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

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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with his earlier tale of triangulated love between two women Luxurious Bone, if sharing some of that film’s perhaps outdated attitudes towards sexuality.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)

Beast Alley (けものみち, Eizo Sugawa, 1965)

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In the opening title sequence of Eizo Sugawa’s Beast Alley (けものみち, Kemonomichi), a thick blob of inky blackness gradually expands over an aerial view of the city until it obscures it entirely. The title card which then appears is written in plain white, but will reappear at the film’s conclusion this time ashen as if it too had been singed by the deeply ironic flames with which the film ends. Based on a novel Seicho Matsumoto and scripted by The Beast Shall Die’s Yoshio Shirasaka, the film similarly takes an incredibly cynical view of the modern post-war society in which it is revealed the militarists are still basically in charge and presiding over a deeply corrupt social order. 

The big bad, Kito (Eitaro Ozawa), says as much when he states the need for reforming the nation’s “rotten political system” by which he means post-war democracy. Kito made his made his money doing deeply dodgy things in Manchuria in addition to running an exploitative coal mine in Japan. Now mainly bedridden, he basically runs the country as a far-right political fixer working in tandem with big business and the yakuza who have traditionally been big supporters of conservative and nationalist forces. Early on we see one of his underlings negotiating with politicians to ensure that Taiyo Roads will be hired be hired for a large scale construction project planning to put highways all the way through Tokyo. As we later discover, he’s prepared to go to great lengths in order to achieve his goal, going so far as to have a sex worker murdered to implicate the uncooperative CEO of a rival construction film into resigning by threatening to frame him for the crime so they can install their stooge in his position. 

It’s into this world that everywoman Tamiko (Junko Ikeuchi) is drawn while working as a hotel maid at a traditional Japanese inn. Trapped in a bad marriage to a man who is also bedridden yet still attempts to rape her when she returns home to find him in bed with the housekeeper, Tamiko longs for escape and is therefore ripe for the picking when approached by Kotaki (Ryo Ikebe), the manager of an upscale Western hotel, to join him in an unspecified enterprise which will apparently make her very rich. The only catch is that she will have to “get rid” of her “dependent”, which she probably wanted to do anyway, by burning down her house with him inside it. Once she’s done this, there is no turning back for her even if she had not developed complicated feelings for Kotaki who is both her salvation and damnation. 

Tamiko’s husband had failed to give her the comfortable life that he had promised, something which she thinks Kotaki can deliver even if it requires her to become the plaything of Kito whom does she actually seem to like even if aware of the precarity of her position and still in thrall to Kotaki. Leaving the hotel so abruptly was however a strategic error as it arouses the suspicious of (originally) earnest cop Hisatsune (Keiju Kobayashi) who quickly realises that Tamiko set the fire to kill her husband. Though he seemed to be motivated by justice, Hisatsune too is soon corrupted explaining to Tamiko that he has become cynical and jaded. Years of police work have shown him that true criminals know how to break the law and get away with it so he can’t do anything about them, but “good” people, like he implies Tamiko, are pushed into crime by desperation and are easily caught. Tamiko wields her sexuality against him by agreeing to a tryst, though when it doesn’t go to plan he tries blackmail and then rape before she, ironically, manages to escape from his bungled crime. 

Hisatsune’s corruption is gradual and self serving. He starts with suspicion, tailing Tamiko in the interests of justice but also because he desires her, before stumbling on the conspiracy, putting the pieces together, attempting to use them for his own gain and trying to blow a whistle mostly out of resentment. Kito’s reach is all encompassing. Hisatsune is warned off investigating certain aspects of the crime by his senior officers and is then fired on Kito’s instructions for fiddling his expenses after harassing Tamiko. He tries to give his findings to his boss but it goes nowhere and then tries the press but is given the brush off, the editor his reporter friend refers him to gently implying he’s just a crank with an axe to grind. Of course, it turns out that the reporter is already in league with dodgy lawyer Hatano (Yunosuke Ito) who is Kito’s right-hand man. 

