Fast & Feel Love (เร็วโหด..เหมือนโกรธเธอ, Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit, 2022) [Fantasia 2022]

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A 30-something couple find themselves pulled in different directions by their conflicting desires in Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit’s post-modern comedy, Fast & Feel Love (เร็วโหด..เหมือนโกรธเธอ). As the title implies, the self-involved hero is eventually forced to accept that his success is founded on the support of those around him while belatedly stepping in to adulthood in undergoing a baptism of fire learning basic life skills along with the confidence to look after himself in a new world of grownup responsibilities. 

Jay (Urassaya Sperbund) and Kao (Nat Kitcharit) met as outsiders in high school, she excelling in English but not much else aside from her love of plants, and Kao obsessed with the art of sport stacking and dreaming of becoming a champion. 10 years later the pair are still a couple, kind of, living in a well-appointed home which they technically co-own though its clear Jay is shouldering the mortgage along with all the other domestic responsibilities. Kao is technically arrested in childhood, spending all of his time shut up in his room practicing sport stacking oblivious that others in his life have sacrificed themselves on his behalf. Jay used to think that it was all worth it as long as Kao achieved his sport stacking dreams but now she’s reached a crisis point realising that for everything she’s done for Kao she’s got very little back and if she waits much longer her own small dream of becoming a mother and having a conventional family life may pass her by. 

There is something of an irony in the fact that all of Kao’s major challengers are young children though as he points out sport stacking is an egalitarian sport in which things like age, gender, and nationality are irrelevant. Having successfully broken a record, Kao begins receiving creepy phone calls from a new rival, Edward, a little boy in Colombia who complains to his mother asking why people can’t go on stacking forever only for her to point out that adults have other things in their lives they have to attend to though Edward simply doesn’t understand. To begin with, Kao doesn’t either because he’s been lucky enough to be surrounded by people who supported his dream and went out of their way to make it easy for him by relieving him of basic tasks so that he could devote himself entirely to sport stacking. Because it had always been this way, it never really occurred to Kao that he needed to grow up and begin taking some responsibility for himself or at least acknowledge the sacrifices others were making on his behalf. 

When Jay eventually leaves him fearful that she’s wasted too much time and he’s never going to change, Kao is suddenly confronted by the frightening world of adulthood in which he must finally learn to look after himself while simultaneously accepting that it’s alright to ask for and receive help while helping others in return. What appealed to him about sport stacking was that it could be done alone, yet he failed to use the sport to block out everything else but was perpetually bothered by the intrusions of ordinary life his concentration ruined by the slightest noise. What he learns is that he cannot, and does not want to, win alone but only thanks to the support he receives from those around him while accepting that perhaps it’s time to move on from competitive sport stacking. 

Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit throws in plenty of meta references as Kao breaks the fourth wall or laments that he thought this was supposed to be an action movie but he’s hardly done any stacking at all and people might be disappointed. An extended running gag directly references Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, while one of the kids Kao teaches at the sport stacking club talks like a gangster because she’s apparently watched too much John Wick. Even so, the relationship between Jay and Kao is drawn with a poignant naturalism rather than rom-com superficiality that allows Kao to accept that it’s time for them both to do what makes them happy even if that means they may not be able to stay together while little Edward seems to come to the same conclusion, ahead of the game in realising that a prize you don’t really want may not be worth winning. 

Fast & Feel Love screened as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Images: ©2022 GDH 559 Co., Ltd.

The End of Summer (小早川家の秋, Yasujiro Ozu, 1961)

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Fathers in Ozu are usually sentimental and doting, sometimes insensitive or austere, but by and large responsible. The crises the family faces are generally emotional more than they are practical, few Ozu fathers fail in a duty of care towards their wives and children. And then, there’s Manbei (Ganjiro Nakamura). The hero of Ozu’s penultimate film, The End of Summer (小早川家の秋, Kohayagawa-ke no Aki), is quite the opposite. He does as he pleases and enjoys his life to the fullest without really noticing the effect his behaviour has those around him. But then, as his sister later puts it, he was a very happy man which is rare thing in this society so perhaps he had something right after all. 

Produced for Toho and set in Osaka rather than the usual Shochiku and Tokyo, the film opens not with Manbei but with his brother-in-law Kitagawa (Daisuke Kato) trying to set up Manbei’s widowed daughter-in-law Akiko (Setsuko Hara) with a widowed industrialist obsessed with cows. Meanwhile, the family is also trying to find a match for his youngest daughter, Noriko (Yoko Tsukasa), who is put off by the whole idea of an arranged marriage and worried that Manbei and her older sister Fumiko (Michiyo Aratama) may try to pressure her into accepting because their family sake brewery is trouble. Fumiko’s husband Hisao (Keiju Kobayashi) is technically running the brewery and favours a merger to save the business but Manbei is resistant. Manbei himself is largely absent and his increasing habit of skipping out during the day is beginning to worry the family, especially when they discover he’s been visiting an old mistress with a 21-year-old daughter he thinks is his. 

