Immortal Love (永遠の人, Keisuke Kinoshita, 1961)

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Patriarchal feudalism destroys not only the life of an innocent young woman but all of those around her in Keisuke Kinoshita’s embittered romantic melodrama Immortal Love (永遠の人, Eien no Hito). Scored to the impassioned beat of an incongruous flamenco and spanning almost thirty years of turbulent history from the tightening years of militarism to Anpo protests, Immortal Love finds its heroine imprisoned by the system within which she was raised but determining to free her children from the legacy of feudalism even while knowing that she traps herself in her intense resentment towards her husband and everything he represents. 

Heibei (Tatsuya Nakadai), the wealthy son of the village chief, returns home from military service in Manchuria after sustaining an injury that will leave him walking with crutches for the rest of his life. Though his father tells him that his is an honourable discharge and has organised a small parade complete with flag waving and a band to greet him, it’s obvious that Heibei feels ashamed to have returned home wounded and is unhappy that his father has made such a fuss. He’s doubly unhappy at his welcome home party on hearing the gossip that local beauty Sadako (Hideko Takamine) is in love with farmer’s son Takashi (Keiji Sada) to whom Heibei has always felt inferior, something which is only exacerbated by the fact Takashi is also at the front and apparently acquitting himself well. Cruelly calling her over, he tells Sadako that he met Takashi at a field hospital but that he was about to go off to a big battle so could very well be dead. 

Heibei’s true feelings, if you could call them that, remain unclear. Later, justifying himself, he claims that he really did care for Sadako and that all of his subsequent “immoral” acts were committed out of a love he was ill equipped to express, but that first night at the party it seems obvious that he only wants her because he knows she is Takashi’s. He tries to assault her when she is massaging his wounded leg, attempts to court her, and then finally resorts to rape with the help of his father who keeps Sadako’s dad occupied by forcing him to drink sake as his guest while making veiled threats about the status of his tenancy. Heibei had made a formal proposal which Sadako was about to turn down, further humiliating him, despite the pressure he’d piled on by threatening to throw Takashi’s brother off his land and potentially kicking her family off theirs too. By raping her and tricking her father into agreeing to the marriage he forces her to accept, wielding his feudal privilege like a weapon. 

Shortly before the marriage, Takashi returns on leave, a heroic soldier painted in glory. He too is resentful and heartbroken to learn that Sadako is to marry to Heibei, eventually hearing the truth of it from his brother. Sadako tries to kill herself rather than be forced into marriage with her rapist, and avoids seeing Takashi in thinking she is now “impure” and can no longer be his wife. Takashi assures her she is wrong, and that even if Heibei thinks he has “stolen” her in taking her by force, he can simply take her back. He proposes they elope, but fails to turn up, leaving Sadako standing sadly at the roadside until her father arrives with a letter explaining that Takashi has reconsidered and advises her to accept a life of material comfort as Heibei’s wife rather than one of hardship with him. 

Forced to marry the man who raped her, Sadako lives in quiet resentment, bearing three children the first of which she struggles to love because he is the result of the rape which condemned her to her present life of misery. Years later, Sadako learns that Takashi married too when his wife Tomoko (Nobuko Otowa) is evacuated to the village to stay with his brother. Heibei, ever cruel, offers Tomoko a job as a household servant, revelling in the idea that Takashi’s first love and current wife are both under his roof, telling her all about their strange romantic history and setting her at odds with Sadako whom she too resents knowing that her husband has never loved her because he can’t give up on his first love. A twisted bond arises between Heibei and Tomoko, united in resentment of Takashi and Sadako, but Heibei eventually tries to rape her too, once again trying to take what Takashi has, or possibly destroy it.  

Despite her despair and loathing for her husband, Sadako tries to rise above it and always makes a point of treating Tomoko with respect and kindness even when she is cruel. Later on the road, she tells her not to worry, that what she grieves isn’t Takashi but the life she lived before. Heibei is perhaps also a victim of the system, his masculinity undermined by his brash father while his sense of inferiority is exacerbated by his disability, but he is also innately cruel and selfish. There’s strange perversion in the act of healing which closes the film in that it forces Sadako to ask for an apology from Heibei, the man who raped her and ruined her life, for using his abuse as an “excuse” to go on hating him all these long years. Heibei characteristically paints himself as the victim, branding Sadako a cold and unfeeling woman, wondering who will look after him now that he has been abandoned by all his children. He tells her that his feelings were sincere even if his acts were immoral, implicitly blaming her for the abuse that he inflicted, but Sadako merely accuses him of romanticising the past in trying to justify this internecine bid for vengeance that ruined the lives of at least four people as a frustrated love story. 

“You and I may never be reconciled until one of us dies” Heibei admits, while Sadako tearfully tells a dying Takashi that it’s not too late for her to try to be happy. Tomoko was able to reconcile with her son and apparently lived out the last of her days in contentment. Naoko (Yukiko Fuji), Sadako’s daughter, eventually married Takashi’s son Yutaka (Akira Ishihama), breaking with the past both in rejecting the feudal class structure within which she was raised in marrying a working class man, and the patriarchal in ignoring her cruel father’s authority. A kind of healing has been achieved, freeing the younger generation from the cursed family legacy which claims that their ancestral wealth was gained by a literal betrayal of thousands of peasant farmers at the time of the siege of Osaka in 1615. The corruption of the war and a culture of hypermasculinty is visited on Sadako in the violent trauma of the rape, an event which echoes through not only her life but perhaps her children’s too. It is not she who should be asking for forgiveness, but she does perhaps begin to find it in herself, in making a kind of peace with the past which at least cuts the cord, allowing the younger generation to escape the net of feudal oppression for a brighter, freer, post-war future.

Immortal Love is available to stream in the US via the Criterion Channel.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Inferno of Torture (徳川いれずみ師：責め地獄, Teruo Ishii, 1969)

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“There’s no hope for us anymore” cries the hero, redeeming himself with one last act of humanity before allowing himself to be consumed by the flames of Edo-era barbarity. Another tale of feudal exploitation, Teruo Ishii’s Inferno of Torture (徳川いれずみ師：責め地獄, Tokugawa Irezumi-shi: Seme Jigoku) opens with an otherwise unrelated scene of female crucifixion followed by an elaborate beheading, presenting both of these events with a degree of historical authenticity they do not perhaps possess. Nevertheless, his central tale which turns out to be less about two women than two men, turns on the exploitation of female bodies, subtly suggesting that the modern society is itself founded on female exploitation. 