The connections between the three men, Kotaki who was once a communist, Hatano, and Kito go back to Manchuria and the corruptions of militarist era which it becomes clear has never really ended. Kito has only one rival and it’s another faction of the conservative ruling party who are probably just waiting for him die. Attempts are made on his life and they don’t go well for those who make them. Even if Hatano hoped to simply inherit an empire he, as he points out, put in much of the work to build he is sorely mistaken while Tamiko may intellectually understand that Kito’s death would place her in a precarious position but carries on regardless. “You never know who will betray you in this world” Kotaki laments, echoing Kito’s later claim that his Buddhist statues are the only ones will never betray him even as sleeps next to a statue of Aizen Myo whom he ironically claims protects mankind from their lust and desire. 

It could be said that desire is Tamiko’s undoing, but as Hisatsune had suggested perhaps you couldn’t blame her for longing to be free of the bedridden husband who had not delivered what he promised her. As she said, she was doing what could to survive even if you’d think she’d know putting on a ring taken from the finger of a murdered woman is akin sealing your own fate. Sugawa shoots with a noirish sense of dread, tracking Tamiko with her coat drawn up around her face as she tries to leave the scene of her crime, and makes the most of his fiery imagery before ending on a note of cynical laughter amid the inescapable hell the of post-war society. 

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Focus Hong Kong Returns to The Garden Cinema 24th June

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Focus Hong Kong returns to The Garden Cinema on 24th June with a double bill of two contemporary classics.

Memories to Choke On, Drinks to Wash Them Down

Leung Ming Kai and Kate Reilly’s four-part anthology attempts to capture the flavours of a Hong Kong in transition. Imbued with a gentle nostalgia the four stories do not so much eulogise as celebrate the island’s unique culture while perhaps provoking questions about an uncertain future in the face of political instability and widespread protest. Review.

Made in Hong Kong

Handover Hong Kong becomes a teenage wasteland for alienated youth in Fruit Chan’s seminal 1997 drama as a small time street punk finds himself on a quest to deliver the bloodstained letters of a high school girl picked up by his friend while bonding with another young woman suffering with a serious illness. Review.

Both screenings take place at The Garden Cinema, London, on 24th June. Tickets are already on sale via the cinema’s website and you can keep up to date with all the latest news via Focus Hong Kong’s official website, Facebook Page, Twitter account, and Instagram channel.

Delicious Romance (爱很美味, Leste Chen & Hsu Chao-Jen, 2023)

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Three “best friends forever” find themselves struggling with happy ever after in the big screen sequel to the hit TV show Delicious Romance (爱很美味, ài hěn měiwèi). Exploring the lives of contemporary women, the often hilarious and infinitely relatable film is both a female friendship drama and a quiet advocation for the right to find one’s own balance in life even amid the series of social expectations each of the women quietly contends with that eventually threaten their friendship.

Meng (Wang Ju), Xin (Baby Zhang Hanyun), and Jing (Li Chun) have been friends since school where they vowed to always remain so. 20 years later, they have each attained a kind of success in both career and romance but are now beginning to flounder as the warm glow of temporary fulfilment starts to wear off. TV producer Meng is happily living with fitness enthusiast Lu Bin (Zhang Fan) but the difference in their social status continues to disrupt the relationship while she encounters workplace strife. Xin works in PR for a wedding company and is expecting a baby with boyfriend Zhang Ting (Ren Bin) but is having second thoughts about marrying him in part because of the failure of her first marriage but also because he’s become worryingly overprotective. Jing, meanwhile, quit her job in IT to open a restaurant but is experiencing difficulty keeping it afloat amid the coronavirus pandemic while she abruptly breaks up with her film exec boyfriend Shanmu (Zhao Chengao) after discovering that he still hasn’t deleted the dating apps on his phone. 

Many of the problems they face are the same given that they all live in a patriarchal society, but each of them faces them slightly differently. Xin, for example, explains that he’s joined a company which has a majority female staff and is run by a progressive female boss who assures her her pregnancy won’t be a problem as they run a flexible workplace geared towards supporting women in society. Yet she soon realises that her boss is run ragged and her image of “having it all” is largely a PR front as Xin discovers when she’s pulled off a campaign to do her boss’ son’s art homework. Feeling professionally sidelined especially as the controlling Ting doesn’t let her attend after work events, Xin starts to wonder if she’s made the right decision doubting that it’s really possible to have fully balanced and fulfilling personal and professional lives. 