Followed to a cafe, Manbei exclaims that summer refuses to end in an accidental metaphor for his life. For him everything is sunshine and rainbows, scuttling away from the family home like a little boy sneaking out after dark while the now grownup kids are left behind to clean up his messes. Manbei is a widower, and aside from the financial dimension, perhaps it’s not a huge problem if he wants to go and hang out with an old flame, but Fumiko in particular is scandalised remembering the various humiliations he put her late mother through when she was just a child. Hisao advises her that perhaps it’s best not to bring it up. Manbei isn’t going to change his behaviour and it’s only going to create more drama whereas it might be more manageable if they all pretend not know. Fumiko, however, can’t stay silent even if she knows her father isn’t going to listen to her and in fact lies quite baldly about what he’s been doing in Kyoto. 

Fumiko is on the side of marrying Noriko off, but unlike her husband, father, and uncle, is keen to emphasise that they should move slowly and be sure to take her feelings into account. Rather than her sister, Noriko turns to Akiko for support. Originally in favour of meeting the prospective husband, after all you can always turn it down if you don’t like him, she cautions Noriko that the most important thing is character rather than behaviour and that it’s essential to marry without regret. Noriko feels as if she’s obliged to do as everyone says, but is secretly in love with a young man she met on a skiing holiday who has just been transferred to Sapporo. Akiko, meanwhile, was not altogether taken with the cow-loving widower, but in any case would prefer to maintain her present way of life as a single mother even while others pressure her to remarry. 

The conclusion Noriko comes to is, perhaps strangely, inspired by her carefree father in that she decides it’s best to do what will make her the most happy rather than simply going along with what everyone else wants her to do which may or may not be in her best interest. Fumiko grudgingly admits that though her father was often exasperating perhaps he was the only thing holding the family together. Ozu broadly lends the irresponsible but never malicious Manbei tacit approval in celebrating the fact that he lived the life he wanted to live and he was at least defiantly happy in his own eternal summer, but then ends on an uncharacteristically morbid note as two farmers wash vegetables in the river opposite a crematorium remarking on the increasing number of crows while resigning themselves to the cycle of life. Smoke and crows await us all, perhaps Manbei had it right and the thing is to be happy while you can without taking much notice of what others might have to say about it. 

Alienoid (외계+인 1부, Choi Dong-hoon, 2022)

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According to the strangely warmhearted AI robot at the centre of Choi Dong-hoon’s Alienoid (외계+인 1부), the universe is already finished, destined only to tear itself apart in destructive instability. According to him, his society evolved, became compassionate and forgiving, yet like many others sought to avoid a problem it did not want to deal with in exiling its most dangerous prisoners to the minds of oblivious Earthlings who apparently rarely realise they’re sharing body and soul with an alien killing machine until that is one decides to escape. 

Thunder (Kim Dae-myung), an AI unit accompanying the sullen Guard (Kim Woo-bin) who is also a kind of guardian, paints the aliens as dangerous mutants who live only for violence yet it might be worth considering that their rebellion may be justified as members of an oppressed minority apparently considered harmful to mainstream society were it not for the fact their plan involves poisoning the Earth’s atmosphere to free their brethren while suffocating humanity in the process. Guard is fond of saying that he cares nothing for humans and does not involve himself in human affairs, yet it’s obvious that as much as his duty is to ensure the aliens stay captive he feels a responsibility to protect humanity, coming to care for an infant child Thunder spirited away in compassion after its mother died when the alien hosted inside her tried to escape. 

There is something a little curious in the fact these alien beings have chosen to live in what is our present day when according to them time is not linear but happening all at once and they appear to have the ability to travel through it at will, even stashing mutant criminals back in the 14th century where a Taoist dosa magician, “The Marvellous Muruk” (Ryu Jun-yeol) is on the hunt for the Divine Blade and a young woman who “shoots thunder” (Kim Tae-ri). Alien technology may seem like magic even if rooted in “science”, but feudal Korea is a place of majestic fantasy in which wizardry is apparently very real to the extent that a pair of powerful sorcerers tour the land hawking magical supplies such as random sutra stickers and mirrors that enlarge whatever passes through them to mysteriously masked warrior monks. Yet as we can see the girl who shoots thunder is merely welding a pistol, a kind of halfway house of technology which seems like strange magic to the people of Goryeo but nothing more than a child’s toy to the laser-wielding robotic aliens. 

