MA – Cry of Silence (မ – Cry of Silence, The Maw Naing, 2024)

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After their factory withholds wages for two months, seamstresses decide they have no other option but to strike in The Maw Naing’s hard-hitting drama, Ma – Cry of Silence (မ – Cry of Silence). As the opening title cards explain, Myanmar has seen a series of military coups over the last few decades and is now in a state of civil war. The military’s burning of villages has forced young people into the cities in search of work and shelter, but also left them in a precarious position and vulnerable to exploitative conditions. 

Mi-Thet, at least,ƒ is haunted by memories of her village burning and lives in a kind of hell where smoke is always on the horizon. She has a job as a seamstress and lives in a dorm with other young women in similar positions, but the factory hasn’t paid wages in two weeks and the landlady is beginning to get fed up. She snaps at the girls and ironically asks if they want her to starve to death, laying bare both the domino effects of this world in collapse and the pervasive heartlessness of capitalism. At the factory, the Forman watches over them, ruler in hand and often strikes them if he thinks they aren’t working hard enough while they’re terrified of taking breaks or visiting the bathroom because he also peeps on them or tries to extract sexual favours which some of the girls grant because they need the money.

The foreman’s face is kept offscreen and even when the women confront him, he appears as a ghostly silhouette behind the plastic sheeting. The factory boss, even when he supposedly arrives by car, is never seen at all. It may be that the political situation makes it impossible to run this kind of business, but at the same time it seems more like the factory just don’t want to pay the women because they think they don’t have to. After all, they have money to hire thugs to break up the protests when the women decide to strike rather than just giving them what they’re owed. The foreman alternately threatens them and makes false promises of payment that the women can’t believe because they’re still owed so much money even though as Mi-Thet says, she spends her days between the factory and the dorm. It wouldn’t surprise her if she died at her machine, while one of the others quips they’d still keep them working after they died.

Mi-Thet remains on the fence about even joining the strike, as do many of the other women afraid of the repercussions and of losing the money they’re owed entirely though it doesn’t seem as if it would be paid anyway. Her neighbour U-Tun who is disabled and is covered in scars from the 1988 protests for democracy remains world-weary and not so much encouraging as fatalistic but offers Mi-Thet a series of books that help her commit to the cause though it’s seeing her friend who works as a maid be badly beaten by her employer that convinces her they have to act now. 

As U-Tun says, the country should have changed but it stayed the same, while Mi-Thet can’t figure out if they’re emerging from the darkness or walking deeper into it. News reports speak of torched villages and refugees but also of the food shortages the destruction has caused. Even the cook at the dorm complains prices have gone up so much she can’t get good food and says she’ll cook better when they pay her more. “Better” doesn’t really matter at the factory as long as the girls hit their quotas, but workers can’t work on empty stomachs and no sleep even as the foreman seems intent in working them to their deaths. Mi-Thet and the others attempt to stand up against this cyclical destruction, but discover that they have almost no power and the factory owners don’t care at all if they live or die because they think there’s an endless stream of displaced girls looking for work. Gunshots and the rumble of fire echo in Mi-Thet’s ears, but ultimately she discovers herself trapped within this historical loop but issuing a rallying cry to the youth of Myanmar to rise up against this continuing oppression.

MA – Cry of Silence screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

To Kill a Mongolian Horse (一匹白馬的熱夢, Jiang  Xiaoxuan, 2024)

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The Mongolian Steppe is known for its vastness and ever-extending horizon, but for Saina it’s shrinking to the extent that seems to be homing in on him and threatening to destroy the only environment in which he feels he belongs. Saina is himself often likened to a runaway horse, though he’s forever catching them and bringing them back, longing for a world in which he could exist within this natural environment just as his ancestors did but finding only futility everywhere.

Once a racer, Saina injured his shoulder and is now relegated to the sidelines while trying to find other ways to work. His father, a broken man who drinks and gambles, has already sold off most of his sheep and is on at Saina to sell the horses too. His friend Hasa has also sold up, first rejoining the circus but then declaring himself sick of being a herdsman. After getting injured he decides to try his luck in the city and ironically ends up getting a job working for the mining company that is quite literally disrupting the foundations of Saina’s life.

The main enemy is modernity, but it’s delivered by the Chinese. Saina finds himself surrounded by Mandarin speakers, while it’s a Chinese mining company that is gradually buying up the Steppe to open a mine and eventually tries to force Saina and his father off their land. Saina’s father keeps telling him a Chinese horse broker could get them a good deal, but he’s also told that his beautiful white horse isn’t worth very much because it’s Mongolian. It’s meat wouldn’t even be worth as much as a cow’s, though that’s the only reason the broker is interested in it.