Meng finds something similar when her boss gives her a warning and insists she land the TV rights for a popular sci-fi novel by a good-looking author or fire one of her team. Working for a station that specialises in TV drama aimed at a stereotypical female audience, she too looks down on her work but immediately faces sexism from author LuoKK (Patrick Nattawat Finkler) who dismisses her suggesting that a woman won’t be able to do his sci-fi novel justice. In a minor gag, neither he nor any of his obnoxious buddies understand the concept of entropy which is central to the novel though both Meng and LuoKK’s  female agent easily explain it. Having spent a long time abroad, LuoKK appears prefer speaking English and originally claims not to have a WeChat which would make his life near impossible in contemporary China. To land the contract, Meng has to pretend to be into mobile gaming getting her boyfriend Lu Bin to play on her behalf while squaring off against an unpleasant ex who has also befriended LuoKK. 

Jing also takes on alternate personalities while trying to trap Shanmu into exposing himself as a cheat. With her restaurant shut down for a fire system repair, she’s offered the opportunity to become an influencer trashing highly rated restaurants for clicks but is quickly disillusioned with the duplicity of online video culture. Like Xin she struggles with her decision to follow her dreams as she faces both personal loss and professional setbacks while battling parental expectation in her family’s continued disapproval of her desire for independence. 

The women are brought together by Meng’s quest to triumph at the office party with a dance routine just like they did at school, only instead of an inappropriate song about “meeting people for drinks and gossip”, she plans to Fosse it up with All That Jazz. When their respective troubles put their relationship under strain, the trio reevaluate their friendship and realise its greatest quality is the unconditional support they give each other as each of them comes to an accommodation with their various difficulties through coming to understand themselves better. Authenticity really is the key as rammed home both by the skewering of the gimmicky restaurant the girls visit in the opening scene and Meng’s realisation that they should perform their high school dance after all rather than making a bid for an affected sophistication. Charmingly heartfelt and amusingly quirky, Chen and Hsu’s zeitgeisty comedy captures the absurdity of life as a woman in the contemporary society while allowing each of the women to take charge of their own lives and destinies through the power of self-knowledge and female solidarity.

Delicious Romance screened in UK cinemas courtesy of CMC

International trailer (English subtitles)

Eighteen Years in Prison (懲役十八年, Tai Kato, 1967)

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Genre star Noburu Ando had a certain cachet in that he had been a yakuza prior to becoming an actor. He had in fact been the head of his own gang which at its high point had over 300 members and controlled much of the lucrative Shibuya nightlife scene. His first onscreen appearance was in a gangster movie in which he played himself. Rather than the jitsuroku epics he would later become associated with, Tai Kato’s Eighteen Years in Prison (懲役十八年, Choueki Juhachi Nen) essentially casts him in a ninkyo role as a noble if compromised former captain of the kamikaze squad who finds himself caught between the contradictions of post-war Japan and the American occupation. 

Indeed, in this as in many other yakuza movies set during the immediate post-war era, the Americans are really just the biggest gang. Suffering with survivor’s guilt, Captain Kawada (Noboru Ando) has set up an association together with former comrade Tsukada (Asao Koike) to look after he dependent relatives of men who fell in war. To do this, he has to resort to criminality raiding American boats for supplies such as sugar and rice which he redistributes to war widows and their families. His ultimate goal is amassing enough money to buy a patch of land in the town centre and do away with the black market which exploits the vulnerable replacing it with a legitimate market so the surviving family members can set up businesses to support themselves. 

Around this time, the association manages to track down the younger sister of one of their men who died as a kamikaze, Hisako (Hiroko Sakuramachi ), and discovers she is living in desperation having lost the family home to aerial bombing. As her mother is seriously ill and she needs money for food and medical treatment, Hisako contemplates turning to sex work and is almost assaulted by a gang of drunk and abusive American servicemen from whom she is rescued by a passing Kawada. This incident makes plain his resentment towards the occupation and sense that it is the American influence that is wilfully suppressing the efforts of the Japanese people to rebuild their society. It’s this resentment that lends a note of justification to Kawada’s decision to rob a nearby factory of valuable copper wire to get the money to save Hisako’s mother thereby saving her from falling into sex work and thereafter helping to achieve their ultimate goal of building the market. The raid, however, goes wrong. Kawada sends an injured Tsukada back to the association and is arrested.