In any case, Choi eventually connects these two worlds bridged by temporal conspiracy as if implying that the future’s salvation lies only in the past. Guard is forced to reflect that their strange act of colonial imperialism in secretly implanting alien prisoners in human minds may have been misguided when challenged by his plucky little girl (Choi Yu-ri) who has already realised there’s something a little different about her distant dad while the fact she’s effectively being raised by two men passes as incidental detail even as the Guard is stalked by her best friend’s apparently smitten aunt (Lee Honey). 

This being the first instalment in a two part film, there is a notable lack of resolution in its closing moments though Choi excels in world building running from hard sci-fi to feudalistic fantasy imbued with the strange magic of technology and underpinned by an interrogation humanity as the heroes battle through time looking for a way to repair an “unstable” world ruled by greed and violence and largely find it in each other. While the chief thrill may come from the incongruity of a young woman firing a pistol in the age of the crossbow (not to mention blasting her way out of a coffin), Choi packs in a series of innovative action sequences shot with a knowing irony as Muruk faces off against the masked monks in the past while the Guard and Thunder try their best to keep the aliens at bay with their high tech weaponry, shooting electric pulses from their palms and dodging lasers but still making a last ditch attempt by leaping at the enemy spaceship and trying to stab it in the heart. Whether this disordered world can be stabilised through a moment of cosmic connection will have to wait for part two, but this opening instalment at least is quite literally a charming affair.

Alienoid is in US cinemas from Aug. 26 courtesy of Well Go USA.

US trailer (English subtitles)

One and Four (一个和四个, Jigme Trinley, 2021)

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A lonely forest ranger nursing a broken heart and an incredible hangover finds himself the accidental arbiter of truth in Jigme Trinley’s frosty psychological drama, One and Four (一个和四个, yī gè hé sì gè). One and four is what each of these men are, individuals pitted one against the other. The atmosphere is one of danger and mistrust coupled with almost supernatural dread in the constant warning of an approaching blizzard with a ruthless maniac on the loose while it’s true enough that the only neutral party may have been quietly going stir crazy for quite some time aside from his recent troubles. 

Troubles do indeed descend on Sanggye in threes with each of his various visitors only complicating an already dangerous situation. As the film opens he’s clearly hungover, grumpy, and tense, going about his quotidian tasks and chopping wood while apparently out of food resorting to sucking old bread and bones. He writes in his diary that he wishes the events of the previous night had been a dream and introduces a note of mistrust regarding village man Kunbo who visited him Sanggye had assumed to borrow money but may have had a different purpose in mind. He’s later startled by another knock at the door from a wounded man carrying a rifle who claims to be a policeman chasing a dangerous poacher but looks to Sanggye like he could well be the poacher himself. 

Then again, Sanggye isn’t entirely honest with him either telling the man that he has no alcohol because forest rangers aren’t supposed to drink yet we’ve already seen bottles littering the cabin and it seems clear he woke with a hangover. “I didn’t know you why should I tell you the truth” he later tells his guest not unreasonably having concealed Kunbo’s visit the night before but now finding himself dragged into a wider drama involving a high speed crash which seems to have caused the death of at least one policeman with the poacher supposedly on the run. Sanggye looks for clues most particularly in the policeman’s badge number though we might wonder if it’s reasonable to assume someone driving a police car or wearing a jacket with a number on it is necessarily a policeman, or if on the other hand someone carrying a hunter’s rifle in the manner of a poacher must be a poacher. He looks for objective facts occasionally asking for verifiable detail such as the name of the man who runs the forest commission and his place of birth but once both Kunbo and another man also claiming to be a policeman turns up the situation only becomes more confusing.

Did Kunbo set him up, drop by deliberately to upset him so he’d be less likely to catch him committing crimes or is he simply in the middle of a bad situation? Are both these men policemen or neither, could they both be poachers after the same kill with Kunbo caught in the middle or is the whole thing some kind of bizarre cosmic coincidence ironically occurring on the “day for heroes to gather” as it says today to be on Sanggye’s wall calendar. As Sanggye points out, if one of these men is a poacher most likely he’d be dead by now but then maybe he’s only waiting to retrieve his missing hoard of antlers cut from a bemused deer left bleeding in the snow. 

