Imai’s The Possessed (妖婆, Yoba) remarks, you can hardly believe that such things could happen in the modern world alongside cars, trains, and telephones yet the tale we’re about to be told begins in 1919. Based on a story by Akutagawa, the film is however less a contemplation of ancient superstition amid rising modernity than the destructive patterns of class and patriarchy which conspire against the lives of two women who had once been good friends. 

In 1919, Shima (Machiko Kyo) marries Shinzo (Shinjiro Ehara) who has taken her name and become the presumptive heir of her family. Everyone at the wedding remarks on what a good catch he is, adding almost as an after thought that Shima seems happy about it too. The problem is that Shinzo is repeatedly unable to consummate the marriage. Part of this seems to be down to his wounded masculinity in having married into the family. He resents being under the thumb of his father-in-law along with the rumours that he only married Shima for her money even though this appears to be exactly what he has done. Perhaps further humiliated by his inability to perform, Shinzo tells Shima that it’s her fault because there is something wrong with her body that prevents him from becoming sufficiently aroused. Being a sheltered woman of the Taisho era, Shima wonders if her husband has a point and visits a doctor to find out but as expected he tells her there’s nothing at all wrong with her and it’s most likely Shinzo’s performance anxiety that is to blame. 

However, when her cousin Sawa’s (Kazuko Ineno) comb is found inside Shinzo’s kimono sleeve, the family begin to realise that the problem is he prefers her. He later admits as much and reveals that he’s planning to move closer to the family’s goldmine in Hokkaido and install Sawa in a house there as his common law wife with Shima left behind as a spouse of symbolic value. Shima has already felt herself haunted, but it’s at this point that the family brings in a Shinto priest who explains that Shinzo is possessed by an evil spirit though also giving the more rational advice that she should probably divorce him. Shima is forced to endure a strange ritual including purification by waterfall, but is also sexually assaulted by the randy priest though it it’s not completely clear that she fully realises what has happened to her. 

The implication is that the family treated Sawa as a kind of poor relation they trotted out to keep Shima company because she was an only child. Having grown resentful of Shima’s class privilege, Sawa’s jealousy manifested as covetousness that made her intent on taking whatever Shima had. She too later resorts to shamanistic black magic, fearful that Shima bears her a grudge for ruining her life and hoping to neuter any dark energy that she might be emanating in order to protect her teenage daughter Toshi (Miki Jinbo) who, ironically, has been betrothed to the son of a kimono shop named Shinzo (Taro Shigaki). 

Sawa never married and bore her child out of wedlock. She implies that she depended on men for financial support but never elaborates further. Shima, meanwhile, has been able to build an independent life for herself as a well-respected tailor. “It’s not normal for someone to suffer this much” a shamanically-inclined midwife later tells her when she too becomes pregnant out of wedlock but loses both the child and the man. The boot is perhaps on the other foot, Shima envies the life Sawa has with the one thing that will always be denied her, a child of her own. The midwife had once again told her that she was possessed, this time by the vengeful spirit of her lover’s daughter with his legal wife she fears may have been drowned deliberately by her mother out of jealousy. 

Shima is given a talisman of beads from the goddess of mercy, Kanon, and told that she can have what she wants if she prays hard enough, but Sawa is told the same thing and ends up going too far with the help of a shamaness praying to Basara Okami who later affirms that Sawa’s request comes with a price for the god wants Shima as a human sacrifice which is not really what Sawa had in mind. There is perhaps something symbolic in Shima’s gradual wasting away, becoming old before her time in her loneliness and sorrow (she is only supposed to be 33 at the film’s conclusion, actress Machiko Kyo was 52 at the time) even if she were not having the life force sucked out of her by a supernatural entity, though both women eventually pay a heavy price for their jealousy set against each other by a fiercely patriarchal and classist society which forces them to compete for husbands and standing. 