Nevertheless, it’s largely for Chinese tourists that Saina is obliged to parade his culture. He takes part in Medieval Times-style dinner shows where the audience is repeatedly reminded they can buy drinks for their favourite riders and carrots for the horses, though the riders and horses almost certainly don’t see them. Saina rides dressed as a heroic Mongol warrior, but has dreams of himself dying on the battlefield alone with his white horse. His ex-wife Tana encounters something similar, as her Chinese boss makes her serve drinks at dinner parties with Chinese businessmen while insisting she sing a Mongolian song for the local colour. Later Saina gets a job at a ranch where city slickers come to experience life on the Steppe, but complains that the tourists ride the horses too hard and end up injuring them. They don’t have a connection to the land or know how to treat animals, while the ranch owners exploit the horses in the same way they exploit Saina, taking little interest in their physical wellbeing only their ability to work. At the show, Saina discovers his horse is injured and asks to switch to another one to let it rest, but encounters resistance in being told to get higher approval from the boss.

Meanwhile, he applies for a job at a fancy equestrian facility but is basically told he’s too he’s common for this elite, aristocratic Western sport that’s no longer about racing but fine technique. The snooty woman who interviews him says that Mongolian riders don’t ride properly and their skills aren’t needed somewhere like this. Saina could possibly start from the ground up as a stable boy but most of those are teenagers. Meanwhile Saina reflects that his father never actually taught him how to ride, he just placed him in the saddle and left the rest up to him with the natural consequence that it feels like something that is innate and essential. Yet he wonders if his son will ride at all or if these grasslands will still exist when he comes of age. Tana lives in the city and wants to send the boy to a school she thinks is better where they speak Mandarin and English while Saina is worried he’ll lose his Mongolian. When he puts him on a horse, the boy is terrified and asks to get off. All Saina really seems to want is to ride horses and raise sheep, but this way of life is dying out and the grasslands are shrinking all around him. There is something quite sad and defiant in his riding of his horse along a motorway in the juxtaposition between the traditional way of life and the modernity which all but destroyed it even as Saina is seemingly left with nowhere to go and no place to roam.

To Kill a Mongolian Horse screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Phobia 2 (5 แพร่ง, Paween Purijitpanya, Visute Poolvoralaks, Songyos Sugmakanan, Parkpoom Wongpoom, Banjong Pisanthanakun, 2009)

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Aptly termed “5bia” but retitled in English as Phobia 2, this sequel to the original four-part anthology adds an additional director for five tales of Thai horror. Unlike the first film, there aren’t any particular linking details though they each someway turn on an anxiety towards cars and other forms of transportation along with exploring the effects of unresolved guilt and natural justice in the form of karma.

Thus in the first sequence, Novice, a young man, Pey (Jirayu Laongmanee), is sent to a temple to hide out after being involved with a crime. He evidently did not want to become a monk and is resentful towards his mother and stepfather for bringing him here. But what he soon becomes involved with is a haunting, a hangover from the hungry ghosts festival that confronts him with his unresolved feelings towards his mother and lingering guilt over the crime he committed. Elegantly lensed, the film has a creeping sense of dread and eerieness as Pey begins to accept responsibility for his actions even if as it seems he must also pay for his lack of respect towards traditional custom.

Continuing the theme, in the second part, Ward, a young man, Arthit (Worrawech Danuwong), with casts on both of his legs is intrigued by the patient in the next bed, a former priest who it seems is not quite ready to move on. Rendered vulnerable by his incapacitation, Arthit can only watch as a weird ritual seems to unfold while the hospital staff do not seem to take his distress seriously. Despite its grim strangeness, there is a dark humour underpinning the action along with a kind of absurdity in the oddness of this weird black magic.

There’s nothing quite so supernatural in the third instalment, however, as a pair of Japanese hitchhikers are unwittingly picked uo by a people trafficker whose entire cargo turns out to be dead because his son tried to use them as drug mules. The film might have something small to say about exploration and the devaluing of the human life, but soon slips into zombie drama as the truckers try to outrun the consequences of their actions while the tourists pay a heavy price for their naivety. 

Just as in the earlier sequences, Salvage too finds a source of fear in the car but this time its largely because it’s haunted, both literally and by the spectre of amoral capitalism embodied by the boss’ attempts at corning cutting. Nuch (Nicole Theriault) has largely been making her money by buying wrecks and selling them as second-hand without telling the new owner they were involved in a fatal accident. After being taken to task by a mother who complains her son was nearly killed, she can’t find her son Toey anywhere and while looking at him is confronted by the ghosts of the various people who’ve been killed by her cars. It’s a neat indictment of the various ways capitalism is killing us even if ending on a note of improbable cruelty.