Though dropping the portmanteau structure frequently employed in the Joys of Torture series, Ishii returns from the prologue with the end of the first arc in which the presumed heroine, Yumi (Yumiko Katayama), makes a stealthy visit to a ghostly cemetery in which she trashes the grave of a man named Genzo (Shinichiro Hayashi), digs him up and dismembers his body to retrieve a key we later see him swallow which she hopes will unlock her womanhood currently imprisoned by an ornate chastity belt, only the key doesn’t fit. 

Flashing back again, we see Yumi forced into sex work in payment of a debt and imprisoned in a labyrinthine brothel which specialises in bondage and torture under the guidance of lesbian madam Oryu* (Mieko Fujimoto) and her samurai fixer Samejima (Haruo Tanaka). The brothel’s USP is in its tattooed women which neatly leads us into the main narrative as Yumi’s body becomes a battleground contested by two men, top tattoo artists in search of the perfect canvas in order to win, ironically, the hand of their master’s pure and innocent daughter Osuzu (Masumi Tachibana). 

Horihide (Teruo Yoshida) and Osuzu are in love, but the dark and brooding Horitatsu (Asao Koike) is determined to frustrate his rival’s desires by becoming the successor to Osuzu’s dying father, the tattooist Horigoro. The “hori” which prefixes each of the men’s names relates to the process of tattooing and comes from the verb to chisel, hinting at the way they prick and channel their desires into the canvas which is human skin. Horihide is our “hero”, described by Horigoro as the light to Horitatsu’s dark, Horitatsu currently making more of an impact with his designs of violent intensity, but each of them is in a very real way content to use and exploit the bodies of women without their full consent in order to practice their art. It is essentially an act of violence if not of “torture”. 

Meanwhile, Oryu and Samejima are profiting off their “merchandise” more directly in participating in the trafficking of tattooed ladies to lecherous foreigners displaying an early fetishisation of Asian women. This being late Edo, Japan is still in its isolationist period in which fraternising with foreigners was illegal which is why the action eventually takes us to Nagasaki and the Dutch trading port of Dejima, here presented as a nexus of corruption, where Samejima and Oryu prove themselves very much in league with foreign powers dealing with powerful businessman Clayton (Yusuf Hoffman), despite his name apparently a Dutchman, and his Chinese associates. Like Nikkatsu’s borderless action films of the ‘50s and ‘60s, Inferno of Torture indulges in an unpleasant Sinophobia which culminates in a chase through a crowded Chinese wet market in which we catch sight of dogs hanging bound ready for the slaughter in similar poses to those of the women in the brothel, not to mention thrusting snakes, before being confronted by a basket full of adorable puppies presumably headed for a dark destination, while we finally rediscover Hidetatsu collapsed in an opium den after being forcibly addicted by Oryu as a means of control. 

“This is a house of horrors” the Chinese gang leader tells a group of women bought by Samejima from a prison and promised a life of wealth and ease as geisha catering to high class clients. It’s difficult to tell if Ishii is critiquing Edo-era misogyny or that of the present day, or merely revelling in it with increasingly perverse scenes of sexual violence and degradation which continually imply that women have no role or value outside of reflecting the desires of men while those who try to claim their own agency are brutally put down by an inherently misogynistic, patriarchal society. After a Count of Monte Cristo-esque subplot in which Horihide is framed for murder but escapes to plot his revenge, the psychedelic final showdown returns us to the tattooists’ artistic face off as they again weaponise female bodies to embody their own ambitions, Horihide turning a blameless young woman into an iridescent peacock to get back at her father. Nevertheless, he finally reassumes his humanity in ending his mission of vengeance before it takes more innocent lives while accepting that he may now be too corrupted to return to his former life. Elegantly composed often unconsciously recalling the keyhole in Yumi’s chastity belt as it imprisons women within the peephole of the frame, Inferno of Torture ends exactly as it began, with a scene of grim and ironic punishment in which the female form is itself obliterated. 

Inferno of Torture is available on blu-ray from Arrow Video in a set which also includes an in-depth commentary from Tom Mes discussing the treatment of the various actresses involved with the series, Ishii, and Toei in general; Jasper Sharp’s Miskatonic lecture Erotic Grotesque Nonsense & the Foundations of Japan’s Cult Counterculture; and a booklet featuring new writing by Chris D.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

*This character’s name is rendered as “Oryu” in the subtitles but “Otatsu” (different ways of reading the same character which means “dragon”) in the accompanying booklet.

Bad Girl (非行少女, Kirio Urayama, 1963)

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“It’s all because of poverty” according to the not-quite hero of Kirio Urayama’s Bad Girl (非行少女, Hiko shojo), and he’s right to an extent but then again not. Following his factory tale Cupola, Where the Furnaces Glow, Urayama shifts further into social realism, exploring small-town life at a midpoint in the post-war era in which the economic prosperity which was beginning to take root in a Tokyo about to host the Olympic Games had not yet been evenly distributed. The titular “bad girl” of the title is no Nikkatsu delinquent, merely a lonely young woman undermined by parental neglect and societal disdain who scandalously smokes, drinks, and steals the things she could never hope to afford. 

Wakae (Masako Izumi) claims she does these things in part because she hates her step-mother (Sumie Sasaki) whom she blames for her own mother’s death after returning from the hospital to tell her father that her mother had died only to find him with another woman. Emotionally neglected, she spends her time in bars enjoying the attentions of men without perhaps understanding the dangers. It’s in trying to escape two young toughs who think they haven’t got what they paid for when they took her to the cinema that Wakae runs into childhood friend Saburo (Mitsuo Hamada), recently returned from Tokyo after the factory he was working at went bust. Now 21, Saburo has a little education and was hoping for an office job but discovers that positions are generally open only to new graduates and is advised that his best option is to work for his brother (Asao Koike) with whom he does not get on. 