Imai’s photography is noticeably eerie if occasionally surreal as in the frequent and increasing sight of frogs, usually sign of good fortune or fertility but here ominous harbingers of supernatural dread in league with dark shamanistic forces. As the voiceover admits, it’s difficult to believe that these primitive ideas can exist side by side with the motor car but then again jealousy is as old as time itself and unlikely to disappear from the human psyche anytime soon even if in this case it could have been avoided if only the world were a little more equal. The film’s conclusion suggests it may now be, in a way, with a love match in the younger generation bringing the cycle of envy and resentment to a close even if the vengeful ghost of Shima may still be lurking somewhere in the shadows. 

Devils (악마들, Kim Jae-hoon, 2023) [Fantasia 2023]

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A detective consumed by thoughts of vengeance suddenly wakes up in the body of the serial killer he had been hunting, but how can we truly know who is who when each is so transgressively corrupt? The pluralisation in the title of Kim Jae-hoon’s bodyswap thriller Devils (악마들, Akmadeul) is no accident as the two men become in some senses interchangeable, their identities constantly shifting and largely dependent on those ascribed to them by others. “If you closed your eyes you’d swear he was Jae-hwan,” his confused partner admits though having witnessed him brutally torture a suspect/witness by hammering nails into his thighs. 

Jae-hwan’s (Jang Dong-Yoon) rage is partly born of guilt in that he failed to properly support his previous partner, who was also his brother-in-law, during a raid on a killer’s lair during which he got his throat slit by sadistic murderer Jin-hyuk (Oh Dae-Hwan) who has been brazenly posting snuff videos on the internet while continuing to evade the police. Two years later, Jae-hwan has been partnered with reletive rookie Min-sung and is determined not to make the same mistake when they get another shot at Jin-hyuk instructing him to stay behind and let Jae-hwan lead. But during the operation Jae-hwan goes rogue, chasing Jin-hyuk on his own and going missing after diving over a ridge in the woods. A month later a car carrying both men rams into a bollard outside police HQ only when he wakes up Jin-hyuk insists on speaking only with Min-sung and claims that he is in fact Jae-hwan.

Of course, Min-sung doesn’t really believe him despite being presented with information only Jae-hwan would know but is a little more convinced on visiting his former partner and observing him behaving strangely. The problem is, how can you tell the difference between a man using extreme violence for “justice”, which in this case is actually revenge, and one who uses it for pleasure? After teaming up with him, Min-sung is called to a station and assists Jin-hyuk/Jae-hwan drag an old man to a grimy trailer in the woods where he tortures him into giving up information on his fellow criminals by hammering nails into his legs while filming his “confession” as the kind of backup evidence which can’t be used it court but still might prove useful. You could say that it’s Jin-hyuk’s subconscious poking through, but Min-sung is fairly unfazed by this unorthodox investigative tactic and his conviction that Jin-hyuk is really Jae-hwan never wavers despite seeing him commit such a violent act so naturally.

Jae-hwan too hints at similarity between himself and Jin-hyuk when he complains that as a police officer he must “fight inside the fence known as law,” while the criminals are bound by no such constraints. He completely misses that this is what ought to separate them, to make their identities distinct, but now they are more or less the same in Jae-hwan’s willingness to turn vigilante, step outside the protection of the law, and do anything it takes to catch Jin-hyuk. “You’ve got my face, take advantage of it” Jae-hwan/Jin-hyuk sneers as he sends his opposite number to catch the men that have betrayed him, while each of them is to an extent adept at playing the role assigned to them at this and any given time. 

It goes without saying that the women who were murdered in the snuff videos have been more or less forgotten, Jae-hwan’s desire to catch Jin-hyuk is born of that to avenge himself as a policeman and gain vengeance for his brother-in-law’s death. In a pointed exchange, Jin-hyuk asks Jae-hwan how he knows that he is not merely toying with him, allowing Jae-hwan to think that he’s manipulating him but secretly in control, hinting at a kind of cat and mouse game between the two to claim the identity of the chaser and the chased. Yet whichever way you look at it, Jae-hwan has overplayed his hand, releasing a “hunting dog” he can’t control with disastrous consequences for himself and others. With a distinctly B-movie sensibility, Kim plays with identity and the malleability of memory to ask if we can really be sure of who we are at any given time while suggesting that’s something Jae-hwan should have been asking himself in his relentless pursuit of his spiritual mirror.

