Manchurian Tiger (东北虎, Geng Jun, 2021)

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An adulterous bulldozer operator in north east China finds himself in conflict with a failed construction magnate when his wife insists he find a new home for their Alsatian before their baby arrives in Geng Jun’s dark comedy Manchurian Tiger (东北虎, dōngběihǔ). A Manchurian tiger does indeed appear at certain points of the film, a child at the zoo asking their grandfather why the rather morose beast does not roar only to receive the explanation that the tiger is all alone with no one to talk to. The child sadly reflects that it’s like the tiger is in prison, but the grandfather corrects them that it’s in there for its own good so that it can be protected, loved, and admired, but its plight still calls out to an emotionally wounded poet (Xu Gang) who is also no longer young and feels isolated and constrained by the world around him. 

As for bulldozer operator Xu (Zhang Yu) who it seems may once have been a teacher, his problems seem to lie more in the inability to reconcile his conflicting emotions towards his family. His wife Meiling (Ma Li) tells him to get rid of the dog because it’ll be too much for them when the new baby arrives and he complies but is also sickened when he’s met with only prices by the pound on trying to find it a new home. He unwisely decides to leave the dog with a local businessman, Ma (Zhang Zhiyong), but Ma slaughters it to curry favour with a pair of “collection agents” he hires to help him get back money he invested into a construction project that’s clearly gone south and in truth sounds like it may have been a scam to begin with. When the heartbroken Xu discovers the truth he vows revenge only for a strange sort of solidarity to arise between them in shared victimhood both bested by the problems of the modern society in the formerly industrial north east. 

Ma could try to make the case that he’s a victim too and he is in a sense but he’s also a conman as Xu later brands him. Even so he does seem to feel some remorse if not for eating Xu’s dog then at least for plunging his friends and family into financial ruin after they sunk their lifesavings into his project because they believed in him. As he puts it they all, he included, fell for the fantasy of the modern China believing they could all get rich quick only to be undercut by the ironic flip side when cost cutting and subpar materials prevent the apartment block from being finished leaving Ma high and dry unable to recoup his costs until the apartments can be sold. The debt collection agents he unwisely hires are just thuggish loansharks who then ask him for a hefty deposit, smashing up his car to make a point when he tries to use it as collateral. 

In essence it seems as if all Xu wants is to Ma to apologise to the spirit of his dog but Ma apparently values his pride above money and complains the price is too high while Xu resents the attempt to place a monetary value on his friend or imply that perhaps his own flesh also has a price. He’s clearly in a space of mental despair, reminding his mistress that like the tiger he’s no longer young and has exhausted all other opportunities to improve his life so the only thing he has left is his marriage. As his wife Meiling starts starts visiting several women around the local area after noticing the scent of perfume along with stray hairs on Xu’s clothes, it becomes clear he has had several affairs already and is seemingly being punished for his sexual transgressions which are perhaps an attempt to escape his own sense of imprisonment, as caged as the tiger by his familial responsibilities and humiliated by the inability to meet them.

Yet none of these men, not Xu, nor Ma, nor the dejected poet are going to roar because they’ve long since accepted their captivity and believe themselves already too old to risk escape. A fight eventually breaks out among Ma’s creditors when one suggests that the money should first be given to the young because they will spend it, keeping the money moving through an uncertain economy, while the old will save having learned to be cautious amid the vicissitudes of life in a rapidly changing society. Darkly comic and tinged with the fatalism of Sino-noir along with its jazzy score, Manchurian Tiger seems to suggest that the cage is infinite and the only escape lies in accepting its myriad disappointments. 

Manchurian Tiger screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival where it was presented in partnership with CineCina.

Festival trailer (English subtitles)

Images: © Blackfin Production

Shari (シャリ, Nao Yoshigai, 2021) [Fantasia 2022]

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From a distance, conflict and harmony can appear as the same thing or at least that’s how it was for the director of Shari (シャリ) seeing a mountain obscured by the weight of clouds seemingly in a constant battle of resistance with the wind. Later she comes to realise that what she was seeing wasn’t discord but two forces acting in concert with one another maintaining a kind of balance in the natural world. 