Where his brother is currently running for political office on a conservative ticket, Saburo is of a more liberal, progressive outlook, thinking back on the divisions in the town caused by protests against an American artillery test site which once occupied the local beach. He is extremely concerned that Wakae has been skipping school and is keen to help her study, even giving her money to help pay the fees as well as buying her a fashionable skirt to replace the worn through trousers which left her too ashamed to go. Unfortunately, Wakae loses the money after she’s accosted by a delinquent boy who tries to press her into sex work, leaving her both unable to attend school and embarrassed to see Saburo who is the only one encouraging her to think that she is worth something and can have a bright future. 

Poverty is in itself only one problem, the wider one being that everyone has already decided that Wakae is “bad girl” and that bad girls aren’t worth anything. Her disinterested father (Jun Hamamura) and stepmother are content to send her to her aunt who wants to make her a geisha, reinforcing an image of herself as somehow unfit for regular society and suited only to sex work. After losing Saburo’s money, she tries to rob the school but is caught by a caretaker who feigns sympathy but later offers her money for sex and then tells everyone that she tried it on with him so he wouldn’t turn her in. This coupled with a misunderstanding that she frittered away the money he gave her for the fees makes even Saburo lose faith in her, convincing him that they must have some time apart after he agrees to take a job on the chicken farm of a family friend to get away from his brother’s conservative authoritarianism. 

After accidentally setting fire to a chicken coop, Wakae is sent to a home for troubled children which turns out to be perhaps the best thing for her. Although she does not immediately bond with some of the other residents, she finds there what she never had at home – a supportive family, while the couple who run the facility do their best to instil confidence by teaching her skills that will allow her to reintegrate into regular society. Even there, however, members of the board are primed to write her off as a lost cause, just another “bad girl” not worth the effort. Only the head of the facility argues the problem is that no one’s ever given her a chance and if no one ever does then she’ll never have the opportunity to prove them wrong. 

Meanwhile, many of the other girls find themselves in the same position. Wakae’s friend Tomiko (Shizuka Yoshida) who ran away when she discovered that her parents were going to sell her, believes her future is hopeless because she’ll never be able to escape the “bad girl” label, but given courage by her time at the centre Wakae is able to tell her to stay strong, because you’ll never know if you don’t try. Wakae becomes an uncomfortable standard-bearer for the others, her eventual graduation another sign of hope but also perhaps a burden in knowing that if she fails to capitalise on her success she will only deepen their sense of despair. 

Yet her path forward begins to take her away from Saburo who makes a late night, romantic visit to the centre to apologise and tell her he’ll be waiting for her when she gets out. After a crisis of his own in which he too commits a crime in an attempt to buy a better future only to return beaten both literally and spiritually, Saburo has perhaps given in, agreed to work for his ultraconservative brother and bought his line of earnest hard work as the only path towards salvation. Wakae decides to take a promising job offer in Osaka and to leave without saying goodbye in case Saburo tries to convince her to stay local. That’s something he eventually tries to do in a last minute station dash, leaving Wakae torn and confused, enduring a public breakdown in a train station cafe literally stuck between one place and another. 

Saburo had complained that his problem was that he didn’t know what to do, confused by the volatile post-war society. Rather than a source of salvation he becomes a feckless suitor who can offer only a vague ideal of “love”, unable to protect Wakae and perhaps selfishly holding her back. As she tells him, she has made her decision, but ironically lacks agency. Her destiny is still to an extent in Saburo’s hands in his desire either to trap or free her. Meanwhile, there is also something insidiously uncomfortable in the fact that the only way to escape her “bad girl” image is by becoming economically productive, redeeming herself through honest hard work, while the desire to reject the label so totally also tacitly reinforces the idea of there being such a thing as a “bad girl” and that “bad girls” are worthless. Perhaps Saburo’s brother wins after all in his aspirational conservatism and its insistence on properness and industry. Nevertheless, Urayama leaves Wakae in a better place than we found her, given the confidence to pursue an individual destiny in the knowledge that she is not worthless, is deserving of love and happiness, and has a place to which to return as she makes her way into a promising post-war future.

Baby : The Secret Diary of A Mom To Be (Baby復仇記, Luk Yee-sum, 2019) [Fantasia 2020]

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“You’re finally a mom just like us!” a supportive friend exclaims in Luk Yee-sum’s pregnancy comedy Baby: The Secret Diary of a Mom to Be (Baby復仇記), “women are destined to be moms, that makes your life perfect”. A humorous take on maternal anxiety, Luk’s otherwise warm and empathetic screenplay cannot help but feel slightly out of touch in its wilfully mixed messages, as evidenced in the total lack of irony in the above statements. While the heroine is encouraged to have it all, her existence is still defined by the ability to bear children, all her other achievements apparently meaningless should she “fail” to become a mother while the choice not to is so invalid as not even to be considered. 

In her early 30s, Carmen (Dada Chan Ching) is a high-flying career woman who has elected not to have children with her basketball player husband, Oscar (Kevin Chu Kam-yin). She’s just been (verbally) offered a big promotion managing a new office in Vietnam, while her circle of friends are all housewives and mothers. Carmen had in any case believed that she would not be able to have a child due to suffering with polycystic ovary syndrome, but the discovery that she may be expecting could not have come at a worse time especially as her overbearing mother-in-law Margaret (Candice Yu On-on) has hired a weird maternity coach (Tam Yuk-ying) to help Carmen fulfil her purpose in life by providing a grandchild. She considers taking an abortion pill without telling Oscar about the baby but when he finds out by accident they decide to go through with the pregnancy. 

Of course, that means Vietnam is off. According to her boss they wanted someone “right away” and so sent a colleague instead. “Maybe you’ll think differently after your baby is born” the boss adds, not quite suggesting her career’s over but definitely implying her prospects have been significantly reduced. Meanwhile, the other women in the office no longer seem to take her seriously. Everyone is telling her to take things easy, leave the heavy work to the young ones, as if she’s just biding her time to motherhood and an early retirement from the employment scene. 