Devils screened as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

International trailer (English subtitles)

East Palace, West Palace (Intro)

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Text of an intro given at the Barbican Cinema, 29th June, 2023

East Palace, West Palace (东宫西宫, Dōng Gōng Xī Gōng) is often described as the first film to explicitly depict homosexuality in contemporary China though there had of course been films with strong queer subtext even as far back as Xie Jin’s Two Stage Sisters in 1964 which followed two female performers of Chinese opera who take very different paths leading up to the foundation of the People’s Republic in 1949. Chen Kaige’s 1993 landmark drama Farewell My Concubine was set partially in a similar time period and also takes advantage of the gender fluidity found in Peking Opera to depict the tragic love of a performer specialising in female roles for his male co-star. 

Despite its success on the international festival circuit, Farewell My Concubine was heavily censored on its domestic release and in fact temporarily removed from cinemas. East Palace, West Palace was smuggled out of China for editing in France after filming concluded in 1996 and was submitted to the 1997 Cannes Film Festival without receiving government clearance. A similar fate would befall China’s first explicitly lesbian film, Fish and Elephant, a print of which was lost en route to the Venice film festival in 2001 though it managed to screen at a few international festivals on videotape. 

Director Zhang Yuan was not able to travel to Cannes to support East Palace, West Palace because the authorities seized his passport on his return from a trip to Hong Kong while they had also pressured the producers of Zhang Yimou’s Keep Cool to boycott the festival if they insisted on screening the film. Cannes responded by empty chairing Zhang Yuan in order to make his absence highly present. Zhang had already been banned from filmmaking in a 1994 crackdown along with a series of other directors including Wang Xiaoshui (So Long, My Son) and Tian Zhuangzhuang (The Horse Thief, The Blue Kite) because of the transgressive nature of his work which often focused on marginalised communities and painted an unflattering portrait of contemporary China. 

East Palace, West Palace which takes its title from a phrase referring to the mens’ public toilets in on either side of the Forbidden City widely known as gay cruising spots, is no different and depicts the lived reality of gay men in the conservative society of 90s China. Homosexuality was not against the law at the time but gay men were often harassed by the police and accused of the nebulous offence of “hooliganism” as you will see in the film when the park is raided and the men rounded up to be humiliated by the local police force who insult, threaten, and beat them though they have not done anything illegal. Led away by a policeman, Xiaohua, A-Lan, a young gay man, transgressively kisses him on the cheek and takes advantage of his shock and confusion to run away. Zhang’s implication is that A-Lan runs in order to be chased, and the relationship between himself and the guard is an allegory for that between the oppressed populace and the authoritarian regime in post-Tiananmen China which is essentially sadomasochistic in nature. 

Zhang’s previous films had largely been shot in a hyper naturalistic, documentarian style but co-scripted by Wang Xiaobo, East Palace, West Palace represents a radical departure in its overtly theatrical overtones in which the balance of power is constantly shifting and prisoner and guard become in a sense interchangeable. Like Two Stage Sisters and Farewell My Concubine, it plays with the aesthetics of Peking Opera in the allegory A-Lan offers while asked to explain himself by Xiaohua in what is really a complex dance of seduction in some ways reminiscent of Kiss of the Spider Woman in which Xiaohua is also forced to confront his own possibly latent homosexuality. 

It’s also worth noting that the actor who plays the policeman Xiaohua, Hu Jun, would go on to star in another Mainland queer classic as the closeted businessman at the centre of Stanley Kwan’s Lan Yu who falls in love with a young student amid the Tiananmen Square protests. Si Han, who plays A-Lan, was like the stars of Zhang’s earlier films a non-professional actor though he was not recruited from the Beijing gay scene but had been the makeup artist with Zhang’s film crew. Unfortunately given the high quality of his performance he has no further acting roles to date, though he does appear as himself in the film Looking for Tsai and resettled in Sweden after the film was completed where he is now an art curator. Those more familiar with Chinese cinema may also be surprised to spot a young Zhao Wei, also known as Vicky Zhao, as the middle school student in A-Lan’s flashbacks who went on to become for a time one of the highest paid actresses in China and made her own directorial debut with the film So Young in 2013. 