In prison he discovers only more corrupt authority in which guards beat and torture prisoners, just another bigger gang. He finds out that block warden Hanya (Tomisaburo Wakayama) is actively accepting bribes and in cahoots with some of the inmates that attempt to terrorise newbies to the point that one attempts suicide by swallowing glass though Hanya refuses to call for help forcing Kawada and some of the other men to pull the alarm themselves. The sources of moral authority lie in the new college-educated deputy warden recently returned from five years as a POW in Manila, and a veteran yakuza with a grudge against Hanya who apparently had his girlfriend raped leading to her suicide. 

Though the film is titled eighteen years in prison, Kawada becomes eligible for parole in 1952 which is of course the year the occupation ends. By this point he discovers that Tsukada has abandoned their idealistic mission and turned full yakuza, building an immense red-light district on the land they bought for the market and making himself rich through the violent trafficking and exploitation of women. Eventually confronted, he tries to convince Kawada that the world has changed, that the post-war years of privation are over and that he sees only “the ghost of a nation that lost the war” rather than burgeoning new economy stimulated by the Korean War and an ironically a repositioned America now no longer occupiers but still somehow influential if leaving a vacuum a man like Tsukada may step into. It’s no coincidence that he threatens Hisako with deportation to a brothel in Okinawa he’s set up to service American servicemen in a place where the conditions of occupation are still largely in place. 

Tsukada clearly feels that he need have no more responsibility for his wartime conduct, roundly telling Kawada that the families of the fallen are not his responsibility and should “stop leeching off other people and start working for a living”. Hisako’s long lost younger brother Kenichi (Masaomi Kondo) who ended up alone on the streets after being conscripted as a student factory worker and returning to find his home in ashes, turns the blame back on the authorities reminding them that it’s their fault, they started the war the cost him his home and family and turned him into the half-crazed man of violence who immediately introduces himself as “King” on moving up from a juvie prison. Much of Kawada’s prison life is then given over to saving Kenichi, a representative of the next generation, from becoming mired in a life of nihilistic crime. 

In many ways, he remains a squad leader trying to atone for having sent so many young men to die by accepting the responsibility for their families while trying to protect those left behind from the vagaries of the post-war era including the amoral capitalism represented by the infinitely corrupt Tsukada. Dressed in a military uniform ironically pinched from an American soldier he goes on the rampage knowing that he has to deal with Tsukada himself in order to defend the post-war future from those like him who’ve apparently learned nothing much at all even from such recent history. Shooting from his characteristically low angles, Kato explores the seedy underbelly of the beginnings of the economic miracle while his noble hero does his best to offer a course correction to those who have already forgotten their responsibility not just to others but to those they left behind.

#Alive (#살아있다, Cho Il-hyung, 2020)

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Is solidarity really the answer to alienation? The latest in a short line of zombie-related crisis movies, Cho Il-hyung’s oddly prescient #Alive (#살아있다, #Saraitda) presses directly into what it means to live in a time of isolation as its already introverted hero discovers the existential dread of true aloneness, orphaned by his society and quite literally surrounded by cannibalistic threat only to rediscover the desire for life in the company of others vowing to survive not out of obligation but individual will. 

A young man in his 20s, Jun-u (Yoo Ah-in) lives at home with his parents and seems to be a virtual shut-in not quite supporting himself as a pro-gamer/vlogger. He ought to be in his element when he turns on his television one day to discover that a violent riot has apparently erupted all over the city, apparently spreading like a virus which causes aggressive behaviour and cannibalistic frenzy. Unfortunately, Jun-u’s parents left early that morning and didn’t have time to prepare food, leaving him money to go out for groceries but obviously it’s too late for that now and it looks like they won’t be coming home. Jun-u is entirely alone, and all the more so when his usual lines of communication are cut. 

Like the thematically similar EXIT, with which #Alive shares its faith in mountaineering, #Alive concerns itself less with the zombie threat than with youthful alienation and a sense of hopeless despair. Jun-u ought to be in his element, but finds himself ill-equipped for surviving the apocalypse given that he lacks basic adult life skills and those he does possess are now ironically unhelpful. Resourceful as he is, he remembers a smartphone app that would help him communicate via FM radio and all he’d need would be a standard earphone jack only all his earphones are wireless. Making the most of his unstable connection he uploads a single photo of himself holding his address written on the side of a cardboard box with the hashtag #I_MUST_SURVIVE to his Instagram in the hope that someone will see him but becomes increasingly despondent as his food and resources dwindle and he receives a disturbing voicemail which suggests his family may not have escaped the disaster. 