Carmen’s anxieties are in many way in regards to the ways her life will change along with the impending loss of freedom and independence. She resents the baby for messing up her career plans, while fearing that she’s being asked to abandon her own hopes and desires in order to become someone’s mum rather than just someone. It doesn’t help that Margaret has already more or less taken over, wielding both her economic advantage and her position as grandma-in-waiting to exert control over Carmen’s living situation. She moves maternity coach Tam into the couple’s home, the pair of them boxing up her evening attire and designer shoes as things a mother no longer needs without bothering to ask her, literally ripping away the vestiges of her old life while refusing her any kind of autonomy. 

Yet her reluctance is reframed as childhood trauma in dysfunctional relationships with her own mother who was apparently largely absent playing mahjong, and a nun at her school who was perhaps a surrogate maternal figure she was unfairly ripped away from when her mother ran out of money for the fees and she had to leave. Carmen’s lack of desire for motherhood is then framed as a kind of illness that must be cured so her life will “perfect”, the implication being that the free choice not to have children is not valid, only a corruption of the feminine ideal born of failed maternity. By paying a visit to Sister Cheung and then to her mother (who remains off screen) she can “repair” her problematic attitude, eventually submitting herself entirely to Margaret’s maternal authority in recognising that her overbearing caring also comes from a place of love and kindness even as it reinforces conservative social codes. 

In a surprising role reversal, meanwhile, Oscar adopts the position of the trophy husband whose career ambitions are perhaps unfairly dismissed by Carmen who has the better prospects for offering financial security. With impending fatherhood on the horizon he tries to assert his masculinity in looking for a steady job but soon realises he has no real skills for the workplace and is later inducted into a strange dad’s club which provides odd jobs and a place for harried fathers to hang out playing video games in escape from their stressful family man lives. A kind and patient man Oscar is perhaps understandably irritated when Carmen ironically snaps at him that he should give up his career ambitions to facilitate hers but later signals his willingness to become a househusband which reinforces the broadly positive have it all message while problematically continuing the narrative that a woman’s fulfilment is found only in motherhood and without it her life is incomplete. 

Nevertheless, Baby: Secret Diary of a Mom to Be has its charms in its empathetic examination of maternal anxiety while highlighting if not quite condemning the costs of living in a patriarchal society. Carmen’s “happily married” friends each have problems of their own they’re afraid to share lest it damage the image of familial bliss they’ve been keen to cultivate. Their secret unhappiness is strangely never a factor in Carmen’s decision making, nor is the quest for that ideal ever critiqued despite Carmen’s eventual success in finally having it all. Still despite its mixed messaging and subtly conservative overtones, Luk’s sophisticated dialogue and quirky sensibility lend a sense of fun and irony to a sometimes dark exploration of impending parenthood.

Baby : The Secret Diary of A Mom To Be streams in Canada from 20th August to 2nd September as part of this year’s online edition of Fantasia International Film Festival.

Original trailer (English / Traditional Chinese subtitles)

Monster SeaFood Wars (三大怪獣グルメ, Minoru Kawasaki, 2020) [Fantasia 2020]

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Ever wondered what happens to a fallen kaiju? After Godzilla and friends have ransacked the city, there’s certainly a lot of cleaning up to do but disposing of kaiju corpses isn’t something your average monster movie gives a lot of thought to. According to Monster SeaFood Wars (三大怪獣グルメ, San Daikaiju Gourmet), there’s surprisingly good eating to be had in monster meat and when it comes to taking down a giant squid, perhaps it’s better to ask a chef rather than a scientist or the boffins from the Ministry of Defence. 

Switching between documentary sequences featuring talking heads looking back on the bizarre events and the events themselves, Monster SeaFood Wars follows scientist/sushi shop heir Yuta (Keisuke Ueda) who accidentally unleashes three giant kaiju on the city of Tokyo after he’s knocked off his bike while delivering some prize seafood to the local temple as an offering. In addition to being the heir to a sushi shop, Yuta is also a scientist apparently obsessed with giant monsters which he describes as “cute” and had been working on a serum, Setap Z, to turn ordinary foodstuffs giant in order to end world hunger. Before you know it, angry octopus Takolla and his frenemy Ikalla are on the rampage through the city. 

Of course, Yuta is the prime suspect which is perhaps why he somewhat arrogantly describes himself as the “biggest victim” while reluctantly agreeing to help out SMAT, Seafood Monster Attack Team, as they try to figure out how to mitigate the effect of Setap Z and stop the kaiju assault but is further irritated by being denied a spot on the team as a full member. Meanwhile, he’s also facing off against rival scientist Hikoma (Yuya Asato) who impresses with an obvious idea, vinegar, while charming Yuta’s childhood friend and unrequited crush Nana (Ayano Christie Yoshida) who now works for the Ministry of Defence and has only contempt for the weirdo monster geek. 

Yuta’s plan had been to let Takolla and Ikalla duke it out, assuming Takolla would win and then they’d somehow lure him into a giant octopus trap. Hikoma meanwhile suggests giant rice vinegar cannons, regular missiles already having proved ineffective against the sea creatures’ springy flesh. Hikoma’s plan would have worked, had it not been for the sudden and unexpected return of Kanilla whose hard shell protects him against the corrosive effects of the vinegar. During the fight, however, some of Takolla’s tentacles are chopped off, chunks of meaty white flesh falling to the ground as SMAT commander Hibiki (Ryo Kinomoto) unconsciously licks his lips. 

While very much a classic kaiju movie, Monster SeaFood Wars has its tongue firmly in its cheek, scaling back on the monster-fighting action for some gentle satire as the gang find they just can’t resist the urge find out what kaiju tastes like. The answer is surprisingly good, with the effect that kaiju meat becomes the latest culinary trend. “Forget bubble tea” one commentator says, monstrous squid is where it’s at. The TV news also comes in for a kicking with its placard unveiling confirming the kaiju’s name as well as a state of the nation address from an Abe-esque PM using the crisis to further his quest to “take back Japan” while speaking in a distinctly squeaky voice.

Meanwhile, drunk salarymen complain about their exploitative working conditions, joking that they’d need to be eight-armed octopuses to get through the amount of work expected of them only for Takolla to appear out of nowhere and slap them down seconds after they’ve made a few inappropriate remarks to some passing young ladies. Aside from the kaiju, the big bad does seem to be pervasive sexism with Ministry of Defence employee Nana often relegated to little more than eye candy and eventually the subject of an offensive bet between the icy Yuta and slick Hikoma whose equally sexist cheesy lines actually seem to impress her. 