After the film’s release, Zhang Yuan shifted increasingly towards more mainstream filmmaking and picked up the Best Director Award in Venice for Seventeen Years which was ironically the first film to be given approval to shoot inside a Chinese prison. Nevertheless, he continued to address queer subjects in a short documentary focussing on transgender dancer Jin Xing who was the first person to publicly undergo gender affirming surgery after beginning her career in the military performance troupe and subsequently became a popular TV personality with her own talk show, and in the 2014 narrative short Boss, I Love You which is completely wordless and explores same sex attraction within the power dynamics of the contemporary society as a chauffeur falls for his callous boss. 

In the present day, the Mainland censorship regime still retains a strong bias against representations of queer people and relationships leaving LGBTQ+ cinema mainly in the underground and independent sectors where they are more likely to be picked up for international festivals as was the case with transgender drama The Rib from 2018 which focusses on a woman’s struggles to get her conservative father’s signature on a permission form she inexplicably needs for surgery despite being over 40 years old, or A Dog Barking at the Moon which won the Jury Prize Teddy Award in Berlin in 2019 and explores the destructive legacies of repression and marriages of convenience. In any case, East Palace, West Palace remains a defiant time capsule of queer life in post-Tiananmen China and a quietly beguiling romantic fable in the oscillating waltz between power and the powerless. I hope you will enjoy it.

Winny (Yusaku Matsumoto, 2023)

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Can a creator be held legally responsible for what other people might decide to do with their creation? For some, that is the essential question of the trial at the centre of Yusaku Matsumoto’s legal drama Winny, but in speaking more to the present day than the early 2000s in which the real life events took place the film is more concerned with freedom of speech in a society in which established authorities may seek to resist the democratisation of information. 

A talking head seen on television at one point suggests that peer-to-peer file sharing programme Winny disrupts the democratic copyright regime, but according to its creator Isamu Kaneko (Masahiro Higashide) the appeal of peer-to-peer is that it is by nature democratic in forging a network of machines on an equal footing. Nevertheless, in November 2003 two people were arrested for using Winny to share copyrighted material and Isamu’s home was searched by the Kyoto police who arrested him for aiding and abetting copyright infringement. He and his lawyers argue that to charge the developer is wrongheaded and irresponsible in that it will necessarily stifle technological advance if developers are worried about prosecution if their work is misused by others while his intention in any case had not been to undermine copyright laws but essentially for technological innovation in and of itself. 

Meanwhile, the film devotes much of its running time to a concurrent police corruption scandal in which a lone honest cop is trying to blow a whistle on a secret slush fund founded on fraudulently produced expense receipts. The implication is that the reason the police decided to go after Isamu is that they feared Winny’s potential to expose their own wrongdoing. A member of the police force had apparently used Winny and introduced a vulnerability to the police computer system that allowed confidential data to be leaked, and Winny is indeed later used to publicly disseminate evidence which proves the claims of the whistleblower, Semba (Hidetaka Yoshioka), are true. Semba had previously tried to take his concerns to the press privately but was ignored, the editor simply printed a police press release without investigation unwilling to rock the boat. But a programme like Winny exists outside of the establishment’s control which is why, the film suggests, the police in particular resent it. 

A younger officer Semba reproaches at his station gives the excuse that everybody does it and refusing to fill in the false receipts would make it difficult for him to operate in an atmosphere in which corruption has become normalised. Even the police use Winny, a prison guard confiding in Isamu that he’s used the programme to download uncensored pornography while prosecution lawyers conversely attempt to embarrass Isamu by leaking pictures of his porn collection to the press and bringing it up on the stand. “Everybody does it” is not a good defence at the best times aside from being a tacit admission of guilt but reinforces a sense that the police operates from a position of being above the law. A particularly smug officer thinks nothing of perjuring himself on the stand, spluttering and becoming defensive when Isamu’s lawyers expose him in a lie. 