Balance may be something in danger of getting lost in the contemporary society as director Nao Yoshigai’s gentle voiceover explains. A documentary/fiction hybrid, Yoshigai wanders around Hokkaido in the winter talking to some of the residents of small-town Japan before shifting into a more environmental message as her interview subjects reflect on the effects of pollution and global warming. The seas are full of plastic while the absence of drift ice has led to a decline in fish populations. Bears have been observed coming down from the mountain but locals were less afraid than sorry hoping the bear would choose to return to its natural habitat and feeling just the littlest bit guilty on hearing it had been killed wondering if their presence is an incursion on its rightful home. Then again, two of the locals that Yoshigai talks to are newcomers from Tokyo who procured licenses to hunt deer and admit that essential life in this land of cold and snow is often difficult. Ironically enough, the woman suggests that they themselves have recovered a sense of being wild in their return to a more primitive way of life. 

In a way it’s that wildness, an ambivalence with an atavistic impulse that seems to captivate Yoshigai as a kind of spirit of the place. She recalls the first time she ate deer meat and that it caused her a sleepless night broken by strange dreams of being in a forest with bloodstained snow and encountering a little girl. Yet as the conclusion admits, we live taking heat from others as the woolly red creature often seen wandering through the town offers up its living blood. In another echo of the opening, two forces which ought to be at war turn out to be allies. The townspeople are fearful at the lack of falling snow explaining that in a roundabout way snow blankets the soil preventing it from freezing and preserving what lies below for the upcoming spring. 

It’s the weather that frightens some most in this age of sleepless bears who no longer have the urge to hibernate given the increasing temperatures. Yoshigai begins to feel responsible, as if her filmmaking has somehow confused the seasons, a feeling perhaps compounded when she returns to Tokyo in late January and finds it unseasonably warm while heavy snowfall is finally forecast for Shari. As another resident puts it, people in places like these had little choice but to learn to live with nature but nature is changing. Some had wanted to shift into hotels but others later won out arguing that nature was their greatest asset and must be protected though few seem to know how when the world is out of kilter and unlikely to stop its course towards self-destruction any time soon. 

In the end, however, Yoshigai’s prognosis is more hopeful recalling the battle between clouds and winds which was really a dance and certain that this perpetual motion has its own direction which can never be stopped. What we discover is nature red in tooth and claw as the Red Thing trudges through snow and smears its blood wherever it goes threatening in jest to consume the local children. Yet through her travels in Shari in summer sunshine and winter snow, Yoshigai comes to understand the pull of the place in its sheer elementality along with the sometimes eccentric residents such as former nomad who chose to settle down rearing sheep for wool and baking bread for sale, both things which are in their own way about warmth and comfort in a cold and unforgiving place. Sleepless bears are all we are, eyes strained by oncoming catastrophe stumbling around a world in the midst of melting until someone puts us out of our misery but continuing to hope for a blanketing of snow as a sign of possible salvation. 

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

Festival trailer (English subtitles)

The Age of Assassins (殺人狂時代, Kihachi Okamoto, 1967)

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“Hey, what’s going on around here?” a sidekick asks directly to camera at the conclusion of Kihachi Okamoto’s characteristically anarchic conspiracy-thriller-cum-spy-spoof The Age of Assassins (殺人狂時代, Satsujinkyo Jidai). Sparked by Bond mania, the late 1960s saw a marked trend in B-movie espionage parody though Okamoto’s take on the genre is darker than the norm even if embracing his trademark taste for absurdist humour leaving us wondering who our hero really is and which side, if any, he’s really on in the confusing geopolitical realities of 1967 Japan. 

As we first meet him, the hero is bumbling professor of criminal psychology Shinji Kikyo (Tatsuya Nakadai) who has extreme myopia and a persistent case of athlete’s foot not to mention a prominent mother complex. Unbeknownst to him, he’s one of three targets picked not quite at random by Rudolf von Bruckmayer (Bruno Lucique), former Gestapo chief, who is interested in hiring some assassins trained by the megalomaniac psychiatrist Mizorogi (Hideyo Amamoto) who’s been turning his mentally distressed patients into hyper-efficient killing machines (sometimes literally) under the rationale that all great men throughout history have been in a certain sense “crazy”. Mizorogi is also in charge of a eugenicist project titled “The Greater Japan Population Control Council” which believes that Japan is already overpopulated but they have to ensure that “the lives of people who might become useful in the future must not be destroyed before they’re born.” Therefore, “the people who will be useless should be asked to bow out”, the assassin calmly explains shortly before Shinji is saved by the divine energy of his late mother as her bust falls from a shelf and knocks the killer out. 