Yuta, however, gets the chance to redeem himself by revealing that the really did make the formula to help starving people in Africa rather than just because he actively wanted to usher in the great kaiju apocalypse, owning his legacy as the son of a sushi shop while his best friend Niima (Shojiro Yokoi) has a few surprises of his own up his sleeve which prove that the best person to have at a giant octopus is a skilled chef. Of course Setap Z turns out to cause a few additional problems, accidentally spreading itself around after hitting the mosquito population, while it seems the villain is not quite done with their desire to misuse the serum, hinting at a possible sequel. A humorous but never mocking take on the classic tokusatsu, Monster SeaFood Wars pits culinary science against the giant monster threat and discovers that all you need to save the world is a good cook.

Monster SeaFood Wars streams in Canada from 20th August to 2nd September as part of this year’s online edition of Fantasia International Film Festival.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Sheep Without a Shepherd (误杀, Sam Quah Boon Lip, 2019)

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“Sheep are happy as long as they have grass to graze, they don’t care if you shear their wool” according to a vox popped farmer in the ironically titled Sheep Without a Shepherd (误杀, Wùshā). Inspired by the Indian film Drishyam, the Mandarin title of Malaysian director Sam Quah’s Chinese remake is simply “manslaughter”, but as the English title perhaps implies if ironically Quah circumvents the censors to issue an oblique broadside to oppressive authoritarianism largely by setting the film in Thailand. 

As the film opens, affable Chinese-Thai IT and internet business owner Weijie (Xiao Yang) is chatting about his favourite thing, movies, with the regulars at his usual haunt, a restaurant run by Uncle Song. Meanwhile, Song tells him about the latest local gossip, the murder of a man who’d recently won the lottery, which is why corrupt cop Sangkun (Shih Ming-Shuai) has been hanging around but not actually doing much investigating. It’s rumoured that hotshot female police chief Laoorn (Joan Chen), who has a fearsome reputation for being able to solve any case, is going to take over. She eventually does just that, fabricating evidence to push the suspect into confessing. Her tactics may be underhanded and unethical, but at the end of the day, as she points out, it doesn’t really matter. She wasn’t framing anyone and isn’t intending to submit the evidence in court, she correctly solved the crime and exerted psychological pressure to trick the suspect into thinking she had something she didn’t so he’d know the game was up. 

“As long as you are not scared, they can’t do anything” Weijie tells his daughter, reminding her that fear is the only leverage of those like Laoorn when they have no real evidence. Unfortunately for him, he’s become involved with the disappearance of Laoorn’s odious son Suchat (Bian Tian Yang) who, we discover, drugged and raped Weijie’s teenage daughter Pingping (Audrey Hui) during an excursion for bright high schoolers, going so far as to film the whole thing in order to blackmail her into providing further sexual favours. Pingping had been keen to go on the trip, somewhat snobbishly looking down on her lower-class family and seeing it as a networking opportunity to make elite friends. She is perhaps the film uncomfortably implies being punished for her unfilial elitism, but eventually finds the courage to tell her mother Ayu (Tan Zhuo) what happened. Ayu accompanies her to the rendezvous with Suchat and confronts him but he is unrepentant, reminding them that his mother is the police chief and his father a politician so he can do as he pleases before trying to force himself on Ayu at which point Pingping hits him with a hoe and knocks him out. Believing that he’s dead, Ayu buries the body with a recently interred family friend and waits for her husband to come home from a business trip repairing the internet in a hotel the next town over. He eventually returns early, worried that he couldn’t get though on the phone because youngest daughter Anan (Zhang Xiran) had left the receiver off the hook. 

A decent and kind man, well liked by everyone, all Weijie wants is to protect his family. What’s done is done, all he can do is try to mitigate it by utilising all his movie knowledge to change the narrative so that they are merely implicated in the crime rather than active suspects. In this, the mini-feud with useless cop Sangkun actually works in his favour. An earlier episode had him offer some advice gleaned from movies to an old man whose grandson had been assaulted by Suchat. Sangkun was in the process of pressuring him to accept a payoff to drop the charges (most of which he’d have pocked for himself). Another business owner privy to the incident apparently reported him anonymously and was attacked in the street only for Weijie to come to his rescue and be accused of assaulting a police officer. It’s very easy for him to claim that Sangkun is trying to frame him out of pettiness, and very easy for people to believe him because that’s exactly something Sangkun would do. 

Sangkun is the embodiment of casual abuse of power. He doesn’t care about serving the people or protecting the vulnerable, he is only interested in validating himself through authority. Laoorn is not quite the same, but she too is an aspect of the all-powerful state as she marshals all her resources against Weijie, an ordinary husband and father, against whom she has no hard evidence only her much vaunted intuition. She will stop at nothing to find out what’s happened to her son, while Weijie is determined to do everything in his power to protect his family. Laoorn underestimates him, as Pingping had, because he is a poor orphan with no education, only later realising that he is clever and resourceful even if he’s pinched his defence strategy from a lifetime of watching crime movies. The pair are engaged in a perfectly matched battled of wits, but only one of them has the power of the state behind her and a gradual erosion of civil rights to allow her to wield it against a personal enemy. 

Filming in Thailand, Quah has a much freer hand to broach the subject of official corruption even if it’s quite obvious that he’s making a point about the overreach of the Chinese state rather than that of Thailand. Weijie’s plight eventually sparks a large scale riot that spreads throughout the country as the populace declares itself thoroughly fed up with the Sangkuns of the world, not to mention the Laoorns or her mayoral candidate husband Dutpon (Philip Keung Ho-Man) who is almost entirely absent from the crisis because all he cares about is the election even if it’s a minor inconvenience not to have his family on show at hustings. Dutpon’s disinterested authoritarian parenting coupled with Laoorn’s indulgence and willingness to enable her son’s crimes through covering them up is perhaps blamed for the “monstrous” young man Suchat was becoming, himself standing in for a generation of wealthy, pampered sons of elites raised with improper boundaries who think they can do as they please because they are somehow above the normal morality. “Good parents” Weijie and Ayu meanwhile find themselves at the mercy of a corrupt faux-aristocracy, abused by Suchat and then rendered powerless in the face of an authoritarian regime. 