Isamu is depicted as a rather naive man whose social awkwardness and childlike innocence leave him vulnerable to manipulation. He’s told to sign documents by the police so he signs them thinking it’s better to be cooperative, taking the advice he’s given when he questions a particular sentence that he can correct it later at face value while assuming that he’ll be able to straighten it all out in court by telling them the truth and that he signed the documents because the police told him to. Meanwhile, he’s almost totally isolated, prevented from talking to friends and family out of a concern that he may use them to conceal evidence. 

The film seems to suggest that the stress of his ordeal which lasted several years may have led to his early death at the age of 42 soon after his eventual acquittal. In any case he finds a kindred spirit in his intellectually curious lawyer (Takahiro Miura) who defends him mostly on the basis that the right to innovate must be protected and a developer can not be responsible for the actions of an end user any more than a man who makes knives can be held accountable for a stabbing. Matsumoto captures the sense of wonder Isamu seems to feel for the digital world and has a great deal of sympathy for him as an innocent caught up in a game he doesn’t quite understand while fiercely defending his right to express himself, along with all of our own, without fear no matter what the implications may be.

Winny screens in New York Aug. 2 as part of this year’s JAPAN CUTS.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Phantom (유령, Lee Hae-young, 2023)

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Neatly subverting the drawing room mystery, Lee Hae-young’s intense colonial-era spy thriller Phantom (유령, Yuryeong) positions female solidarity as the roots of resistance towards oppressive militarist rule. Inspired by Mai Jia’s novel Sound of the Wind which focused on Chinese resistance towards the Japanese puppet government in Nanking, the film does indeed begin with the suggestion that one of the people in this room is a spy but soon encourages us to wonder if they all may be or some other game may be being played by an infinitely corrupt authority in the midst of a constant series of betrayals and reversals.

Opening in Kyungsung (modern day Seoul) in 1933, the film both begins and ends with a radio broadcast in Japanese reporting on the actions of “terrorist” group known as the “Shadow Corps” which has been conducting “organised crime” through a network of spies known as “Phantom”. An assassination attempt has recently been made in Shanghai on the new Korean governor and all members of the organisation are reported as dead following shootout with the Japanese authorities, though that obviously turns out not to be the case and we are quickly introduced to operative Park Cha-kyung (Lee Hanee) who works in the intelligence division of the colonial government and utilises a local cinema permanently screening Shanghai Express to communicate with her handlers. New instructions are boldly announced in plain sight through coded messages on cinema posters including one for Tod Browning’s Dracula. 

The group plan to assassinate the new governor when he visits a Japanese shrine in the city. A young woman dressed as a Shinto shrine maiden using a pistol concealed in a tray manages to wound but not kill him. She makes an escape but is shot by an unseen hand that could have come from either side. Following, Cha-kyung witnesses her death but can do nothing other than make a swift disappearance before the authorities arrive. Cha-kyung is often depicted as a shadow presence, disappearing phantom-like from the scene both there and not there as she tries to maintain her cover, but Lee also imbues her with an additional layer of repression in that the assassin, Nan-young (Esom), had been her lover. The two women meet briefly outside the cinema in an emotionally charged scene in which they can display no emotion as they must appear to be two strangers exchanging a match on the street though it’s clear that something much deeper is passing between them. 

The exchange of cigarettes itself becomes repeated motif standing in for deepening intimacy in an atmosphere of intense mistrust. The box of matches that Cha-kyung had given to Nan-young as a parting gift and means of buying a few seconds more, blows their operation in leading investigating officer Takahara (Park Hae-soo) to a bar opposite the cinema where he figures out their code. Seemingly unsure as to who is the “Phantom”, he rounds up five suspects and takes them to a clifftop hotel where he encourages them to identify themselves or else they will be interrogated the following day. Along with Cha-kyung whom we already know to be “a” if not “the” Phantom is a police officer against whom Takahara bears a grudge (Sol Kyung-gu), the governor’s flapper secretary Yuriko (Park So-dam), codebreaker Cheon (Seo Hyun-woo) who is very attached to his cat, and terrified mailroom boy Baek-ho (Kim Dong-hee). 