The fifth, final, and best instalment meanwhile takes on a meta quality. Directed by Shutter’s Banjong Pisanthanakun, it follows the action on the set of a sequel to his film Alone and stars the same actors as his segment in 4bia which Banjong Pisanthanakun humorously references while inverting its structure. After the supporting actress is taken ill, a rumour begins that she has in fact died only for her to turn up on the set provoking terror from the boys who become convinced she’s s vengeful ghost.In any case, it turns out it wasn’t the supernatural they really needed to look out for but a sleepy, overworked driver. Like Man in the Middle, the gentle camaraderie between the guys and zany humour help carry the witty tale alone as the gang start suspecting each other and acting irrationally in an attempt to escape “the ghost.” All in all, it’s a fitting way to end the series, concluding on a note of cosmic irony as the real threat turns out to be all too human and an exmplifcation of an exploitative employment culture rather than a vengeful spirit seeking revenge from beyond the grave.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Visitor Q (ビジターQ, Takashi Miike, 2001)

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As Japan emerged from post-war privation into bubble-era comfort, the family underwent something of a reassessment. Remoulding Teorema, Yoshimitsu Morita’s The Family Game had punched a hole through the concept of the family in sending in a mysterious teacher who slowly proved to them all they were merely involved in a prolonged act of performance unpinned by social convention rather than genuine feeling. Sogo Ishii’s The Crazy Family did something much the same but ultimately opted to save the family unit by allowing them to find peace literally “outside” of the contemporary rat race. And then there comes Takashi Miike who, ever the ironist, runs the whole thing in reverse as Visitor Q (ビジターQ) comes to put the family back together again by giving them permission to bond through satisfying their previously unanswered emotional needs.

As the film opens, however, patriarch Kiyoshi (Kenichi Endo) is in a hotel room interviewing a young woman as part of a documentary investigating the youth of today. She replies only that what the youth can tell him about the future of Japan is that it’s hopeless, before getting back to business and elaborating on her price list for a menu of sex acts. Though originally unwilling, Kiyoshi ends up having apparently very exciting sex with her, but comes to his senses after climaxing too early. The girl, we later learn, is his runaway daughter, Miki (Fujiko), who has been living a life of casual sex work in the city. Kiyoshi determines to pay her in full, but explains that that he’ll give the rest of the money to her mother and she must keep everything that happened between them in that room a secret (a minor problem being Kiyoshi left the camera on and ended up documenting the whole thing, something that he will repeat later but quite deliberately). 

Stunned by his transgressive encounter, Kiyoshi looks on at a happy family with a degree of confusion while a strange young man leans through the window of the train station waiting room and whacks him on the head with a rock. Before he finally arrives home, the man hits him again just to be sure, but eventually follows him for dinner where he is introduced as an “acquaintance” who will be staying with him for an unspecified amount of time. 

Kiyoshi’s household is already falling apart, and quite literally seeing as the shoji are full of holes, partly because of the attacks of the “big bullies” who torment his teenage son Takuya (Jun Muto) by launching fireworks into his bedroom, but also because the boy takes his humiliated frustration out on his mother Keiko (Shungiku Uchida) who is covered in scars from previous beatings and has taken to using heroin to escape the misery of her family and doing part-time sex work to pay for it. 

Like the intruder of The Family Game, Visitor Q gradually infiltrates the family by usurping a place within it but begins to reawaken and reinvigorate each of the members as he goes. The first thing he takes hold of is Kiyoshi’s camera, literally observing the family and helping to document the Japan of today through the eyes of this very strange yet “ordinary” family. A man of the post-bubble era, he’s another failed provider whose career continues to flounder while his home spirals out of control, shorn of paternal authority. He feels insecure in his manhood, humiliated by his tendency towards premature ejaculation, and is raped with his own microphone by the “youth of today” while trying to interview them, which leaves him, according to his boss and former lover, looking like a fool. 

Kiyoshi is convinced he can get his mojo back through career success in making himself the subject of his own documentary, or more accurately his observation of his son’s bullying which he later reveals perversely turns him on. When his boss shuts his idea down, he rapes her, feeling humiliated again in complaining that she dumped him because of the premature ejaculation and vowing to prove himself but accidentally strangling her. Meanwhile, Visitor Q is back home getting busy with the under appreciated Keiko who describes herself as neither special nor pathetic but an ordinary woman, longing to be loved and wanted. Even one of her clients, exclaiming surprise to discover that a “nice woman” like her does stuff like this, appears to have a disability fetish remarking that is feels different with someone who has a limp. Visitor Q gets her juices running again, literally, reactivating her maternity and perhaps allowing her to reclaim her position within the household. 