The central conceit plays into a real anxiety about the post-war baby boom expressed in earlier films such as Yuzo Kawashima’s Burden of Love while attacking the capitalistic philosophy that regards some people as more useful than others. By the late 1960s, Nazis had begun to make frequent appearances in these kinds spy spoofs as comedy villains usually crazed to the point of being little real threat. Mizorogi too is eventually exposed as exalting the “mad” interested more in the art of chaos and the impulse to murder than in any greater political goal. Indeed, the central MacGuffin turns out to be less to do with a grand conspiracy to create some kind of super society than the very B-movie-esque missing diamond known as Cleopatra’s Tear.

Okamoto piles each of these subplots one on top of the other as if he were making it up as he goes along suddenly undercutting what we thought we knew with an unexpected reversal. Shedding his glasses and shaving his scraggly beard, Shinji shifts from myopic professor to suave super agent using profiling and psychology to stay one step ahead while encountering plots by spiritualist cults, overly cheerful self defence force officers in the middle of training exercises, and eccentric assassins. From a modern standpoint, it might seem uncomfortable that each of the killers is manifesting disability in order to seem non-threatening, a female operative concealing a deadly weapon behind an eyepatch, while her poetry-obsessed colleague stores his in a fake crutch, but then again they are each pawns of a game being played by the crazed Mizorogi. Aided by female reporter Keiko (Reiko Dan) and car thief sidekick Otomo Bill (Hideo Sunazuka), Shinji seems to bumble from one bizarre episode to another but may actually be far more in charge of the situation than we might have assumed. 

Among the most visually striking of Okamoto’s late ‘60s pictures and once again making great use of animation, Age of Assassins features high concept production design, Mizorogi’s asylum lair a maddening corridor of Omega-shaped passages with ornate cell bars on either side behind which we can see a room full of men often engaged in what seems to be a military exercise regime while the plaster effigies of human form seem to be bursting from the walls. As in all of Okamoto’s films the central message lies in the absurdity of violence suggesting in a sense that the dog-eat-dog ethos of contemporary capitalist consumerism is in itself a kind of internecine madness countered only by Shinji’s rather childish mentality crafting his various gadgets out of household objects while attacking this elitist individualism with nothing more sophisticated than a vegetable peeler. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Struggling Man (私はいったい、何と闘っているのか, Toshio Lee, 2021)

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Life is a lonely battlefield for the middle-aged hero of Toshio Lee’s Struggling Man (私はいったい、何と闘っているのか, Watashi wa Ittai Nani to Tatakatteiru no ka). The film’s English-language title and supermarket setting may recall Juzo Itami’s Supermarket Woman, but Lee’s lighthearted dramedy soon takes an unexpected left turn as the hero battles a kind of mid-life crisis of fracturing masculinity as his professional and family lives come under simultaneous threat firstly by his failure to land a long overdue promotion and secondly by his eldest daughter’s impending marriage. 

After 25 years working at the same small-town supermarket, Haruo Izawa (Ken Yasuda) is well respected by his colleagues and often depended on by his boss Mr. Ueda (Hikaru Ijuin) yet harbours an internalised inferiority complex that he has not yet made manager. When Mr. Ueda passes away suddenly, everyone, including Haruo himself, just assumes he’ll finally be getting promoted but head office soon parachute in an extremely strange man from accounts, Nishiguchi (Kentaro Tamura), who knows nothing at all about how to run a supermarket. Haruo ends up with an awkward horizontal promotion to deputy manager while Nishiguchi basically leaves everything up to him. 

Haruo is always being told that he’s too nice but as he later tells another employee, he too is really just thinking of himself as revealed by his ever running interior monologue in which he often imagines himself in situations which will show him in a good light only for things not to pan out as he’d hoped. It’s clear that what he’s experiencing is partly a middle-aged man’s masculinity crisis often comparing himself to others and embarrassed on a personal level in not having achieved his career goals while directly threatened by the presence of his daughter’s new boyfriend fearing that he will lose his patriarchal authority within his own household in which he is already somewhat mocked by an otherwise genuinely loving and supportive family. His anxiety is compounded by the fact that he is a stepfather to the two daughters while he and his perspicacious wife Ritsuko (Eiko Koike) have a son together. The discovery of plane tickets sent by the girls’ estranged birth father in Okinawa with the hope that they will visit unbalances him in his increasing fear of displacement.  