Hitting rock bottom he considers taking his own life but is saved by a literal light in the darkness, a laser shone from an opposing apartment signalling another presence he had previously missed. Believing he was alone in the world, Jun-u lost the will to live and faced with the prospect of waiting to starve to death or venturing out among the zombie hoards chose the only agency available to him in deciding the time and manner of his death. Realising he is not alone restores his desire for life, yet Yu-bin (Park Shin-hye), though much more well prepared, is also dealing with her own trauma in the face of crisis in the memory of a climbing fall that leaves her additionally anxious and fearful of physical risk. Where Jun-u flounders, lamenting as so many of us has in recent years, that no one seems to know what’s going on, the news continually flashing the same info screen while telling viewers only to stay home, Yu-bin has constructed a mini fort complete with a series of booby traps perhaps content in her independence having resolved to live and glad to have discovered she is not entirely alone. 

In contrast to disaster movie tropes, the pair instantly bond in their shared bounce back from despair, developing unconventional means of communication while Yu-bin willingly shares her food stash which in turn gives Jun-u the courage to venture outside for supplies. Eventually reuniting they do their best to withstand the zombie hoards, standing in as they are for the various anxieties which otherwise surround and oppress them, only to find themselves betrayed, worried that perhaps they have after all been abandoned and that no one is there looking out for them. Their salvation lies in their connection, the derided social media proving a lifeline that both affirms their existence and restores a sense of community that returns their safety, airlifting them from the locus of despair finally #Alive and returned to the world secure in the knowledge that they are not alone.

Netflix trailer (English subtitles)

Break Out (行き止まりの挽歌 ブレイクアウト, Toru Murakawa, 1988)

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Good cop or bad cop? A maverick detective crosses the line in the name of justice in Toru Murakawa’s hardboiled thriller, Break Out (行き止まりの挽歌 ブレイクアウト, Ikidomari no Banka: Break Out). Like many of Murakawa’s films throughout the ‘80s, the main villain turns out to be political corruption along with a complicit police force which the hero must in a sense divorce realising that he can enforce the law only by breaking it but tragically failing to protect those most in need of his care. 

Kaji (Tatsuya Fuji) is indeed the archetype of the lone wolf cop. Stumbling out of bed with an obvious hangover and fuzzy beard that stands in stark contrast to his clean-shaven colleagues, he immediately butts heads with follow officer Sakura (Renji Ishibashi) who is technically in charge of the latest homicide case which Kaji believes may be connected to the death of a young woman at a hotel that the force has so far proved reluctant to investigate. To him, it all seems to point to local gangster Nakai (Kiyoshi Nakajoe) with whom he seems to have an ongoing rivalry which might be why Nakai has implicated Kaji’s ex wife Saeko (Saiko Isshiki) in his drug smuggling operation. 

Kaji quickly identifies the body as a bass player, Shimada, who just happens to have played at a club connected to Nakai, and soon realises that a young woman, Miki (Yoko Ishino), who belongs to a local biker gang, is most likely responsible for his death. But, somehow feeling sorry for her and suspecting she may have access to information that would help him take out Nakai for good, Kaji actively helps Miki evade the police by harbouring her in his own apartment while they are both stalked by a mysterious, Terminator-esque hitman who seems intent on recovering some kind of evidence obviously harmful to his client whoever that may be. 

Murakawa’s greatest successes had occurred in the 1970s partnering with the great Yusaku Matsuda who had at this point moved away from genre films though he would later reunite with the director in his final screen appearance, a television movie in which he played an earnest policeman investigating a terrorist incident, before sadly passing away of bladder cancer at only 39. In any case the image of Matsuda hangs heavy over Murakawa’s subsequent films and it’s quite obvious that the menacing hitman has a distinctly Matsuda-esque silhouette, while Tatsuya Fuji plays a similar role to that he’d inhabited in Yoichi Sai’s Let Him Rest in Peace only this time as a world weary ‘80s cop who has his own particular code of righteousness he feels the world has failed. 