“Preventing forest fires is everyone’s responsibility” according to Sanggye’s mug, though it seems unlikely anyone’s going to be able to stamp out this conflagration very speedily. Aligned with nature, Sanggye first refuses to accept a gun perhaps because he does not trust the man who gives it to him fearing that he intends to lull him into a false sense of security but is eventually forced to wield one in a four-way stand off uncertain who to believe in this increasingly complicated piece of game theory thought experiment. Sanggye probably wishes this had all been a dream too though one supposes he’s reason to believe the bad news he received the previous evening may not be true. In any case another cosmic coincidence eventually makes his decision for him as the clock rounds out the day. Tense, frosty, and full of questioning angles, Jigme Trinley’s well designed forest fable suggests the most dangerous beast in the forest is your fellow man though a deer may repay a kindness if you’re mindful enough to show them one. 

One and Four screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Images: © Mani Stone Pictures/Tsemdo

Japan Society Monthly Classics & Anime Fall 2022

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Japan Society New York has announced the lineup for its upcoming autumn programme of classic films and anime kicking off on Sept. 2 with a 35mm screening of Kihachi Okamoto’s satirical chambara Kill! and closing on Nov. 14 with the much loved Studio Ghibli classic My Neighbor Totoro.

Sept. 2, 7pm: Kill!

Screening on 35mm.

Inspired by the same source material as Akira Kurosawa’s Sanjuro, Kihachi Okamoto’s absurdist jidaigeki finds a naive farmer and jaded samurai turned yakuza swept into local conspiracy when seven samurai arrive intent on removing a corrupt lord little knowing they too are merely pawns in a much grander game.

Sept. 16, 7pm: Tekkonkinkreet

Landmark adaptation of the Taiyo Matsumoto manga directed by Michael Arias and following two street kids in a futuristic city who survive through pickpocketing only to have their territory contested by invading yakuza intent on building an amusement park.

Oct. 7, 7pm: Ringu

Classic J-horror from 1998 directed by Hideo Nakata and adapted from the novel by Koji Suzuki in which a journalist with a young son begins investigating a series of unexplained deaths among teens who had each watched a mysterious videotape.

Oct. 14, 7pm: Angel’s Egg

Experimental anime from Mamoru Oshii in which a young girl patiently nurturing a mysterious egg encounters a faithless man in a ruined world.

Nov. 4, 7pm: My Neighbor Totoro

Screening on 35mm.

© 1988 Studio Ghibli
© 1988 Studio Ghibli

The much loved Studio Ghibli classic in which two little girls discover a new world of wonders after moving to the countryside while their mother is ill in hospital.

The fall season runs Sept. 2 to Nov. 4 at Japan Society New York. Tickets priced at $15 / $12 students & seniors, and $5 Japan Society Members are on sale now via the official website and you can also keep up with all the year-round events by following Japan Society Film on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Goodbye, Don Glees! (グッバイ、ドン・グリーズ！, Atsuko Ishizuka, 2021) [Fantasia 2022]

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A diffident high schooler finds a new sense of confidence after a poignant summer adventure in Atsuko Ishizuka’s heartfelt coming-of-age anime, Goodbye, Don Glees! (グッバイ、ドン・グリーズ！). In many ways about finding direction in life, learning to live with grief, and making the moment count, the film is also a paean to male friendship as the trio at its centre develop new senses of security through mutual support while beginning to figure out what treasure it is they’re seeking in the further course of their lives. 

For Roma (Natsuki Hanae), a farm boy largely rejected by the other kids in the village, this summer is a little different. Not only is it his first as a high schooler, it’s also the first since his best and only friend Toto (Yuki Kaji) moved to Tokyo for high school and despite their previously close relationship it’s clear there’s a minor awkwardness in the distance that’s arisen between them since they’ve been apart while Roma has also added a third boy, Drop (Ayumu Murase), to their secret Don Glees friendship group. Now that he’s been living in the city, Toto finds the whole Don Glees thing childish and decidedly uncool while Roma is obviously keen to hang on to their shared history and childhood friendship. 

Their dilemmas may seem opposed but are in actuality very similar. Toto resents Roma for not having the courage to come with him to study in Tokyo where there are more academic high schools, choosing instead the safe option of attending a vocational school with a focus on agricultural education implying that he plans to stay in his hometown and take over the family farm. It isn’t immediately clear if it’s because this is what he wants to do with his life or if he is simply too afraid to strike out and try something different. Roma does indeed seem to lack confidence often remarking that he feels he’s not enough in some way or doesn’t have the right to chase after the things he wants. Unable to face his inability to tell his middle school crush Tivoli, who has since travelled to Ireland to study abroad, how he feels he ends up deleting his Instagram account to avoid being confronted with pictures of her exciting international life. Toto meanwhile is stressed out by his cram school lifestyle and newly uncertain in his decision making realising that he’s just been following the path his parents set out for him and wondering if he really wants to become a doctor after all. 