Weijie, however, rejects his powerlessness in an attempt to think himself out of the cage in which he finds himself imprisoned. A perfectly plotted psychological thriller, Sheep Without a Shepherd ironically satirises the much cited claim of authoritarians that humanity flounders without a leader as the populace begins to fight back against its toxic relationship with those in power. Nevertheless, its admittedly compassionate and humanitarian conclusion cannot help but feel like an overt concession to the Mainland censors’ requirement that crime can never pay and all transgressions must be owned (even if not directly by those who are literally guilty). Ultimately, however, Weijie redeems himself in the eyes of his daughter, and in doing so subtly reinforces the anti-authoritarian message in instructing Pingping never to be afraid of anything again, freeing her from the oppressive leverage of fear which itself constitutes authoritarianism.

Sheep Without a Shepherd opens in UK cinemas on 21st August courtesy of Cine Asia.

UK release trailer (English / Simplified Chinese subtitles)

Crazy Samurai Musashi (狂武蔵, Yuji Shimomura, 2020) [Fantasia 2020]

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Action star Tak Sakaguchi rose to fame in Ryuhei Kitamura’s low budget zombie movie Versus, thereafter starring in a series of similarly pitched splatter and exploitation films as well as appearing in long running tokusatsu series Kamen Rider and making his own directorial debut with manga adaptation Be a Man! Samurai School in 2008. Much to fans’ disappointment, Sakaguchi announced his retirement as a performer in 2013, but has since made several high profile returns to the big screen including Yuji Shimomura’s Re:Born in which he played a former JSDF elite soldier living quietly in the countryside until an old enemy tracked him down. 

Again emerging from semi-retirement, Crazy Samurai Musashi (狂武蔵, Kurui Musashi) sees Sakaguchi reunite with Shimomura to play the most famous of legendary samurai Miyamoto Musashi in an all out action fest including a 77-minute one cut assault during which he singlehandedly kills 588 men. Unsurprisingly light on dialogue, the film credits Sion Sono with original concept and Atsuki Tomori with screenplay who do at least add a little context which frames this, to an extent, as a tale of merciless samurai hypocrisy and the fallacy of “honour” as a code for living. 

As the film opens, a small boy stares in wonder at a white butterfly before being reminded that he has, as the head of this clan, apparently challenged the great Miyamoto Musashi to a duel in revenge for his murder of two of their previous leaders. Affable retainer Chusuke (Kenta Yamazaki) tells the boy not to worry, he’s not going to let anything happen to him, but stops short of explaining that he’s really just a kind of bait. Nevertheless, Chusuke has his reservations about their plan. After all, it’s not very befitting of a samurai’s honour to challenge someone to a private duel but invite 400 retainers to the surprise party. 400 against one seems faintly ridiculous. It might even be embarrassing if anyone else finds out, but then as the priest (Yosuke Saito) says you can just kill them too. In any case, while Chusuke is talking to the priest and the mercenaries are busy arguing with the retainers, Miyamoto Musashi sneaks through the perimeter and fells the small boy who is technically the “leader” of the clan with one flying sword blow, kickstarting a scene of utter carnage as he attempts to fight his way out of the compound.   

“How many more?” Musashi asks in exasperation during a momentary pause, later doing a few calculations. He thought there’d be about 70, but it feels like he’s killed a few more than that. True to form, the samurai warriors largely follow the protocols of honour. They fight one-on-on, and only at the end does anyone attempt to attack Musashi from behind. He makes swift work of them, taking each man out with maximum economy, occasionally challenged by complete randomers who apparently aren’t even part of the clan, they just really don’t like him. Though necessarily repetitive, Shimomura’s innovative, non-stop fight choreography follows a realtime, broadly naturalistic logic in which duels are generally brutish and short. Musashi begins to tire as he continues to fight for his life, taking brief breaks for water, food, and existential questioning, before heading back into the fray. 

“Duty? Honour? Who gives a crap? I just wanna win” he later says in what is simultaneously a rejection and an embodiment of the samurai code. “I’ll die one day anyway” Musashi chuckles to himself before rejoining the fight, wilfully embracing the nihilism of the samurai existence that allowed him to kill a child without thinking twice. Chusuke failed to protect his honour, or save his clan, his earnestness perhaps betrayed by his mentor’s underhandedness in unwisely hiring vast numbers of mercenaries and sending his own unprepared students, many of whom simply flee (a wise decision), to face off against an unstoppable killing machine. Paradoxically, Miyamoto Musashi will survive because he doesn’t care about playing fair, he may not even care about surviving, all he wants is to win. “A kid who knows nothing of war”, Chusuke’s stubborn insistence on illusionary samurai honour will lead only to more suffering and violence while all Musashi can do is sigh in resignation and ready his sword. 

Crazy Samurai Musashi streams in Canada from 20th August to 2nd September as part of this year’s online edition of Fantasia International Film Festival.

International trailer (English subtitles)

The Story of Woo Viet (胡越的故事, Ann Hui, 1981)

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Displacement and a legacy of violence conspire against a young man attempting to escape the trauma of war in the second in Ann Hui’s “Vietnam trilogy”, The Story of Woo Viet (胡越的故事, AKA God of Killers). Starring a young Chow Yun-fat as Chinese-Vietnamese refugee headed to Hong Kong with a hope of making it to the US, Woo Viet’s story suggests that violence may be impossible to escape in a world increasingly corrupted by human indifference while only crushing disappointment awaits for those who live on dreams alone. 

After years fighting for the South Vietnamese army, Woo Viet (Chow Yun-fat) is one of many young Chinese-Vietnamese men attempting to escape through claiming asylum in Hong Kong so that he can eventually apply for a visa to the US. The reasons he needed to leave are readily apparent. Even on the overcrowded, primitive boat on which he arrives in Hong Kong, Woo Viet has already witnessed several atrocities in which fellow passengers were dumped overboard, killed, or marooned on isolated islands. He has become the surrogate father to a little boy who is now alone on the boat because his dad was killed by the guards, and subsequently becomes a target for Viet Cong “special agents” after they strangle his friend in his sleep for having seen something he shouldn’t have.  