“I’ve never seen her so competent since we married,” Kiyoshi exclaims after she employs some top housewife logic to help him deal with his dead body problem, after which they take a rather more active stance against Takuya’s snotty bullies, pulling together to protect him in a way they never have before. Takuya may remain outside of the family hive, but he’s drenched in mother’s milk and perhaps the only one to truly recognise Visitor Q for who he is. Nevertheless, the Yamazakis are an “ordinary” family, just taken to extremes. Dad’s an emasculated salaryman broken in spirit by economic failure, mum’s an unhappy housewife lonely in repressed desire, son is an angry young man like his dad humiliated by the big boys, and daughter is a melancholy runaway who has tried to seize agency through using her body as a weapon but still feels that the future is hopeless and that her gesture may be one of self harm. Nevertheless, through the exposure of their myriad transgressions, they begin to bond in shared perversity. Thanks to Visitor Q, the family is “restored”, not “cured” but reaching its natural state of being as a collection of individuals assume their complete selves and in mutual acceptance rediscover a home.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Dongji Rescue (东极岛, Guan Hu & Fei Zhenxiang, 2025)

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If someone’s drowning, then you save them no matter what language they speak or where they come from. Such is the simple logic of the Dongji fisherman who risked their lives to rescue British prisoners of war when the boat they were travelling on was torpedoed in the waters near Zhoushan. Inspired by this historical event, Guan Hu and Fei Zhenxiang spin a tale of resistance and righteousness with an unexpected advocation for borderlessness and freedom as the two orphaned pirate brothers at the film’s centre finally find their way back to their home in the sea.

It’s Ah Dang (Wu Lei), the younger of the brothers, who fishes a British soldier out of the water and tries to rescue him, while the older, Ah Bi (Zhu Yilong), refuses and tries to throw the man back. Ah Bi may appear heartless, but considering the risk the presence of the British soldier poses to the islanders perhaps Ah Bi’s callousness is perfectly understandable. Nevertheless, Ah Dang stashes the young man, Thomas Newman, in their cabin and seems fascinated by his blue eyes and a vision of the wider world that he seems to represent. Thomas desperately tries to communicate with Ah Dang but though he knows some Cantonese cannot get through to him that there are men trapped on the sinking boat. Meanwhile, Japanese troops turn up on the nominally occupied island erroneously looking for a blond, blue-eyed man missing from the ship. Convinced the islanders must be harbouring him, they start taking hostages and executing villagers until Thomas finally knocks out Ah Dang so he can give himself up to save them.

Though the island was not in fact occupied in real life, here the villagers are placed under incredibly oppressive rule despite there only being two Japanese soldiers standing guard. The fishermen are no longer allowed out to fish and are, they say, stuck on land like turtles unable to practise their traditional crafts or way of life. Old Wu led the resistance before, but didn’t end well and now even he has been cowed into submission. The rescue is then as much for the islanders as anyone else as an act of resistance to authoritarian oppression in their following their belief that those in peril on the sea must be saved in defiance of the Japanese’s prohibition on sailing. The same is doubly true of Ah Bi’s girlfriend Ah Hua (Ni Ni), Old Wu’s adopted daughter who takes up his place and breaks a taboo about women going to sea to lead the rescue mission. 

She, Ah Bi, and his brother are all technically outsiders on the island who were never fully embraced by the community. The brothers were held at arms’ length because of their possibly pirate origins, while Ah Bi’s dream had been to escape to Shanghai with Ah Hua. Ah Dang is then touched by Thomas’ constant attempts to talk to about “home” though he perhaps doesn’t quite have one while Ah Bi’s “home” more than anything else is simply Ah Dang. Rather than the expected definition of a homeland of the greater China, the brothers’ “home” is later redefined as “the sea” which is to say a place of boundless freedom where national borders don’t exist. 

These elemental origins also give the brothers a mythical quality that adds to the sense of heroism in the rescue as Ah Bi goes after the Japanese and attempts to save the remaining POWs, some of whom can’t swim, marooned in the middle of the sea. The Japanese, meanwhile, are intent on covering the incident up which means everyone must die from the POWs to the residents of Dongji Island, though it isn’t really clear who the islanders would tell anyway considering that they live on a fairly remote island. In any case, the heroism of the Chinese fisherman is directly contrasted with the craven callousness of the Japanese who are still trying to pick off the POWs like fish in a barrel and only stop on realising that there are too many Chinese fisherman and if they were to kill them all it would get out and they’d look very, very bad. Epic in scope and impressively staged with some truly stunning underwater photography, there is a sense of genuine poignancy and human solidarity in standing up to oppression and cruelty no matter how ironic or jingoistic it might otherwise seem as ordinary villagers rise to up to help those from a distant land they don’t even know at the risk of their own lives and livelihoods.