Lee keeps the tension high and us guessing as we try to figure out what’s really going on, who is on which side, and if there’s to this than it first seems. Cha-kyung too seems uncertain, unable to trust any of her fellow suspects who obviously cannot trust her either while trying to maintain her ice cool cover. With sumptuous production design evoking the smoky, moody elegance of the 1930s setting, Lee drops us some clues in focussing on footwear particularly Cha-kyung’s ultra-practical boots and Yuriko’s totally impractical high heels and fancy outfits which as it turns out may have their uses after all when the simmering tension finally boils over and all hell breaks loose at the combination luxury hotel and state torture facility. In any case, as we gradually come to realise, the real “Phantom” the title refers to may be Korea itself, the resistance fighters accused of clinging on to the ghost of a nation which no longer exists while themselves rendered invisible, forced to live underground until the liberation day arrives. 

Phantom screens July 30 as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Images: ⓒ 2023 CJ ENM Co., Ltd., THE LAMP.ltd ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Father of the Milky Way Railroad (銀河鉄道の父, Izuru Narushima, 2023)

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Generations of Japanese children have grown up with Kenji Miyazawa’s much loved classic Night on the Galactic Railroad but Miyazawa remained largely unknown in his lifetime and passed away from pneumonia at the young age of 37 in 1933 with the book that would make his name still unpublished. His story has been told before, most notably by Kazuki Omori in 1996’s Night Train to the Stars, but Izuru Narushima’s Father of the Milky Way Railroad (銀河鉄道の父, Ginga Tetsudo no Chichi), adapted from the Naoki Prize-winning novel by Yoshinobu Kadoi, takes a slightly different angle in exploring the life of his generally supportive father, Masajiro (Koji Yakusho).

As he’s fond of saying, Masajiro is a product of the modern era and a very modern father even in some ways by the standards of today. The film opens (and closes) with him on a train, this time hurrying home having received a telegram informing him that his first child has been born. So excited is he that he offends his own father by running past him on the way to see the baby without offering the proper greeting. Kisuke (Min Tanaka) is indeed more of a traditionalist raised with feudal values that are fast becoming out of date in the new society. As the head of the household, it’s he who gives the baby his name, Kenji, written with the characters for intelligence and healing which will indeed define his character if leaving him somewhat at odds with his society. 

Such a devoted father, Masajiro breaks with tradition and accepted gender roles in insisting on accompanying Kenji to hospital when he is taken ill despite his father’s admonition that caring for the sick is a role reserved for women. Kisuke also tells him his decision to have Kenji educated is wrongheaded, that literature and the arts only confuse a man and may prove more ruinous to him than drink or women. Annoyingly, Kisuke may have a point in that on his return from middle school Kenji (Masaki Suda) immediately rejects the family’s business as pawnbrokers having read too many Russian novels in which they are depicted as exploiters of the poor. He decries Masajiro’s justification that they support farmers who would otherwise be unable to access other forms of financial help such as bank loans and be forced to sell their daughters into sex work as mere sophistry. Masajiro may share some of his concerns, but remains in part wedded to some aspects of feudalism in insisting that as the oldest son Kenji has no choice other than to take over the family pawn shop.

Nevertheless, he also educates his daughter, Toshi (Nana Mori), who later begins working as a school teacher and is able to convince him to allow Kenji to further his studies only for Kenji to suddenly announce he wants to go to agricultural college to better understand their customers who are after all predominantly farmers. Having sent him away to be educated, Masajiro laments that Kenji knows “nothing of the world” after seeing him taken in by an obvious sob story from a duplicitous customer reflecting that his liberal education may have given him ideas that prevent him from living successfully in the society in which he lives. Kenji continues to resist the idea of taking over the pawnbroker’s while evidently unsuited to it before worrying his family further by becoming dangerously obsessed with radical new Buddhist sect Nichiren. 