The mysterious Drop makes constant suggestions that he can’t really afford to think about the future and is living intensely in the moment. He is insistent on finding some kind of treasure, afraid of ending his life without resolving this one mystery and keen to ask both boys what it is they’d regret if the world were to end tomorrow. The quest takes on literal dimensions when the boys are accused (falsely) of starting a forest fire and set out in search of a drone they were using, technically illegally, to capture a local fireworks display hoping it will contain footage to verify their innocence but getting lost along the way and eventually sharing their fears and anxieties alone together under the night sky. It seems this new friendship is destined to end in unexpected tragedy, but as Drop is fond of saying sometimes all it takes is a little courage to make a jump and see things from a different perspective allowing Roma to gain the confidence in himself he’d been lacking to chase the things he really wants. 

A teen summer adventure movie, Goodbye, Don Glees! features lush animation of the Japanese countryside along with some enhanced CGI of nature in bloom captured forever via photograph which as Tivoli points out is like a freeze-frame in time trapping both the image and its accompanying emotions. That is perhaps what Roma learns, to make memories he can treasure when the moment ends while saying goodbye to something doesn’t mean it’s gone forever, it just exists in a different form. A warm and heartfelt tale of teenage male friendship and summer’s end, Goodbye, Don Glees! discovers a sense of the serene in the face of life’s futility through connections both momentary and eternal. 

Goodbye, Don Glees! screened as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival and is in US cinemas from Sept. 14 courtesy of GKIDS.

US release trailer (Japanese with English subtitles)

Sweet Home (スウィートホーム, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 1989)

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A documentary film crew hoping to discover long-hidden frescos by an artist with a tragic history find themselves on a quest to resurrect the traditional family in unlikely horror comedy Sweet Home (スウィートホーム). Written and directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, the film shares many of the hallmarks of his later career in his preoccupation with what lurks in the shadows, yet produced by Juzo Itami who also stars and apparently reshot some scenes himself it also mines a deep seam of ironic humour harking back to classic serials and contemporary kids adventures in the same way as Hiruko the Goblin among others would do just a few years later. 

This strain of irony is perceptible in the opening scenes in which producer Akiko (Nobuko Miyamoto) appears in an elegant ’40s-style outfit more in keeping with an archeological dig than a haunted house adventure, her later attire strongly recalling that seen in Indiana Jones. The gang are waiting by their military-style jeep seemingly in the middle of a sandstorm while chief producer Kazuo (Shingo Yamashiro) is busy at the municipal office trying to get permission to enter the Mamiya Mansion which has been shut up for the last 30 years since the death of legendary artist Ichiro Mamiya who is the subject of their documentary. A diffident man as his daughter jokes, Kazuo finds it difficult to make headway until a slightly more cynical employee takes over the negotiations and hands over the key with the rationale that they’ll either find out the house isn’t haunted after all in which case they can turn it into a museum, or that they’ll get some tidy publicity out of the horrifying deaths of all concerned. 

A western-style gothic mansion, the house is itself as imposing as it is ominous even without swirling mists or hovering gloom. Once inside the crew find what they’re looking for, a beautiful fresco with the title “home sweet home” painted in a corner. All we’re told about Ichiro is that he died in the house, but when all is said and done he, like Kazuo, is not terribly important and it is not his death which has cursed the mansion but that of his wife. The sweet home the couple had dreamed of was coming to fruition with the long-awaited birth of a child whose life was to inspire frescos on the remaining walls only tragedy struck. As a toddler the child somehow climbed into the furnace and was burnt alive when his unknowing mother ignited it. She then went mad, kidnapping other children and apparently burning them so her child would not be lonely before eventually throwing herself in too.

Perhaps uncomfortably, Sweet Home leans in to the kind of maternal questioning common to the genre as it considers the formation of a new family in the awkward romance between the shy widower Kazuo who has brought his teenage daughter Emi (Nokko) along on the job, and capable producer Akiko who is repeatedly questioned about marriage, children, and the reasons she currently has neither of them. Keying in to the terror of the house, Emi reveals that as she grows older the memories of her birth mother begin to fade to the extent that she can barely make out her outline, envisioning her merely as an indistinct light. She is prepared to accept Akiko as second mother, offering her the dress which her own mother used to wear only for Akiko to diffidently refuse on the grounds that the dress should be worn by Emi as her mother would have wanted perhaps hinting at the way Emi often treats her father as a clueless child in need of mothering himself. 