Dongji Rescue opens in UK cinemas 22nd August courtesy of CineAsia.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Evil Dead Trap (死霊の罠, Toshiharu Ikeda, 1988)

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The embattled host of a late-night TV show is confronted by the image of corrupted maternity after receiving a snuff film in the mail that seems to feature herself in Toshiharu Ikeda’s body horror slasher, Evil Dead Trap (死霊の罠, Shiryo no Wana). A giallo-esque slasher echoing alternately by Argento and Cronenberg, the film is in part an exploration of changing gender norms at the height of the Bubble era in which the career woman hero is essentially stalked by a monster baby because she reminds him of a mother he for some reason hates.

Nami’s (Miyuki Ono) late night TV show “for those who can’t sleep” relies on viewers for its content, making use of newfangled VHS technology to play videos sent in to the studio. Her bosses are thinking of canning it for being too “fluffy” which might be one reason Nami does not immediately call the police after receiving a disturbing video of a woman being tortured and killed who is later revealed to have her own face. Instead, she gets the all female (plus one “bodyguard” who is the boyfriend of one of the team) crew together and heads out to the abandoned US military base which appears to feature in the video. 

At several points, the women remark on how difficult it is for them working in the TV industry where they need a big story just to earn their place in their room. Nami even jokes that if she were to die investigating the tape it would only boost the ratings while simultaneously putting her life on the line for the sake of her career. Meanwhile, we later realise that Nami is being targeted in part because the killer, who has a child’s voice, thinks she looks like his mother whose voice is frequently heard playing on a loop via reel to reel tape. He later attempts to kill Nami by wrapping what appears to be an umbilical cord around her neck, while she is finally subjected to a forced birth as maternity is visited on her almost as an act of rape even as she resists it. It could even be said that she is a kind of mother to the group, and one who ultimately fails to take care of family as each of her team falls victim to one of the traps set by the killer.

Meanwhile, the film adopts a slasher-esque morality in which the first victim is killed shortly after having sex with her “bodyguard” boyfriend, assistant director Kondo (Masahiko Abe), who had up until that point been suffering with erectile dysfunction only to be sexually revived thanks to the violent and eerie space of the abandoned military base. Another of the women attempts to leave the compound, but is caught by a random man claiming to be working for the killer who violently rapes her but also strangely answers some of her questions about what’s really going on as he does he does so. Nami is also less than shocked by the video after putting it in the machine, giving a response which suggests it’s not unusual to receive this kind of material or to witness such brutal treatment of women. 

The killer does indeed make good and ironic use of new technology, at one point putting one of the victims on TV begging for their life to taunt Nami and having a giant set up featuring several screens plus the reel to reel tape. A mysterious man also lurking around the military base suggests to Nami that the sender of the video is likely a crazed stalker, a pervert who wanted to see her naked who lured her to this remote location and then murdered all her friends when actually it’s almost the reverse that’s true and Nami is being targeted both for and not being a mother. Often switching to a Testuo-style shuttling camera and blue-tinted filter, Ikeda enlivens his genre adventure with interesting composition and a fantastic use of lighting right down to the oscillating blue police light in the killer’s lair as Nami attempts to retake control of her image and escape the penetrating gaze of her audience along with the patriarchal cage of an oppressive society.

Trailer (dialogue free)

Ghost in Love (자귀모, Lee Kwang-hoon, 1999)

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Caught in limbo, a young woman finds herself torn between the desire for revenge and letting go in Lee Kwang-hoon’s supernatural drama, Ghost in Love (자귀모, Jagwimo). Is love really what Chae-byul (Kim Hee-sun) was in, or is it more the sense of humiliation that’s she’s carried into the afterlife while obsessing over her cheating ex-boyfriend who was two-timing her with the boss’ daughter? Her colleague Kantorates (Lee Sung-jae), by contrast, had a love that was purer and reminds her that though it’s painful, if she really loved him, she’d be rooting for her ex’s future happiness rather than plotting how to mess up his life. 

Then again, the Korean title is “Suicide Ghost Club” and refers to the group into which Chae-byul is press-ganged after two of its grim reaper agents help her on her way having overheard her say she wanted to die because of all the romantic drama in her life. This literal purgatorial space located between heaven and hell is run like an exploitative company/cult in which the only metric of success is claiming more members. Chae-byul is warned that she doesn’t really have any choice but to join them, because otherwise she’ll become a vengeful spirit and lose all her memories, though she’s drawn to a mysterious presence known as Pale Face who does indeed become a terrifying spirit of vengeance, taking revenge primarily on the men who gang raped her while her fiancé, who later dumped her, looked on helplessly.