As in the Japanese title of the film, Haruo is always asking himself what it is he seems to be fighting with the obvious answers being an internalised inferiority complex and toxic masculinity while constantly told that he doesn’t help himself with his Mr. Nice Guy approach to life. When he discovers an employee may be defrauding the business, he stops his assistant from reporting it and after discovering the truth decides to help cover it up so they won’t lose their job but later loses out himself when his simple act of kindness and compassion is viewed in bad faith by a potential employer. He tries to make things work with Nishiguchi, but Nishiguchi is a defiantly strange person and so all of Haruo’s attempts to help him integrate into supermarket life backfire. As it turns out, he’s in a constant battle with himself against his better nature but always resolving to be kind and put others first while privately annoyed that the universe often seems to be unkind to him. 

Then again as an old lady running a curry house puts it, happiness is having a full belly and so long as Haruo has a healthy appetite things can’t really be that bad. His life is quite nice, which is something he comes to appreciate more fully while reclaiming his image of himself as a father and along with it a sense of security brokered by a truly selfless act of kindness informed by paternal empathy. Professional validation may be a little harder to win, but lies more in the gentle camaraderie with fellow employees than in ruthless workplace politics or rabid ambition. Life need not be a lonely battle as Haruo begins to learn setting aside his manly stoicism and trusting in his ace detective wife who has been engaging in a similar and apparently victorious battle herself reaffirming her love for the kind of sweets so unexciting no one remembers they’re there which may seem a little plain on the outside but have their own kind of wholesome sweetness. 

Struggling Man streams in the US Sept. 17 – 23 as part of the 15th season of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Tekkonkinkreet (鉄コン筋クリート, Michael Arias, 2006)

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A pair of orphaned street kids attempt to defend backstreet life from the ravages of progress in Michael Arias’ adaptation of the manga by Taiyo Matsumoto, Tekkonkinkreet (鉄コン筋クリート). Though the manga was first published in the early ‘90s which is to say at the beginning of the post-Bubble era, the film looks back to a scrappy post-war Japan embodied by the moribund Treasure Town, once a lively city filled with the promise its name implies but now according to some a lawless slum ruled over by the “Cats” and contested by yakuza determined to turn it into another “Kids Kastle” theme park. 

There is something particularly ironic in the desire to turn Treasure Town, a literal playground for orphans Black (Kazunari Ninomiya) and White (Yu Aoi) collectively known as the Cats, into a walled city taking something that should be free and charging for it while displacing the street kids who live there so that those whose parents can pay can be given a temporary illusion of freedom. To Black, this is his city and he will defend it along with protecting White who has an otherworldly simplicity and makes radio calls to the universe reporting that he has preserved peace on Earth for another day. In a way he has because it becomes clear that the two boys are a two halves of one whole maintaining balance and keeping each other in check. Innocent and naive beyond his years White cannot survive alone, but without White, Black would have nothing to live for. His inner darkness would become all consuming and present a threat to all those who cross his path. 

In a piece of poignant symbolism, White attempts to grow an apple tree by planting a seed in the junk yard where they live but is disappointed that it does not seem to sprout little realising that it cannot grow where it is planted because the conditions are adverse to its development. The same might be said of he and Black who have been abandoned by their society and are cared for only by a wise old man who gives them occasional advice. Their only desire to is protect their town in a bid to avoid yet another displacement this time at the hands of corporatised yakuza who see Treasure Town only as a relic of a previous era sitting on valuable land which must be seized and monetised. Only old school gangster Rat ironically enough agrees with the Cats, confused by the desire to erase community and history riding roughshod over the feelings of all those who have ever called Treasure Town home. 

Rat’s battleground is located in the soul of his protege, Kimura (Yusuke Iseya), who first says that he doesn’t believe in anything only for Rat to tell him that he should at least believe in love. Seduced by the consumerist promises of the duplicitous Snake (Masahiro Motoki) and his giant alien minions, Kimura nevertheless comes around to Rat’s way of thinking on learning that he will soon be a father. Like Black and White, he dreams of escaping Treasure Town for a house by the sea where he could live a peaceful life with his child but is trapped by contrary codes of gangsterdom if even if eventually realising that the two things he believes in are truth and love neither of which are very important to Mr. Snake. Black meanwhile is torn between his inner darkness and his belief in White, caught between nihilistic violence and the desire to plant a seed and watch it grow even on shaky ground. 

Designed by Shinji Kimura, the backstreets of Treasure Town are a Showa-era paradise perhaps stuck in the past in the view from early Heisei but embodying a scrappy sense of possibility. It has an uncanny reality as an organic space built and lived in by human hands that is at an odds with the slick uniformity of the gangster developers who want to turn it into a children’s theme park, the very embodiment of a constructed paradise that will halt the natural growth that Rat describes in reminding Black that Treasure Town will never be what it was but will continue on with or without them. Bringing this place fully to life, Arias’ surprising, inventive direction gives full vent to the anarchy of the source material but is in the end about the heart of a place along with the bond between its two protectors keeping the peace through complementary balance.