Nevertheless, it’s the dress of maternity that Akiko must finally put on in order to claim the maternal space in venturing back into the haunted house in order to save Emi from becoming another playmate for Mrs Mamiya’s child. Rather than Kazuo, who proves rather ineffectual, she is guided by a weird old man, Yamamura (Juzo Itami), from the petrol station who apparently knows all about fighting ghosts but bluntly tells her she has no chance of success because she is not a mother herself and cannot understand the pain of a mother who has lost a child nor the magnetic pull between a childless mother and motherless child. In order to defeat the vengeful spirit, Akiko must fully embrace the role of the mother, easing the spirit’s pain with maternal compassion in returning to her what was lost. Her child restored to her, the spirit takes on the appearance of the Holy Mother ascending to Heaven bathed in golden light lifting the shadowy gloom that cursed the house. 

Even so there is something insidious in the fact that as Yamamura says if you attempt to fight shadow with light all you get is more of the same, the crew trapped in the house with no means of defence against the encroaching darkness. This unknown, shadowy sense of threat, of being swallowed by darkness, is a key harbinger of a Kurosawa’s signature style as well as a clear evocation of the gothic dread focused on the house with the ironic failure of the “sweet home” dream which is in essence what Akiko, Kazuo, and an Emi are chasing as they try to escape the haunted mansion. Ironically enough, Sweet Home has become best remembered for fathering a video game which eventually led to the Resident Evil series while Kurosawa himself has all but rejected the film claiming Itami’s later interventions undercut his directorial vision. Featuring effects work by Dick Smith, the horror is visceral and disturbing at one point a man’s face melting, his skin slipping from his bones, while the score is cheerfully whimsical in keeping with the absurd lightness of tone that recalls classic teen adventures before heading into the fable-like conclusion in which Akiko must wrest her surrogate child from a vengeful spirit through maternal exchange. Having served its purpose the mansion implodes, freeing not only the spirits trapped inside but the new family now freed of the weight of traditional mores to embrace their new connection founded on love and empathy rather than duty or convention.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Imaginur (Nik Amir Mustapha, 2022)

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“It’s a pickle, isn’t it? Trying to remember what you don’t know you’ve forgotten.” So says the father of the hero of Nik Amir Mustapha’s touching sci-fi romance, Imaginur. It is however his son who’s trying to piece things back together while seemingly stuck in a maddening time loop chasing the ghost of lost love and searching for his “happy place”, the safest place he can imagine that will reconnect him with who he really is. 

Zahul seems to be haunted by fleeting glimpses of a woman whose face is hidden. After being involved in a traffic accident, he fetches up at the hospital but is there with his elderly father who is living with dementia. An elderly lady gives him a card for a special service called Hypnotica run by a mad scientist named Ramil who claims he can use hypnosis to cure Zahul’s panic attacks the most recent of which caused him to abandon his father in a supermarket after an awkward interaction with his ex. Ramil tells him that they’re simply going to revisist old memories with a new perspective to solve the cause of his anxiety but we can’t be sure when or if Zahul has actually left the state of hypnosis. Unable to remember or get a firm grasp on his reality he becomes panicked and short tempered, eventually paranoid and rambling about people trying to steal his brain.

Even so as someone puts it, his quest for Nur, a woman he meets at a burger stand, is also a quest for light and the path back towards himself in reclaiming his past even if it comes with the pain of loss on waking up to the reality. “This is what becomes of our lives” the sympathetic elderly woman laments of Zahul’s father, only for Zahul to reply that there’s no point resisting, but resisting is in a sense what he’s been doing trying to push through to a more concrete reality unwilling to accept the first or even second iteration of a moment in time but looking for the essential truth of it. 

What his father tells him is that the answer is what we feel in out hearts, that there’s nothing so important as feeling except perhaps the memory of it. That is in a sense what Zahul is chasing, trying to reorient himself through emotional logic while simultaneously reluctant as if avoiding something he doesn’t know that he’s forgotten. Meanwhile, he becomes increasingly paranoid about the shadiness of Ramli’s operation which even he calls a “pseudoscience” wondering if he’s caught up in some kind of conspiracy while convinced they’re trying to steal his brain or at least mess with it to drive him out of his mind. 