There is a kind of misogyny that’s most obvious in the afterlife but exists in the real world too. The film opens with a woman about to take her own life because of persistent fat shaming. She’s fat shamed by the grim reapers too and on into the afterlife, though in ghost form it’s revealed that she could be skinny if she wanted but is happiest in herself like this. Meanwhile, the grim reappears make other suggestive comments, leering over Chae-byul and remarking that a girl should have nice hips. Pale Face took her own life because of the trauma of her rape, the stigma of being a rape victim, and the betrayal of her fiancé who she says broke up with her because he thought that she was tainted. Even in the afterlife, she’s constantly washing in an attempt to make herself clean which is why she’s become so pale. 

Despite being told primarily from Chae-byul’s perspective, the film more or less normalises her boyfriend’s sexist views and behaviour in which he sees nothing really wrong with two-timing each of the women. Chae-byul tries to confront him, but he tells her Hyun-ju (Kim Si-won) was only visiting “to check on her stock transactions,” and shifts the blame onto Chae-byul for being paranoid and unreasonable. He says he liked her because she was “nice and comfortable,” but now she’s changed, so if she’s going to carry on “nagging” him like this, he may as well break up with her. HIs domineering attitude and characterisation of Chae-byul as a crazy girlfriend have the desired effect of causing her to back down and apologise to him. He may be a bit pathetic and materialistic in dating the boss’ daughter solely for advancement claiming it was his only chance to get on, but his behaviour isn’t really regarded as being particularly negative while Chae-byul’s desire for vengeance is, belittled in part because it involves disrupting not only his bright future but pointlessly harming Hyun-ju too.

Then again, perhaps these attitudes are intrinsic to the latent authoritarianism of the afterlife which is governed by the mysterious “messengers” who punish the transgressions of wandering ghosts. One grumpily rants about now having to work for a living, unlike in the old days in which some people would even try to bribe them for a longer life which they don’t do anymore in an allusion to Korea’s recent democratisation. The Messengers From Hades have a serious whiff of the KCIA mercilessly pursuing those who threaten to destabilise the system and then “disappearing” them. Nevertheless, Chae-byul eventually begins to come around to Kantorates point of view while quietly falling for him even as he struggles to move on from his own lost love. He knows he can’t be with her any more, but needs to find a way to tell her to move on so that he can do the same. A strange twist of fate gives them another chance at life and at love to live without wanting to die and try to find happiness even in a world of financial anxiety where consumerist desire has replaced spiritual fulfilment.

Gowok: Javanese Kamasutra (Gowok: Kamasutra Jawa, Hanung Bramantyo, 2025)

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There’s an essential contradiction at the centre of Hanung Bramantyo’s spicy romantic melodrama Gowok: Javanese Kamasutra (Gowok: Kamasutra Jawa) in that, on the one hand, the gowok is said to exist so that men learn how satisfy their wives’ sexual desires. Which is to say, the sexual desires of women are recognised and approved rather than denied or taboo while men are expected to live up to satisfying them as part of what it means to be a proper man. But at the same time, women are constrained by the patriarchal institution of marriage, have few rights of their own, and are largely unable to live independently while lacking status as anything other than a man’s wife. 

Indeed, the inserting of increasingly outdated notions of sex and class that stand in the way of romance and set the tragic events in motion rather than the black magic to which many attribute the looming crisis. Years before, Jaya’s mother had been in love with the soon-to-be king, but he couldn’t marry her because she wasn’t of sufficiently noble birth. She agreed to step aside and marry a mutual friend on the condition he would be given high office and her son would marry into royalty so that she would be a queen in all but name and their family would enter the royal bloodline.

Now a university student, Jaya (Devano Danendra / Reza Rahadian) is sent to a gowok to make a real man out of him, though as he explains to his father, that’s not what a real man is. Jaya is a young man of the new Indonesia who believes in things like equality of the sexes and the breaking down of the old class system even if he maintains his privilege in other ways, including submitting himself to the gowok. Nevertheless, while he’s there, he falls in love with the adopted daughter of his gowok Santi (Lola Amaria), Ratri (Alika Jantinia / Raihaanun), and makes her a lot of promises about the future while introducing her to the women’s movement in 50s Indonesia that offers her the vision of a different future in which she might become an independent woman rather than being forced to become a gowok herself. To become a gowok necessarily means that she would not be able to marry. Most gowok adopt children to succeed them. Accidentally seeing a secret ritual, Santi fears that Ratri has fallen victim to a pure love spell that threatens spiritual disaster should the man break his promise which, as an older woman, she knows he almost certainly will. 