Tekkonkinkreet screens at Japan Society New York on Sept. 16 as part of the Monthly Anime series.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Alivehoon (アライブフーン, Ten Shimoyama, 2022)

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How far can skills learned in simulation be transferred to the “real” world? Ten Shimoyama’s Alivehoon (アライブフーン) sees a top gamer take to the track for real to compete for drift racing glory while battling both his own lack of confidence and that of those around him. What he discovers is that there may not be so much difference as might be assumed, but offline racing is not a solo sport and succeeding means learning to trust in others as well as oneself. 

Koichi’s (Shuhei Nomura) immediate problem is that he doesn’t fit in at his job as a mechanic and is resented by the other employees for failing to pull his weight. All he wants to do is play games and after a lifetime of practice he’s become a champion in the world of e-sports drift racing but secretly harbours the desire to become a “real” race driver. He finally gets the chance to prove himself when his exasperated boss gets him an opportunity to try out for a real team in need of a rookie driver to ensure its survival. Diffident as he is, Koichi agrees and after brief moment of confusion on the track, proves he has what it takes to take his virtual skills to the real world as an aspiring drift racer. 

The main opposition Koichi faces is from those who dismiss him on the grounds that in-game experience is useless in the real world, which in some cases it may be but luckily Koichi does at least know how to drive and after a moment to play things through knows how to translate his skills from the online world to a real life track which of course has much more proximity to mortal danger than he has ever experienced before. That might be one reason that veteran driver Muto (Takanori Jinnai) who retired after a catastrophic crash in the opening sequence does not take him very seriously on witnessing him being physically sick after being driven round the course by a champion racer while his daughter Natsumi (Ai Yoshikawa) is very invested in the idea that it might be possible to turn an e-sports champ into a top rank driver and save the team in the process. 

Team Alive is positioned as the nice guy underdog, trying to win through hard work and fairness in contrast to arrogant hotshot Shibasaki (Shodai Fukuyama) who turns down the chance to join Alive to go with a more lucrative offer from a haughty middle-aged woman (Anna Tsuchiya) who plays only to win. Shibasaki drives dirty with the racing equivalent of kicking dust in Koichi’s eyes but eventually pays a heavy price for his lack of sportsmanship only to be humbled and come to see the merit in the honest and down to earth approach of team Alive. Koichi meanwhile fights an internal battle trying to rediscover a sense of confidence while beginning to find it in the mutual support of his teammates acknowledging that he may be in the driving seat but he’s not alone and the victory does not belong entirely to him. 

The film’s race scenes are supervised by “drift king” Keiichi Tsuchiya and feature real life drivers such as Naoki Nakamura, Daigo Saito and Masato Kawabata driving real courses for added authenticity all shot in camera without the use of CGI or special effects. The neon blue/red lighting and synth score contribute to the retro aesthetic but it has to be said that Koichi seems to take to real life drift racing a little too easily and experiences surprisingly few setbacks before making a fairly perplexing decision in the film’s final moments despite having discovered the value of teamwork along with a new family in team Alive who each value him for who he is as he brings the best in virtual racing to the real world game. Natsumi too earns the respect of her father as he comes to trust and believe in Koichi but is never quite given the chance to prove herself in her own right. In any case there is something heartwarming in the film’s conviction that there are no pointless skills and that working hard to become good at something is its own reward whether you become a champion or not.

Alivehoon screens in Chicago on Sept. 17 as part of the 15th season of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

The Fifth Thoracic Vertebra (다섯 번째 흉추, Park Sye-young, 2022) [Fantasia 2022]

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A strange fungus growing on an old mattress slowly takes human form while feeding on loneliness and misery in Park Sye-young’s melancholy experimental feature, The Fifth Thoracic Vertebrae (다섯 번째 흉추, daseos beonjjae hyungchu). The Fifth Thoracic Vertebrae is near enough the one closest to the heart, and the one the growing creature is prone to rip out of its unsuspecting victims as it travels towards its uncertain evolution. Yet there is a strange sort of wistfulness that accompanies the mattress’ journey as if a new world were being born, one birthed in pain and anguish but with a yearning for love and connection even in the depths of its loneliness. 