Yet it all seems to come back to a choice he didn’t and didn’t make watching the mysterious woman head towards a station with a suitcase but getting hit by a car before reaching her. “Remember me” she plaintively asks in the shared space of his mindscape, perhaps a phantom of his imagination but also a real woman he didn’t know he’d forgotten who holds the key to everything he is. “You live inside your head a little too much” Nur tells him, and she’s absolutely right while ironically advising him to find his happy place little knowing that perhaps he has and they’re already in it. 

Oneiric and elliptical, the film’s fragmentary dream logic in which Zahul is forced to relive a series of moments from getting a parking ticket to being at the hospital eventually builds towards a moving moment of cohesion as Zahul manages to find himself again accepting both love and loss along with memory in all of its emotional intensity. Opening with a classic hypnotic spiral, there’s a kind of charm in Nik Amir Mustapha’s retro production design in the lo-fi hypnotism headsets Ramil alarmingly claims turn off part of the brain along with the softened colour palate that lends a note of nostalgia to what we assume to be the present day. In any case there is something genuinely touching in Zahul’s determination to reclaim himself through remembering lost love and discovering the eternal in transient moments of happiness.  

Imaginur screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Teaser trailer (English subtitles)

Images: © 2022 Lumatic Films.

Next Sohee (다음 소희, July Jung, 2022) [Fantasia 2022]

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“She just went quietly” an older woman running a cafe explains to a police officer against all advice attempting to investigate the suicide of a young woman in July Jung’s long-awaited A Girl at My Door followup, Next Sohee (다음 소희, Daeum Sohee). In the end, Sohee (Kim Si-eun) did indeed go quietly, cowed into submission by the apparent hopelessness of her life amid the grinding crushingness of contemporary capitalism while even the policewoman who shares her fiery sense of outrage comes to a similar conclusion on uncovering the endemic abuses of the modern society. 

Jung devotes the entire first half of the film to Sohee’s slow burn disintegration as a high schooler selected as an “extern” for a call centre business while dreaming of becoming a dancer. These exploitative work experience programs are technically part of Sohee’s high school education and dropping out of them incurs the possibility of not graduating along with being “red tagged” by the school in a lesson in banishment room tactics which sees the kids forced to perform menial tasks such as cleaning the toilets while wearing clothing that marks them out as a failure who has brought shame on their institution. A proud young woman, Sohee is thought of as mentally strong and academically earnest originally excited by the extern opportunity which the teacher sells to her as being a cut above, she being the first of their students to land a position at a “major” company which is also feather in his own cap. 

Later Yoojin (Bae Doona), the policewoman who briefly met Sohee at a dance class, asks the teacher why he didn’t bother to investigate what was really going on at the call centre but he only tries to shift the blame explaining that he needs to find good jobs for other kids to maintain the school’s rankings which means keeping on the good side of employers. As Sohee sat vacantly and cried having attempted to take her own life, he dismissed her concerns and told her to work harder. Each time Yoojin interviews an authority figure they tell her it’s not their fault, it’s the system, while blaming Sohee for having “attitude problems” and pointing out that she should have just quit if she wasn’t up to the job. 

But Sohee couldn’t quit in part because of the shaming culture that surrounded her in which she’s constantly reminded that her actions have negative consequences for others. Firstly she’s told that her subpar performance brings down their team’s rankings, then shunned by her colleagues because her top scores are pushing up the targets for everyone else. She doesn’t want to let her teacher down by quitting, and even on trying to explain to her parents after her first suicide attempt is simply told to work harder under the fallacy that if you obey all the rules and work hard you’ll be alright. The call centre is almost entirely staffed by externs, in the main teenage girls, who are made to listen to irate customers verbally abuse or sexually harass them while instructed that they must do whatever possible to stop them cancelling their accounts. The call that breaks Sohee comes from a sobbing father who wants to cancel because his child has died so he doesn’t need the service anymore but she still has to try and sell him a new TV package while giving him the run around on the contract cancellation. 

Because the externs have a high turnover, the company defers payment of their bonuses to discourage them from leaving while continuously docking their wages reminding them of the clauses in the contract they signed which state that remuneration is subject to change. Sohee was in fact forced to sign two different contracts so the company could get away with paying her below minimum wage which is a violation of what little labour law actually exists while as these are essentially children who’ve signed contracts they don’t understand because their teachers and parents told them to they have no idea of their rights but are gradually realising they’re being exploited and there’s nothing they can do about it. Sohee was thought of as the type to fight back, and she was, she did, but in the end she went quietly because what else could she have done. 