Then again, that turns out not quite to be the case and the lovers are in fact betrayed by those still clinging on to to the old class system. The destructive quality of their romance is played out against the background of the screws tightening across Indonesia as anti-communist fervour takes hold and suspicion falls on the women’s groups when military generals are abducted and murdered. Despite his progressive views, Jaya ends up married to a princess at his mother’s behest, exemplifying the ways in which women try to hold on to power by exerting matriarchal control over their sons. As for the princess, she is already pregnant by her communist boyfriend but prevented from marrying him and forced to marry Jaya instead though apparently coming fall in love with him after their marriage. Meanwhile, it turns out that there is an awkward connection between Jaya and Ratri that lends their fateful meeting a tragic quality even as his mother refuses to entertain the idea of Ratri marrying her son because her mother was a sex worker and she is not of their class.

In any case, though the gowok system may not actually be that different from other folk practices, there is something uncomfortable about it in that some of the “men” are very young and do not want to be there. Though Jaya, who is also sent there against his will, is in university and falls for Ratri who is around the same age, when his own son, Bargas, is sent to the gowok he is only around 14 and looks very childlike while ushered into “manhood” by a then 33-year-old Ratri. The system is at least potentially abusive and unethical while demonstrating how men are also ensnared by the patriarchal trap in that they too are being groomed for marriage whether they like it or not. It was in fact a man’s inability to remain faithful to the wife chosen for him that led to Ratri’s mother’s death and the activation of a black magic curse.

In any case, it turns out that human motivations can be far more damaging than any curse in the long years of anger, resentment, and misery born of misunderstandings and deliberately misdirected love. Ratri desperately tries to overcome her past and become an independent woman as a gowok but finds herself frustrated by the changing nature of society which promises so much freedom and opportunity in her youth only to immediately roll back on it while her own attempt at revenge backfires with tragic results. Poignant in its themes of tragic romance, the film quietly hints that this kind of oppression may not have really gone away even as Ratri seeks to reclaim her legacy in the 1980s-set coda by turning the gowok house into a school that educates women in a final attempt to finally free them from patriarchal control.

Gowok: Javanese Kamasutra screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Roppa’s Honeymoon (ロッパの新婚旅行, Kajiro Yamamoto, 1940)

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One of the most surprising things about Kajiro Yamamoto’s defiantly silly comedy Roppa’s Honeymoon (ロッパの新婚旅行) is how devoid it seems to be of political import with no overt patriotic content or references to the ongoing conflict even if the central messages of the necessity of enduring hardship are otherwise very on brand. Likewise and contrary to expectation, the film is clearly influenced by Hollywood comedies and heavily features American ragtime music presented largely without prejudice. 

In fact it’s the confrontation of these different influences which eventually sparks a crisis between father and son. As the film opens, beer magnate Garamasa is sitting in his bath practicing his gidayu recitation with the help of a shamisen player in an adjacent room, but his idiot son Ichiro (Roppa Furukawa) keeps singing “stupid Western songs,” which is very annoying for him but apparently not enough to actually get out of his bath which is why he rings an employee and gets him to ring Ichiro to tell him to shut up. This seems in part to be a slightly subversive gag poking fun at fat cat CEOs with Garamasa weirdly berating the staff member for being lazy and suggesting that he’s probably only just got up despite it being already 7am even if Garasama himself is still in the bath. The employee has, however, been busily at work for quite some time and spends the rest of the film toadying up to Garamasa. Later on, Yamamoto includes a similar gag in which a maid is forced to run back and forth between Ichiro’s annex and Garamasa’s office to deliver messages between the two.

In any case, Garamasa’s grand plan to get his son to be quiet is to marry him off to someone who also likes Western music which is why he visits a pair of servants he actually kicked out of the house when they decided to get married 20 years previously but have since opened a shop selling Western records. They suggest a young woman, Eiko, known as the nightingale of Japan (real life opera singer Hamako Watanabe) who is also a member of the nobility and the daughter of one of Garamasa’s friends, yet Ichiro has been seeing a young woman, Chiyo, who works in an oden restaurant and in fact finds out he is “engaged” from the same newspaper article she does. Eventually he makes the decision to run away from home and elope only to flounder while being entirely ill-equipped to live a “normal” life in which he must attempt to support himself financially.

Star Roppa Furukawa was himself a member of the aristocracy and one of a small number of performers popular enough in the 1930s that their names were often inserted into the titles of the files in which they appeared even if their characters did not share it. Roppa was well known for his rather comical face, round and a little pudgy with big round glasses which seem to capture something of the zeitgeist of the interwar years. He was also an excellent singer and the film is quite notable for its use of an ironic song in which Roppa narrates his “honeymoon” in which he and Chiyo are forced to move several times, first sitting in their living room on the back of a truck before their belongings slowly decrease from truck to cart to hand. Chiyo is eventually forced to return to work at the oden restaurant while the relationship suffers because of Ichiro’s refusal to do a common man’’s job. Ironically, he is disturbed by the singing of Eiko who lives close by and on visiting to tell her to be quiet is talked into buying a pair of charity concert tickets.