His more cynical boss, played by Murakawa stalwart Mikio Narita, is quick to tell him that he should have resigned after a previous incident and that if he had done so his wife would not have left him, a sentiment which she later confirms which is in part surprising because the incident involved him fatally shooting her father. The implication is that Kaji is a true defender of justice who refused to surrender to institutional corruption even at great personal cost. Yet we do definitively see him cross the line, coldly executing a suspect who goads him by claiming he has already killed someone he cared about and thereafter little caring for conventional morality deciding to take the bad guys down with him no longer having anything left to lose except perhaps the girl, Miki, with whom he has developed a paternal bond. 

Meanwhile his earnest partner, Nishimura (Hiroaki Murakami), who originally disapproved of Kaji’s old school, maverick policing has changed his tune now seeing the value in his belligerence not least when his own wife is taken hostage by Nakai leaving him equally powerless at police HQ. Kaji is constantly told to back off the hotel case because of pressure from above, eventually discovering a connection to a sleazy politician but knowing that he can’t touch him or Nakai while bizarrely ordered to continue investigating Shimada’s death despite the evidence that suggests they are quite clearly connected. Still as the rather more poetic Japanese title which means something more like “elegy for a dead end” implies, this world is already beyond redemption and the only recourse open to Kaji is to make a sacrifice of himself in the name of justice. A good bad cop, all he can do is pass on his outrage to those left behind. Shot with Murakawa’s trademark hardboiled mist, and a noirish sense of fatalism the film paints a bleak picture of infinite corruption in Bubble-era Japan in which the only hero on offer is a morally compromised cop prepared to die for an illusionary justice. 

Hachiko (忠犬八公, Xu Ang, 2023)

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The heartrending tale of a faithful dog who continued to wait for his late owner at a cable car station becomes a poignant symbol for a left behind China in Xu’s Ang’s reimagining of the 1987 Japanese film scripted by Kaneto Shindo, Hachiko (忠犬八公, zhōng quǎn bā gōng). Xu keeps the original title which translates as “faithful dog Hachiko” (Hachiko comprising of the characters for “eight” and “public” which when used in names conveys a note of nobility), but changes the puppy’s name to “Batong” which means “eight dots” and is taken from a mahjong title he naughtily runs off with after being taken in by kindhearted professor Chen Jingxiu (played by film director Feng Xiaogang).

The film opens, however, in the present day with Jingxiu’s wife (Joan Chen) and son (Bai Jugang) returning to Chongqing after many years living in Beijing and remarking on how much the city has changed. These days the cable car system across the Yangtze is a nostalgic tourist attraction with crossing the river increasingly easy thanks to a widescale bridge project. Jingxiu was a professor of engineering working on infrastructure projects, but despite the allure of progress the opening scenes suggest a quiet note of melancholy that runs underneath with constant references to the Three Gorges Dam project which led to mass displacement throughout the region as traditional villages were sunk beneath the reservoir. 

It’s in one of these villages that Jingxiu finds Batong, an abandoned puppy left behind when the village was evacuated. He brings him home with him despite knowing that his wife has an aversion to dogs owing to having been bitten as a child, and attempts to hide him from the rest of the family later suggesting that he’s just waiting to find a suitable owner to rehome him but clearly having no intention of doing so. The callousness with which some people treat animals is fully brought home when Jingxiu’s wife gives Batong away to a man who clearly intends to sell him for dog meat with Jingxiu managing to rescue him in the nick of time. 

In some ways, the professor and dog bond precisely because they are outsiders neither of whom is actually from Chonqing. Jingxiu’s family members often tease him for still not understanding the local dialect despite having lived there for decades while he often seems as if he feels out of place in his own home. When he’s asked to give up the dog, Jingxiu refuses insisting that some of their habits such as his wife’s obsession with mahjong, his son’s newfangled internet career, and his daughter’s grungy boyfriend, annoy him but he respects their right to be happy and would never try to stop them from doing something they love so he’s putting his foot down and Batong stays. This sense of solidarity binds them tightly to each other which might be why Batong often escapes in the morning to chase Jingxiu to the cable car, later returning in the afternoon to welcome him home. 

There is something undeniably poignant in Batong’s waiting at the station for someone who’ll never return in part because the cable car itself has become somewhat obsolete despite having been completed only in the mid-1980s. Jingxiu dies of a heart attack on a boat on the Yangtze circling the site of the dam, disappearing amid its landscape as so many others also did. He left on the train but did not return by it, and so Batong is unable to understand his absence or grasp the concept of death. Displaced himself, the lost dog becomes a melancholy stray trapped in another China and longing for the return to something that no longer exists. 