It’s with this that Masajiro cannot really help him and begins to lose his patience as Kenji gives in nihilistic despair believing that nothing he does has any real meaning. His literary gifts are appreciated only in the wake of a tragedy that reconnects him with his childhood self while finally freeing Masajiro to embrace his son’s natural gifts as a writer rather than trying to force him to take over the family business. In truth, the film barely touches on the novel from which it takes its title if subtly hinting at it and bookending itself with the celestial train motif, but rather takes its lead from one of Miyazawa’s best known poems about his desire to become a better, more selfless, less self-defeating person that is perhaps inspired by his “modern” father’s “new” ideas of a society founded above all else on love. Perhaps it’s not so bad to know nothing of the world after all.  

Father of the Milky Way Railroad screens in New York July 29 as part of this year’s JAPAN CUTS.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Insomniacs After School (君は放課後インソムニア, Chihiro Ikeda, 2023) [Fantasia 2023]

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Two teens begin to overcome their fears and anxieties after bonding over their shared insomnia in Chihiro Ikeda’s adaptation of the Makoto Ojiro manga, Insomniacs After School (君は放課後インソムニア, Kimi wa Hokago Insomnia). It may seem strange in some ways that the pair find their inability to sleep so embarrassing that they keep it a secret from those around them, but then it’s difficult to tell people you’re having trouble sleeping without explaining why which is admittedly to enter the place of emotional vulnerability that each of them is otherwise avoiding. 

Namiki (Daiken Okudaira) describes himself as being overwhelmed by negative thoughts while his days are filled with despair. Unable to sleep at home he struggles to keep his eyes open at school and is otherwise reserved, rejected by many of his peers for being gloomy and aloof with only one real friend to whom he has disclosed his persistent insomnia. When he ventures into a part of the school others avoid thinking it is haunted, he discovers another “ghost” in classmate Isaki (Nana Mori) who also suffers from insomnia and had carved out this small corner of the disused astronomy club as a private lunchtime nap space. Luckily for him, Isaki, who is cheerful and outgoing, is willing to share and soon they become firm friends who decide that their empty nights of dark despair could otherwise be filled with fun and adventure. 

Neither of them really discuss why they aren’t able to sleep until their friendship is more deeply established and the facts emerge somewhat naturally but instead draw strength from their new connection while laying claim to their “sanctuary” in the school’s disused observatory as a place where they can find peace. Discovered by a teacher they have to keep up the pretence of restarting the astronomy club which means deciding on some sort of goal activity as proof that they have a right to the space all of which leads them down a secondary path that distracts them from their sleeplessness as they determine to put on stargazing events and enter a photography competition which requires a short sojourn in the country as well as making entreaties to their classmates for additional help and support. 

Then again, that might be contrary to their original wishes given that what they wanted from the observatory was a private place to sleep free from the stresses of their home lives which are in themselves fairly wholesome problems running from health anxiety to abandonment issues. Parallel scenes remind us that their struggles are largely the same, each has come to blame themselves for things which weren’t their fault and has developed a need to be seen as “good” which has led to chronic people pleasing and low self-esteem. But what their stargazing mission begins to teach them is that some things in life are beyond your control so there’s no point worrying about them, while the sense of eternity they discover watching the movement in the skies helps them overcome an adolescent fear of mortality in realising that “human existence doesn’t disappear so easily” and those who are gone still live on in the hearts of minds of others in the great confluence of humanity. 

Where night had been something to endure, they now find new ways to appreciate their lives in a world that seems more full of possibility than fear. Ikeda’s adaptation revels in its wholesomeness with even its slow-burn romantic subplot relatively innocent in its earnestness as the pair monologue over a voice notes app and quite literally lean on each other for support even if it’s not clear whether their insomnia actually improves or they just find better ways of living with it thanks to the new community they’ve found in the re-formed astronomy club which like most clubs is more about just hanging out than it is about serious study of the stars. Making the most of its picturesque small-town setting, the film discovers a quiet sense of serenity in the beauty of the landscape along with its ever expanding vistas in which the teens learn to overcome their mutual anxieties and embrace the infinite possibilities of life thanks to a true friendship founded on empathy and compassion.