Chiyo actually approves because she doesn’t like the idea of people looking down on them for not having the money to pay, but is then jealous, insisting that she’ll pay for the tickets herself while forbidding Ichiro to go. It’s this that forces him to accept a job he previously thought demeaning as the leader of a marching band singing a ragtime-themed jingle for a brand of toothpaste. All of this absurd silliness might be thought too trivial for the early 1940s in which censorship concerns usually some kind of patriotic content (aside from gidayu) but there is a message to be found in Garamasa’s eventual acceptance of their relationship in which he thanks Chiyo for introducing his son to hardship and thereby making a man of him as reminding the audience that a little bit of suffering is character building though doubtless they don’t have such wealthy parents to bail them out nor can they really look forward to better days any time soon. In any case it paints a rather rosy of picture of life in the early ‘40s, harking back to a distinctly ‘30s brand of foppish comedy with Ichiro a kind of Bertie Wooster suddenly plunged into “real” life and realising being the stupid son of a CEO obsessed with gidayu recitative wasn’t so bad after all.

Travesty (Гажуудал, Baatar Batsukh, 2024)

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“One man’s screams will not fix this social travesty,” according to an exasperated police officer sent in to quell a hostage crisis in a quiet rural town in Baatar Batsukh’s Mongolian crime drama. Led by chapter headings reading The Town, The City, the Nation, The State, the film pushes deeper towards the centre of corruption in an indifferent society in which the lives of citizens are barely valued and the authorities will do little to protect them. Indeed, the hostage taker’s claims that he will kill one person an hour seems to stand in for the slowly ticking time bomb of governmental indifference.

Or at least, that’s how it seems to Davaa whose teenage son keeps ringing him but he can’t help because he’s so far away on a case. His absent paternity seems to echo the ways in which the old have abandoned the young. The hostage taker turns out to be a young man who feels left out and hopeless. Rendered mute during his military service, he tried to sue the government but couldn’t while his mother, who worked for the government her whole life, ruined her health doing so and then was unfairly denied a loan to pay for medical treatment. The boy’s father appears to have been in the military, but is otherwise not around leaving him alone after his mother’s death having lost pretty much everything, which is why he takes revenge by holing up in the hospital with 20 hostages and asking 1 billion Mongolian tugrik a person. He’s clearly putting a price on a human life, but then so is the government when it declares I won’t pay.

The fact that it’s the hospital he takes over obviously has knock on consequences preventing local people from accessing health care, but the government does that too. As the doctor points out, rural hospitals are understaffed and under resourced. They can only offer basic services and send more seriously ill patients to the cities, but there aren’t enough beds there either so those like the hostage taker’s mother are sent back anyway. Meanwhile, a local crook’s ageing wife goes into labour with her fourth child which will earn them a medal from the government. The pregnancy is high risk and the doctor is worried about her because all of her previous births have involved complications which endangered the life of mother and child. But the woman insists she doesn’t care about the risks and is willing to die to get the medal from the government even though it appears they won’t care very much about her child after it’s born and fulfils their aim of expanding the population. 

Her husband is well known to the local police who’ve rounded up two other petty crooks who are listening intently to the unfolding crisis from their place in the cells. These middle-aged men, one of whom is a former nurse, don’t seem to have much to do except get into trouble. The police are doing their best, but like the hospital, they’re also under staffed and under resourced. A hostage crisis in their tiny town is an absurd development they have no idea how to deal with which is why Darvaa is dispatched to deal with it. The town can’t hope to raise the money the hostage taker is asking for, while the government could but it won’t pay despite Davaa’s please that they just give the hostage taker what he wants so he’ll stop executing people. When the authorities eventually turn up, it turns out they’ve lied. They didn’t bring the money and are planning to storm the building to end the crisis quickly without giving much thought to the hostages’ lives. Taken hostage himself, their representative grovels and pleads but refuses to offer the apology Davaa suggests as a last resort to appease the hostage taker with whom he has come to sympathise. 

A late twist makes the situation all the more tragic with the boy another victim of governmental indifference which would rather kill first and then refuse to answer any questions later. They try to fob Davaa off with a promotion in return for his silence, but he refuses while implying that he doesn’t really want to talk about this whole sorry affair either and would rather to get on with his job and looking after his family. In any case, the government representative seems more concerned that Davaa will embarrass him by exposing how he grovelled and begged for his life rather the fact they acted with callous disregard for the lives of the hostages and failed to take into account the fragile mental state of the hostage taker. The travesty is then not the hostage crisis but the state of the nation in which the citizens are themselves taken hostage by an indifferent and oppressive authority which extracts its ransom but offers little in return.

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

Trailer (no subtitles)