Luckily, Woo Viet has a friend in Hong Kong, a female “penpal” Lap Quan (Cora Miao Chien-Jen) who sent him letters he rarely answered all through the war. After Woo Viet is forced to kill a special agent in the refugee camp in order to ensure his own survival, he finds himself relying on Lap Quan to help him organise a fake passport. He no longer has the luxury of waiting to do things properly, he needs to leave the country as soon as possible. The fake passports available are, for some reason, Japanese meaning he has to learn to at least sound plausible by picking up a few handy phrases to fool the border guards. It’s in the language classes that he meets fellow refugee Shum Ching (Cherie Chung Chor-hung) who is travelling to the US because a former customer who has already emigrated told her that he wanted her to come no matter what the cost. The problem is the HK trafficker has not been honest with either of them. Woo Viet may have a decent shot at actually making it to the US, but the girls are to be sold on at the first available Chinatown, which in this case is Manila where they’re waiting for a connecting flight. Having bonded with Shum Ching, Woo Viet surprises the traffickers by giving up his chance to go to America to stay in the Philippines to try and rescue her. 

“Whichever Chinatown it is, I think my situation will be the same” Woo Viet writes back to Lap Quan, keeping up a correspondence which becomes increasingly dishonest as he struggles come to terms the shattering of all his dreams. Trapped in a Philippine Chinatown, he discovers the only way he can save Shum Ching is by serving the gangsters that “bought” her from the HK trafficker. Yet, also in his letter to Lap Quan he claims that “it is much simpler to kill people here compared to Vietnam”, while suggesting that the reason his situation is “the same” in Chinatowns the world over is that he has no real identity and can therefore “solve people’s problems with no problem” which is why he’s ended up working as a hired gun for HK gangster Chung. 

Even so, he still harbours hopes of making it to the US when he’s made enough money to “redeem” Shum Ching who is already dreaming of finding a tiny house for them both where she can cook him proper Vietnamese food. While in Manila, he’s partnered with a slightly older man, Sarm (Lo Lieh), who came from Hong Kong a decade earlier. Woo Viet thinks he should have earned plenty of money after a decade making kills for Chung, so he doesn’t understand why he’s still here rather than off somewhere else enjoying a better life. He still doesn’t quite see that Sarm is a vision of his possible future, a man so beaten down by life that his only goal is to drink himself into an early grave. Sarm no longer believes in a future for himself, but he wants to believe in one for Woo Viet, and so he tries to help him but brotherhood, like love, is no match for the casual cruelty of the world in which they live. 

Woo Viet’s floating rootlessness is perhaps an echo of a potential anxiety in a Hong Kong facing its own sense of displacement with the handover less than 20 years away, as perhaps are his feelings of hopelessness as he attempts to write himself into a better future in his now constant letters to Lap Quan in which he somewhat insensitively talks of his love for Shum Ching born precisely out of that same sense of rootless desperation. Soon after they meet, the pair attempt to visit a flower market at night but their romantic moment is disrupted by another refugee couple being caught and dragged away by police, instantly throwing a fatalistic shadow over their innocent connection. All Woo Viet wanted was an ordinary settled life, perhaps adopting that orphaned little boy from the refugee camp and bringing him with them as he and Shum Ching claim a better life in the US, but even small dreams are seemingly impossible in a world in which the predominating force is not love or compassion but violence.  

Tokyo Chorus (東京の合唱, Yasujiro Ozu, 1931)

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“Tokyo – city of the unemployed” runs a rather unexpected caption part way through Yasujiro Ozu’s depression-era silent comedy, Tokyo Chorus (東京の合唱, Tokyo no Chorus). Putting an unconventional spin on the reality of the contemporary capital, Ozu nevertheless retreats into his favourite themes as good people attempt to remain cheerful in the face of increasing adversity while embracing an often latent interest in class politics as the hero finds himself losing out at the hands of heartless capitalists when he alone is brave enough to stand up for a friend treated unfairly. 

Ozu opens however with an amusing prologue set some years before the main action in which the hero, Okajima (Tokihiko Okada), is a poor student goofing off during a military-style drill. While another boy arrives late to practice and is mocked for having arrived in geta, Okajima’s problem is that he didn’t want to take his jacket off because he isn’t wearing a shirt. A little less well off than some of the others, he brazens things out by ribbing the teacher, Mr. Omura (Tatsuo Saito). Flashforward some years and Okajima has become an insurance clerk, married with three children. His oldest child, a son, is desperate for a bicycle because the other kids have one and as Okajima is supposed to be getting his bonus today, the parents have decided to give in. 

Things do not, however,  go quite to plan. After picking up his pay packet, Okajima gets talking with an old timer who laments he’s just been fired. He thinks it’s because he sold some unlucky policies in which the beneficiary died shortly after signing the paperwork, but it seems obvious to Okajima that they’re firing him because they don’t want to pay his pension. He talks things over with the other employees who all agree it’s unfair, but is the only one brave enough to march into the boss’ office and say so. Unfortunately, Okajima gets nowhere and loses his own job in the proccess. Dejected, he buys his son a much cheaper scooter on the way home but the boy is unimpressed, as is his wife (Emiko Yagumo) when he hands her his notice of termination. 

It is of course a good and proper thing that Okajima stood up for colleague, but he’s lost out because of his pride, smugly explaining to his wife that he was in the right while arguing with his boss and resentfully refusing to admit the irresponsibility of his actions as a husband and a father. Pride becomes a persistent secondary concern as he tries to find another steady job in the economically straitened world of 1931. Despite telling his colleague he envied him for his job as a sandwichboard man and claiming that having a college degree makes him overqualified for casual work, Okajima struggles with himself intellectually knowing that any job will do to feed his family but embarrassed in having to resort to work he feels is beneath him. When he runs into Mr. Omura and he offers to help him with a job in the curry rice restaurant he now owns after retiring from teaching, Okajima is conflicted, telling him he won’t accept help if it’s offered out of pity but only if extended in friendship. When his wife spots him out delivering leaflets, however, she is scandalised and humiliated rather than proud or grateful, only later coming round and agreeing to help out in the Omuras’ restaurant herself. 