Insomniacs After School screened as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Best Wishes to All (みなに幸あれ, Yuta Shimotsu, 2023)

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A young woman is confronted with an uncomfortable truth on return to her old hometown in Yuta Shimotsu’s eerie horror satire, Best Wishes to All (みなに幸あれ, Mina ni Sachi Are). Is there really a finite amount of happiness in the world or would there be plenty to go around if only we weren’t all so selfish? The unnamed heroine (Kotone Furukawa) claimed she wanted to become a nurse to “save people” but in the end starts to wonder if the only way to be happy in a cynical world is to meet it on its own terms. 

Even so, there’s something decidedly strange about her reunion with her grandparents. She notices them behaving oddly but isn’t sure whether to chalk it up to their age and not having seen them for a long time, only there’s something a little creepy in their overt “happiness” as they cryptically look up at the ceiling as if gazing at a higher power or suddenly start making pig noises before remarking that they should be happy as they eat their bacon that the animal has achieved its purpose in life. Meanwhile, for unclear reasons they forbid her from hanging out with a childhood friend who stayed in town to take over his father’s farm despite showing promise as an artist.

He too cryptically adds that he thinks there’s enough happiness in the world for everyone to have some without needing to hoard it, adding to the heroine’s unease as she tries to investigate the strange noises coming from behind a locked door in her grandparents’ home. Soon, she begins to discover what it is that makes them “happy” and is confused and appalled, unsure whether she should believe her eyes or has actually gone out of her mind in this already quite weird place. 

On leaving the city, she’d paused on a pedestrian crossing to help an old lady with her bags while a salaryman had knocked hers out of her hands by walking into her. She was the sort of person that thought it was important to help others or at least to be considerate, but is confronted with an uncomfortable truth in being asked if she can go on pretending that her happiness isn’t bought with the suffering of someone else somewhere in the world even if they aren’t exactly “visible” to her. She tries to revolt and reject the strange goings on at her grandparents’ but is told that it’s the way of the world, that it’s happening everywhere, and that really she knows but has chosen not to see because when it comes right down to it she’s as selfish as everyone else and isn’t willing to sacrifice her own happiness to “save” someone else from suffering.

Meanwhile, she realises that some families are being shunned in the village for resisting and these families largely are “unhappy”, though undoubtedly some of that at least must be down to their stigmatisation. She and her friend save a high school boy who was being bullied, but even he later relates to her that he’s decided to “live smart” by going along with the local practice even if it doesn’t seem right to him because it’s pointless to resist when everyone is doing it. Another rejectee also tells her that the village philosophy is a fallacy because even if someone “should” be miserable there’s no way to know how they really feel and if you’re only basing your idea of “happiness” on external validation then of course you’ll always be miserable. 

Confronted with a bizarre series of events, she begins to wonder if she’s going out of her mind and none of this is really happening even while pressured to submit herself to the ways of the village. In effect, she’s being asked to choose her level of comfort with complicity, acknowledging directly that her “happiness” is based on a quite literal exploitation, drained out of those less fortunate than herself. Her friend remained convinced that there is plenty of happiness to go around without needing to extract it from others, but the lessons she learns are more cynical, no longer stopping to help old ladies with their shopping and suspicious of those who do while proudly declaring herself “happy” with her new “reality”. Shimotsu excels in finding the eeriness of the every day in which an ordinary jar of miso or a workman’s tool box can seem to radiate evil while the grandparents’ ordinary house has an incredibly ominous atmosphere that raises a note of uncanniness in their “happy home” suggesting that their quasi-beatific state is more akin to curse than blessing. 

Best Wishes to All screens in New York July 27 as part of this year’s JAPAN CUTS.

Trailer (no subtitles)