The mattress is to begin with one purchased by a young couple about to move in together but soon becomes a symbol of their doomed love. While the mattress leans against a pillar outside an apartment building, a rude removal man swears at the young woman on the phone apparently unable to gain access. The boyfriend was supposed to let them in, but as we discover he’s fallen asleep and the girl must now abandon her plans to carry the mattress up the stairs herself and position it around his sleeping body. The film had explained to us that we are still some days away from the creature’s birth but we can soon see spores collecting on the mattress as a symbol of the relationship’s demise. When the couple finally break up, the boyfriend notices the mould but simply flips the mattress over as if that will solve all of his problems. 

Slowly but surely, the mattress travels all around the contemporary society in which many are it seems remarkably unfussy about the condition of a mattress they do not intend to sleep on themselves. It first ends up in a love hotel where it witness another breakup, resentment between the lovers soon giving way to sorrow and finally neediness as they consent to part. Now grown enough in strength the mattress creature rips out their vertebrae though it’s unclear whether it does so to relive them of their pain or merely to consume it. 

Abandoned again by the irritated landlord cross with his customers for being too stuck up for a mattress which he thinks is perfectly fine if you just flip it over and forget about the admittedly “disgusting” growths on the underside, the creature finds a new home with a terminally ill woman who seems to have some kind of rare disease which requires her isolation though seemingly because of some kind of stigma rather than for any medical cause. It’s distressing to think that anyone would give such a soiled, unsanitary thing to a dangerously ill woman though she seems to have become aware of the creature and views it almost as a friend reaching out in her own loneliness and charging it with a letter for her daughter she fears the nurses will otherwise burn with her body. It seems they do not burn the mattress, but seek to get rid of it while recommending it be purified through exorcism but of course the removal people are far too cheap for that. 

In any case, the mattress creature soon finds an affinity with the van driver who is celebrating his 37th birthday alone on the road with a sad slice of cake and a single candle while listening to teach yourself English tapes in search of meaningful connections. Perhaps it makes sense that along with sweat, dead skin, and other things we unknowingly shed, we leak sadness and pain into a space of comfort and safety feeding a creature of loneliness and desire with the physical remnants of our emotional selves. What survives of us is less love than its unanswered call, an undeliverable letter becoming a sort of holy text for a new form of life that may long survive us. Filmed with a dreamy poeticism and sudden shocks of eeriness in its ominous lighting and sci-fi score, Park’s oneiric drama nevertheless beats with a melancholy pulse of frustrated desire in which all connection is fleeting and love births only loneliness in a world in which a mattress knows us best of all. 

The Fifth Thoracic Vertebra screened as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival. 

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Hot Little Girl (しびれくらげ, Yasuzo Masumura, 1970)

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“Using women to make money is the same as a yakuza” a repentant gangster insists on confronting the real big bad of exploitative corporate power in Yasuzo Masumura’s ironic exploration of corruptions of a consumerist society. Ironically given the rather salacious title The Hot Little Girl (しびれくらげ, Shibure Kurage), the Japanese a more suggestive Numbing Jellyfish, Masumura’s spicy drama finds an exploited woman fighting back to reclaim her own image and agency by seizing the tools used against her in the company of a sensitive yakuza himself tiring of the amoral world of contemporary gangsterdom. 

Once an ordinary coffeeshop waitress, Midori (Mari Atsumi) is now a successful model thanks to the efforts of her salaryman boyfriend Hiroshi (Yusuke Kawazu). Completely in love with him, Midori is convinced they will one day be married while Hiroshi is obsessed with corporate success and ultimately intends to buy his own advancement with her body by acquiescing to an indecent proposal from an American department store owner to strike a massive trade deal none of his colleagues had been able to broker. Shocked and disgusted Midori refuses but is later won over by Hiroshi’s rather dubious arguments that she must sleep with the American for the good of Japan along with their personal happiness, insisting that nothing will change between them while her sacrifice will buy a more secure footing for their mutual future. 

After the deed is done she seeks additional reassurance, heading straight to Hiroshi’s apartment where they again make love he insisting she is “clean” as the day she was born. In this instance he sells her body directly, though as others point out he was already doing something similar in selling her image for his own gain. Yet he is not the only person to do so, Midori’s feckless father who ruined himself embezzling money to spend on a bar hostess and thereafter going to jail, goes out on the town claiming to be a movie star and showing off Midori’s magazine spread to a woman at a bar who turns out to be there with a petty yakuza. They decide to run a scam on him, demanding compensation for messing with a yakuza’s girl while setting the amount so high they know he’ll never pay intending to press the pretty daughter, should he have one, into sex work in a fairly common gangster manoeuvre. 