Jingxiu’s house is soon pulled down too, exiling his wife to the modern metropolis of Beijing now a displaced person herself as these traditional spaces are gradually erased in the name of progress. Batong makes his home in the ruins, continuing to wait like a lonely ghost in the rapidly changing city. Undeniably moving in its unabashed sentimentality in which Batong is finally reunited with Jingxiu as they board the cable car together, the film is also a poignant tribute to man’s best friend and a plea to end animal cruelty, ending with a heartfelt message encouraging the adoption of stray dogs many of whom like Batong are simply looking for a place to belong. 

Hachiko screened in UK cinemas courtesy of CMC.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Goodbye, Bad Magazines (グッドバイ、バッドマガジンズ, Shoichi Yokoyama, 2022)

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With the 2020 Olympics on the horizon, Japan began looking for ways to tidy up its image expecting an influx of foreign visitors which for obvious reasons never actually materialised. As part of this campaign, leading chains of convenience stores announced that they would stop selling pornographic magazines in order to create a more wholesome environment for children and families along with tourists who might be surprised to see such material openly displayed in an ordinary shop. Then again, given the ease of access to pornography online sales had fast been falling and the Olympics was perhaps merely a convenient excuse and effective PR opportunity to cut a product line that was no longer selling. 

Based on actual events, Shoichi Yokoyama’s Goodbye, Bad Magazines (グッドバイ、バッドマガジンズ) explores the print industry crisis from the inside perspective of the adult magazine division at a major publisher which has just announced the closure of a long running and well respected cultural magazine, Garu. Firstly told they don’t hire right out of college, recent graduate Shiori (Kyoka Shibata) who had dreamed of working in cultural criticism is offered a job working on adult erotica and ends up taking it partly in defiance and encouraged by female editor Sawaki (Seina Kasugai) who tells that if she can make a porn mag she can make anything and be on her way to working on something more suited to her interests with a little experience under her belt. 

Her first job, however, consists entirely of shredding voided pages filled with pictures of nude women which is slightly better than the veteran middle-aged man who joined with her after being transferred from Garu who is responsible for adding mosaics to the porn DVDs they give away with the magazines to ensure they conform to Japan’s strict obscenity laws. Later a mistake is made and mosaics are omitted placing the publishing company bosses at risk of arrest and the magazine closure. Aside from being one of two women in an office full of sleazy men and sex toys, Shiori’s main problem is that she struggles to get a handle on the nature of the erotic at least of the kind that has been commodified before eventually falling into a kind of automatic rhythm. “It’s easy when it does’t mean anything” she explains to sex columnist and former porn star Haru (Yura Kano) who is much franker in her expression but perhaps no more certain than Shiori when it comes to the question asked in her column, why people have sex. 

Shiori asks her sympathetic colleague Mukai (Yusuke Yamada) for advice and he tells her that what’s erotic to him is relationships, but it seems his work has placed a strain on his marriage while his wife wants a baby and he has trouble separating the simple act of meaningless sex with that which has an explicit purpose such as an expression love or conceiving a child. According to Shiori’s editor Isezaki (Shinsuke Kato), the future of erotica will come from women with their boss finally agreeing to an old idea of Sawaki’s to create an adult magazine aimed at a female audience in the hope of opening a new market while handing a progressive opportunity to Sawaki and Shiori to explore female desire, but at the same time magazines are folding one after the other with major retailers canceling their orders and leaving them to ring elderly customers who’ve been subscribing for 30 years but don’t have the internet to let them know the paper edition is going out of circulation. 

The editorial team have an ambivalent attitude to their work, at once proud of what they’ve achieved and viewing it as meaningless and a little embarrassing. Not much more than a few months after working there, Shiori has become a seasoned pro training a new recruit who’s just as nervous and confused as she was but offering little more guidance was than she was given while becoming ever more jaded. When handed evidence that her boss has been embezzling money, she just ignores it though perhaps realising that when he’s found out it means the end for all of them too. Like everyone else, he’d wanted to start his own publishing company but the editor who left to do just that ended up taking his own life when the business failed. Yet, on visiting a small independent family-run convince store near the sea, Shiori hears of an old man who visits specifically to buy the magazines she once published because he can’t get them anywhere else while they have steady trade from fishermen who need paper copies to takes out to sea. The message seems to be there’s a desire and a demand for print media yet, even if it’s not quite enough to satisfy the bottom line. A sympathetic and sometimes humorous take on grim tale of industrial decline, Goodbye, Bad Magazines sees its steely heroine travel from naive idealist to jaded cynic but simultaneously grants her the full freedom of her artistic expression along with solidarity with her similarly burdened colleagues.  