Meanwhile, family life is obviously strained by their ongoing financial predicament. When their daughter is taken ill and needs hospital treatment, Mrs. Okajima is upset to discover that her husband sold all her kimonos to pay the fees, their eyes aflash with anger and despair as they put on a brave face for the children but eventually brightening as they continue on with a family game of pat-a-cake. Despite her distress, Mrs. Okaijma maintains faith in her husband and the family is as happy as it can be under the circumstances. At a reunion organised for some of his former students now no longer the rambunctious young men they were at the film’s opening but wistful for the spent freedoms of their youth, Omura makes a toast hoping that everyone continues to prosper through “hard-work and self-reliance”, but it is the mutual solidarity which Okajima showed when he stood up for his mistreated colleague which eventually proves his salvation. Humbled by his experiences, no longer looking down on honest work, he gets the offer of another job which is not quite of the kind he was hoping for, but is perhaps a new start even if it means leaving Tokyo, city of the unemployed, behind for the greener pastures of provincial Tochigi and a simpler, but perhaps kinder, existence. 

Taiwan Film Festival Edinburgh Announces Lineup for First Ever Online Edition

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Originally scheduled to take place in physical form for the very first time this year, the Taiwan Film Festival Edinburgh has reconfigured itself as an online event showcasing a host of underseen classics from throughout the island’s cinematic history.

Taiwanese Hokkien-Language Cinema 

The Husband’s Secret (1960), dir. Lin Tuan-Chiu

A happily married woman tries to help a school friend who has fallen on hard times after becoming a single mother, but the situation is complicated when it turns out the father of her friend’s baby is actually her husband…

Six Suspects (1965), dir. Lin Tuan-Chiu

Stylishly shot noirish pro-police crime movie in which a blackmailer is offed leaving a series of suspects all annoyed by him because of his capacity to expose their dodgy dealings in the increasingly amoral post-war economy. Review.

The Bride Who Has Returned From Hell (1965), dir. Hsin Chi

Gothic mystery based on Mistress of Mellyn in which an entrepreneur believes that his wife has drowned after trying to elope with another man whose body was found after a boating accident along with a woman’s purse while she remains absent…

A Borrowed Hong Kong, the Imagined China in Taiwan, and Trans-regional Cinema 

A City Called Dragon (1970), dir. Tu Chun-Hsun

Sumptuous Taiwanese wuxia starring A Touch of Zen’s Hsu Feng as a revolutionary who ventures to the capital to meet up with a comrade and retrieve a secret map, only she later learns that he along with his whole family has already been executed…

Four Moods (1970), dir. Li Han-Hsiang, Pai Ching-Jui, Li Hsing, King Hu

Four-part portmanteau movie featuring folklore-themed contributions from Li Han-Hsiang, Pai Ching-Jui, Li Hsing, and King Hu.

Melodrama Divas

Where the Seagull Flies (1974), dir. Li Hsing 

A Taiwanese journalist encounters three identical young women but they each disappear right after he falls in love with them. In Hong Kong she is a woman attempting suicide after killing her husband, in Singapore a Filipina bar hostess, and in Taipei his younger sister’s uni friend. After discovering her identity and that she likes to play tricks on men, he plots his revenge…

Cheerful Wind (1981), dir. Hou Hsiao-Hsien

Early idol drama from Hou Hsiao-Hsien starring Fong Feifei as an independent young woman working in advertising who falls for Kenny Bee’s blind musician. Review.

Taiwan New Cinema and Its Legacy

The Sandwich Man (1983), dir. Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Tseng Chuang-Hsiang, Wan Jen

Tripartite portmanteau film inspired by the short stories of Huang Chun-Ming and exploring the changes in Cold War Taiwanese society. Features contributions by Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Tseng Chuang-Hsiang, and Wan Jen.

Kuei-Mei, a Woman (1985), dir. Chang Yi 

Melodrama inspired by the Xiao-Sa novel in which the heroine, Kuei-Mei escapes the Mainland for Taiwan to live with her cousin but is married off to a widowed Chinese refugee who already has three children and a massive gambling addiction leaving her with no choice other than to seek a better life in Japan.

When Love Comes (2010), dir. Chang Tso-Chi

A young woman living with her two mothers, father, uncle, and grandfather comes to understand more about her family when she is abandoned by her boyfriend after becoming pregnant.

God Man Dog (2007), dir. Chen Singing 

A hand model suffering from post-natal depression, a bereaved indigenous couple, their daughter in the city, and a one-legged man driving a giant Buddha bus, are brought together by a stray dog. Review.

Midi Z Selection

Jade Miners (2015), dir. Midi Z

Midi Z’s first documentary focusses on the jade miners continuing to work against the back drop of the continuing conflict with the Kachin Independence Organization which had brought the industry to a halt.

Ice Poison (2014), dir. Midi Z

When economic forces render his farm unviable, an old man sells his cow to buy a motorcycle for his son so he can make money taking people into town but he ends up becoming involved in drug trafficking to help a woman trying to bring her child back to Myanmar after being tricked into marriage in China.

The Palace on the Sea (2014), dir. Midi Z

Experimental short in which a Buddhist monk tries to free the ghost of a woman from a floating restaurant.

Docs: Exploring Diversity in Pursuing the Taiwanese Identity 

How Deep is the Ocean (2000), dir. Tang Hsiang-Chu

Documentary following a young man from the Tao indigenous minority who returns home to Orchid island after pursuing a better life on the Mainland.

Out/Marriage (2012), dir. Nguyen Kim-Hong

Documentary following a Vietnamese woman who came to Taiwan to marry but endured years of domestic abuse before escaping and becoming a single-mother to her son.

The Mountain (2015), dir. Su Hung-En 

Documentary following the director’s grandfather, Teymu Teylong, a hunter from an indigenous community.

The Taiwan Film Festival Edinburgh will take place online from 18th to 27th September with all films streaming for free! Full details are available via the official website and you can also keep up with the festival via the official Facebook Page and Twitter account.