She went quietly from the dance class where Yoojin first encountered her too, but does not pass so quietly from her mind. Yoojin asks why it was that she danced given there’s no gain to be had by it, she was too old to become a K-pop star and there’s no money in dancing but for her there was perhaps freedom and a small act of rebellion in the use of her physical body for something other than labour. An inspector who calls, Yoojin shares Sohee’s “attitude problems” and refuses to let the case rest realising that the poor kids at the below average schools are being forced into employment that is almost entirely unregulated while the companies that exploit them paint themselves as the victim, pressuring employees and bereaved family members into signing documents denying any wrongdoing. Betrayed by the company, Sohee first refuses to sign but in the end she does so, quietly, and at the cost of her integrity. Yoojin too is eventually forced to sign a form and put her name to something she believes is not quite true. Sohee’s death was as she puts it a workplace accident, or perhaps a slow motion murder, and “nobody gives a damn” because she was just a teenager with a “bad attitude” who went quietly because no one would have listened to her anyway. 

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

International trailer (English subtitles)

Ribbon (Non, 2022)

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What is the place of art amid a global crisis? A young student finds herself wrestling with her sense of purpose uncertain if art is more necessary than ever before or a completely worthless waste of time that could be better used dealing with the situation on a more practical level. Written, directed, and edited by actress/singer Non, Ribbon is a response to pandemic anxiety but also a meta drama about an artist reclaiming a sense of confidence in their work along with their right to make it even if not widely understood. 

As the film opens, art student Itsuka (Non) is lugging a series of paintings and art equipment back to her university for the upcoming graduation exhibition, only the exhibition has just been cancelled because the university will be closing its doors the following day due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Itsuka has to cart all her stuff home again, but she’s luckier than some she witnesses who are left with no choice other than to destroy the precious works of art into which they’ve poured four years of their lives because they can’t store them and neither can the university. 

Watching her fellow students in tears as they crush, tear, and bludgeon their projects Itsuka can’t help but wonder what separates her painting from “trash”, seeing these precious pieces dismembered and left out for the binmen. The feeling is compounded when her mother (Misayo Haruki) pays her a visit, clad in a homemade hazmat suit, and throws the painting out justifying herself that as it had stuff stuck on it she thought it was just something she’d made messing around, more like a child’s collage than a serious piece of “art”. Unable to accept her mistake, Itsuka’s mother defensively doubles down leading to a climactic argument and the visits of other family members including her father (Daikichi Sugawara) who arrives with a social distancing pole and her sister (Karin Ono) who now dresses like an assassin each armed with passive aggressive peace offerings but ultimately seeking validations that her mother was right to dismiss her incomprehensible art. 

While her friend Hirai (Rio Yamashita) is later caught sneaking into uni to work on her much more conventional piece, a large canvas painting featuring a young girl in a forest with giraffes and leopards, Itsuka has been unable to find the desire to paint. The painting, a mixed media portrait of a young woman surrounded by ribbons, sits looking down on her taped to the wall but she can’t get away from the idea that perhaps her work really is “trash” and she’s just been wasting her time on something meaningless that other people don’t understand or care about. The feeling is compounded when she’s informed that the job offer she had from a design firm for after graduation has been rescinded due to COVID uncertainty. Only when she accidentally reconnects with a middle-school classmate (Daichi Watanabe) who had praised her work does she begin to rediscover its value not least in allowing her to vent her frustrations not only with the pandemic-era society and its isolating anxieties, but the conservative ideas embodied by her mother’s constant complaints about her “attitude” reminding her she’ll never get married if she carries on as she is.  

“This is what our frustration looks like” she explains incorporating her friend’s fractured painting to turn her formerly chaotic apartment into an installation covered in the ribbons which had previously swarmed around her. Opening with scenes of the deserted university peopled with broken statues, headless mannequins, and crude drawings on walls, Non captures a sense of the lonely despair of the early days of the pandemic allowing these now empty places to seem almost haunted by an eerie sense of absence. There is an unavoidable absurdity in the constant masking, obsession with social distance, and spraying anything and everything with sanitiser but also a care beneath the anxiety in the concern for others’ safety as well as one’s own. “Heavy” is how Itsuka frequently describes her situation not only the physical weight of her work but its spiritual burden along with her despair and anxiety for her uncertain future, but learning to bear it allows her to rediscover a purpose and value in art not despite but because of the times in which she lives. Quirky and heartwarming, Non’s accomplished directorial debut is not only a snapshot of ordinary life in a pandemic, but a meta tale of a young woman reclaiming her right to create and vent her frustrations towards a sometimes restrictive society. 

Ribbon screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Images: ©︎”Ribbon” Film Partners