Goodbye, Bad Magazines streamed as part of the 2022 Yubari International Fantastic Film Festival.

Teaser trailer (English subtitles)

Crossroad (死の十字路, Umetsugu Inoue, 1956)

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An adulterous industrialist finds himself in a sticky situation after accidentally killing his wife in Umetsugu Inoue’s bizarre noir Crossroad (死の十字路, Shi no Jujiro). Based on a story by Edogawa Rampo, the film like any good noir suggests that in the end you can’t outrun your fate and all transgressions must be paid for but also turns on cosmic irony and strange coincidence in the great “tapestry” of life in which everything really is connected.

Shogo Ise (an aged-up Rentaro Mikuni) is the director of a construction firm about to complete a hugely expensive dam project which requires the sinking of a village and quarry. Apparently unhappily married to a woman obsessed with Nichiren Buddhism believing it helped to cure her of a serious illness during the war, he more or less lives with his secretary/mistress Harumi (Michiyo Aratama) who has been receiving incredibly weird and definitely threatening letters from Shogo’s wife Tomoko (Hisano Yamaoka). Tomoko claims that she has received an order from the “Child of the Sun” insisting that she must exact vengeance for the “great sin” Harumi has committed. The letter seems to be the last straw for Shogo who has decided to leave his wife, despite her incredible wealth, and set up home with Harumi permanently. 

Shogo hadn’t taken the threat very seriously, but sure enough Tomoko later shows up with some kind of ceremonial dagger and barges in to attack Harumi in the bath. During the struggle, Shogo accidentally kills Tomoko while trying to wrestle the knife from her. After briefly considering turning himself in, he realises that doing so will involve them all in scandal so he decides the best thing to do is dump her body in a well at the quarry which is shortly to be sunk. However, the plan soon goes awry and not least because a random man with a head injury climes into his car after he has a fender bender on a set of crossroads and later dies there leaving Shogo no choice but dump him alongside Tomoko. 

Inoue casts the abandoned quarry in truly eerie light, filled with gothic winds as if Shogo were being chastised by the gods themselves. In a sense, he’s paying not only for his sexual transgression but for the breaking of a taboo. A homeless man who once lived in the village later relates that he stayed until the last day because he did not want to leave his ancestors’ land. Shogo is part of the post-war construction boom but there’s also an underlying implication that this industrialisation is harmful to the land itself, not least in constraining a natural flow with the imposition of a dam in addition to causing a displacement of the people who once lived in the village while literally drowning the ancestral spirits. 

Harumi too speaks of feeling as if they’re both sinking beneath the waves, chasing a happiness to which they have no entitlement though she herself seems completely blameless save for her involvement in an extra-marital affair and strangely wholesome in comparison to the film’s otherwise sordid atmosphere. Even for a noir, Inoue’s sensibility is surprisingly sleazy for the world of 1956 and more than a little suggestive. A detective that randomly shows up, Minami (Shiro Osaka), lives with his foxy assistant and the interaction between them is constantly sexually charged while Inoue frequently returns to the backstreets of a neon city and the bars that line the streets approaching the crossroads where Shogo’s fate will align. 

It could be inferred that Shogo is a man whose life was marked by the war, his marriage perhaps in haste and then regretted while his wife developed her illness and subsequent obsession with Nichiren because of its corruption. Nevertheless, he’s portrayed as a basically “good” man in a very bad situation who made some very bad choices he wasn’t in the end bad enough to carry through properly hence the amazing series of collisions that seal his fate. On the one hand, like the young couple related to the drunk man who ended up in Shogo’s car, he and Harumi are just two otherwise ordinary people who decided to chase happiness albeit through an extra-marital affair only to pay a heavy price for daring to dream of a better future. Inoue has his usual amount of fun playing with noir archetypes as men strike matches in darkened alleyways and silhouettes of mysterious men in trench coats line the walls, not to mention the gothic sense of dread in the abandoned quarry, while constantly wrong footing us only to set us on our own collision course with the vagaries of post-war morality.