The flaw in their plan is that the feisty Midori is less than attached to her dad who continues to ruin her life with his fecklessness, a drunken fool who steals her money and gets himself into trouble. It’s clear that he sees Hiroshi as something of a meal ticket, while Midori sees a marriage to him as a path towards a more stable, conventional life. Nevertheless, she finds herself unable to abandon her father, bravely standing up to the yakuza who threaten her and eventually saved by sensitive gangster Kenji (Ryo Tamura) who instantly sympathises with her situation having grown up with an abusive father he once tried but failed to kill. The gang he’s with are old school yakuza not yet part of the newly corporatising breed, still running petty scams pressing women into sex work through blackmail or parental debt. 

Yet those two worlds are, the film suggests, beginning to merge. The corporation is founded on an image of female exploitation, Hiroshi pimping out his girlfriend while his bosses giggle about it jokingly referring to her as a secret weapon for the company. On being confronted with her father’s problematic past, Hiroshi makes Midori an ultimatum to sever ties with her dad or break up with him because associating with the yakuza will ruin his career despite the fact that he is really no different himself in his desire to exploit her. Kenji’s boss Yamano (Daigo Kusano) instructs him to make Midori his woman and then put her work, but he refuses while Midori eventually opts for an ironic revenge that will quite literally buy her freedom not only from the corporate world but from yakuza threat in allowing Kenji to free himself. Together they determine to “become ordinary people again”, attempting to shake off both parental failure and the corruptions of a rabidly consumerist society to resist the commodification of body and image in world in which everything has a price and nothing any value. 

Schemes in Antiques (古董局中局, Derek Kwok, 2021)

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Two very different men square off in the race to find a precious Buddha head and reclaim their family honour in an old-fashioned tomb raiding mystery from Derek Kwok, Schemes in Antiques (古董局中局, gǔdǒng jú zhōngjú). The key to the future seems to lie in the past as the heroes approach from opposing sides, one keen to expose a truth and the other seemingly to conceal it but both otherwise unable to escape a problematic family history and be rehabilitated as a member of one of the top five antiquing families in the China of 1992. 

Now a middle-aged drunkard, down on his luck Xu Yuan (Lei Jiayin) lays the blame for his present circumstances solely with his immediate forbears. A member of the Plum Blossom Five, five families who are the ultimate authorities on the authenticity of historical artefacts, Xu Yuan’s grandfather was executed as a traitor during the war for having gifted a precious Buddha head to the Japanese. In a fairly traumatic childhood, Yuan was abandoned by his his dad whom he believes to have been too badly damaged by seeing his grandfather die to be any sort of father while somehow even kids his own age called him scum in the streets because of the shame his grandfather’s transgression had placed on the family. Now running an electronics store which is in its way the opposite of antiques, Yuan has a fairly cynical view of the artefacts trade but is dragged back into it when the granddaughter of the Japanese soldier who received the Buddha head (Lili Matsumoto) insists on returning it to a direct descendent of the Xu family. 

Perhaps surprisingly, the issue isn’t really with the Japanese but the current status of the Buddha head which, after a duel of detection with well dressed rival Yao Buran (Li Xian) who is also trying to redeem his family honour, Yuan quickly realises is a fake suggesting his grandfather wasn’t really a traitor after all while giving rise to the question of what actually happened to the “real” one. When it comes to the antiques trade, perhaps there’s a question mark over the degree to which “authenticity”, whatever that might mean, really matters and if all the Plum Blossom Five are really doing is attempting to assert their authority over an unruly market as the accusation that one head of family in particular has long been knowingly authenticating fakes when it suits them to do so bears out. In something of a plot hole, Yuan is revealed to be an antiques expert despite having been abandoned by his father at a young age but his ability is for some problematic even if admired by his main rival in its ability to expose the hidden truth or as the film later puts it the real within the fake. 

In any case, it’s true enough that the battles of the past are still being fought by the grandchildren of those who started what they couldn’t finish. Yuan is joined in his quest by the feisty granddaughter of another Plum Blossom family (Xin Zhilei) who is also battling her grandfather’s sexism in his refusal to trust her with anything important in the antiques trade. She and Yuan end up squaring off against Yao who is largely playing his own game as they embark on a good old-fashioned treasure hunt in which they solve a series of puzzles set down by Yuan’s father to lead them towards the truth.

Discovering another father figure along the way, Yuan learns to accept his complicated legacy while redeeming his family honour and along with it his self worth in outsmarting just about everyone else to solve the final mystery. There is something refreshingly innocent in these well constructed, defiantly analogue puzzles which rely on cultural knowledge and mental acumen along with a spirit of curiosity, while there’s also a fair amount of running away from bad guys and escaping from collapsing tombs filled with artefacts that might in a sense be cursed even if not quite literally. There are definitely a lot of schemes in antiques, something of which Yuan himself takes full advantage, but they’re also in their own way pieces of a puzzle in which the fakes are less red herrings than gentle pointers towards other truths some of them buried under layers of subterfuge and obfuscation only to be dragged into the light by those with dangerously curious minds.

Schemes in Antiques streams in the US Sept. 10 – 16 as part of the 15th season of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

International trailer (English subtitles)

The Magical Craftsmanship of Suzhou (天工苏作, Sun Zengtian, 2022)

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Suzhou was once such a bustling hub of traditional arts that the guild had to institute a quota system forbidding artisans from taking on too many apprentices lest they generate a monopoly. Times are now very different and such businesses often have trouble recruiting young people willing to learn traditional crafts or are even in a sense reluctant to do so knowing that their industry is in decline and those entering it now may never be able to support themselves fully on an artisan’s earnings alone. 

Sun Zengtian’s documentary The Magical Craftsmanship of Suzhou (天工苏作, tiān gōng sū zuō) is however a little more hopeful than some of its subjects examining the still thriving local culture along with some of the efforts and perhaps compromises of those trying to ensure the traditional arts survive. A lantern maker laments that his industry has become so straitened that his small team often have to work to incredibly tight schedules with little time for rest yet he refuses to compromise on quality and is determined not to damage his hard-won reputation as a master of the art. The demand may be more limited than it might have been in the past but is still very much there as the crowds of visitors at a local festival marvel at the spectacle of light illuminating the darkness through the beautiful lantern designs. In any case, he takes pride in showing his daughter some of his work safely installed in a local museum while giving talks in local schools to ensure the next generation is at least familiar with the art of lantern making.

Meanwhile, another man’s business carving intricate designs into olive stones continues to grow while he takes on pupils to pass on his knowledge. Others meticulously craft traditional furniture and aim to reintroduce an element of serenity through simplicity in an increasingly chaotic modern society. A chair can be whipped up in as little as eight minutes by a skilled carpenter, but the wood requires two years of seasoning and a seasoned craftsman to understand the process. Many believe that only a handmade piece can perfectly match the spirituality of the natural materials rather than the soulless mass produced furniture of a similar design. 

For the carpenters, their craft is almost a ritual and for that reason largely unchangeable save for the use of modern sandpaper in place of the leaves their ancestors may have used with a kind of tenderness to protect the wood. Yet for the craft itself may be less important that the end result such as it is for a local architect who sometimes butts heads with his father trying to explain that things cannot always be done like the old days given modern building and employment regulations. Their problem is that many of the craftsmen are now elderly and few are keen to learn their skills while the veterans often find it difficult to follow the plans constructed by young and inexperienced architects sometimes choosing to disregard them in favour of their well honed professional judgement. Yet the young architect feels compromise is the way to go, building traditionally but with the assistance of modern technology while preserving the aesthetic charm of traditional buildings. 

Others look to the international market drawing inspiration from global fashion trends and making innovations of their own such as an embroidery master who has patented her own style and firmly believes her craft to be an art rather than a simple means to support oneself as it had been for her mother and grandmother. She worries about taking on apprentices knowing that there is little scope for them to earn a decent living through handmade embroidery, but there is a poignant moment as she discusses options with a young woman wanting to learn as she sews the needle and the potential apprentice pulls it through. Meanwhile, a pair of female visitors from overseas ask how they might be able to learn traditional weaving. The woman running the store just laughs while the narrator explains that it’s easy to learn but difficult to master and many give up halfway. She is trying to modernise by building an online platform for practitioners in her field but finds it difficult to get the older artists on board. In any case, it seems that the traditional arts are very much alive in Suzhou, not fossilised or stuck in the past but constantly evolving as they fight for their survival along with the pleasures of a simpler existence in a fast moving culture. 

The Magical Craftsmanship of Suzhou screens in Chicago on Sept. 10 as part of the 15th season of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Trailer (English subtitles)