Windows on Worlds

Love on Delivery (破壞之王, Stephen Chow & Lee Lik-Chi, 1994)

September 26, 2019by Hayley Scanlon

By the standards of ‘90s Hong Kong cinema, early Stephen Chow hit Love on Delivery (破壞之王) might seem refreshingly down to earth but make no mistake this under appreciated romantic comedy gem is as zany as you’d expect from the master of surrealist laugh a minute humour. A curious tale of cultural pollinations, Delivery once again stars Chow as an ineffectual loser trying to impress a girl but this time it’s a battle of wits he ends up winning when he unexpectedly finds himself standing up for “garbage” in the face of arrogant elitism.

The film opens not with its hero, but with judo champion Li (Christy Chung) who finds herself persistently sexually harassed by her slimy dojo leader who is apparently determined to win her because she’s the only woman capable of “throwing him over”. Seeing as his chat up lines are things like “my house is really big and my bed is really comfy come and see”, Li isn’t really interested which is why she ends up kissing in the right place at the right time delivery boy, He (not altogether against his will). He (Stephen Chow) is smitten, but Li has been looking for a “hero”, someone big, strong, and manly who can match her martial arts prowess but also respect her as a human being. Unfortunately, He is a weakling and a coward, as Li discovers when the boss of the dojo interrupts their first “date” and tries to thump He who activates his well honed coward skills and dodges the blow which lands squarely in the middle of Li’s face.

Fearing his romantic dreams have been well and truly shattered, He resolves to become stronger so he can fight back which is how he ends up meeting conman and stall owner “Devilish Muscle Man” (Ng Man Tat) who claims to be the last heir to “Ancient Chinese Boxing” as well as a close friend of Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan (only he doesn’t like to name drop). Devilish Muscle Man offers to “train” He in the ancient martial arts, for a “small” fee. Though all of Devilsh Muscle Man’s “training” is a sham, He starts to get quite good at it and eventually defeats the dojo boss whilst wearing a giant fluffy Garfield head. However, a new challenger soon enters the arena – a childhood friend of Li’s who went to Japan and has become an “elite” karate champion claims to be the mysterious Garfield head, stealing He’s thunder and Li’s heart along with it!

Chow may be in a relatively restrained mood, but there are pop-culture references and in jokes galore which eventually culminate in a Hong-Kong vs Japan standoff in which Chow ends up inheriting Devilish Muscle Man’s kung fu persona which saw him fighting in a strange costume inspired by Ultraman (or possibly Chinese Ultraman rip off Inframan). Meanwhile, the big bad – Li’s ex Duan Shui Liu (Ben Lam Kwok-Bun), dresses in an old fashioned Japanese students’ uniform and rails about the “garbage” people of Hong Kong with their “garbage” kung fu which he plans to eradicate through affirming the primacy of karate as the best and only real martial art. He’s first problem is that he actually self identifies as “garbage” – he is only a poor delivery boy working for a tiny cafe which stoops to various scams to trick its customers out of their money and/or complaining and has no real prospects of being able to lift himself out of the gutter despite his new found fighting spirit and commitment to martial arts training. Nevertheless, He decides to own his “garbage” status to stand up for all the other “garbage” people resisting “Japanese imperialism” in the only way he knows how – by using his wits to trick Duan into allowing himself to be defeated.

He, a perpetually “nice guy” who gives away not only his entire wallet but all his clothes to a homeless father, eventually defeats the forces of “elitism” through an acknowledgement of his inferior fire power and an efficient use of the skills he does have to create a confusing atmosphere of chaos which ensures his final victory. A mildly subversive tale of fighting back against “the elite”, Love On Delivery is also a hilarious romantic comedy in which the nice guy gets the girl solely by demonstrating himself brave enough to face defeat with, well if not dignity, perhaps resolve.

Currently available to stream on Netflix in the UK (and possibly other territories)

Celestial Pictures trailer (Cantonese with English/Traditional Chinese subtitles)

Night and Fog in Japan (日本の夜と霧, Nagisa Oshima, 1960)

September 25, 2019by Hayley Scanlon2 Comments

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Nagisa Oshima entered the world of filmmaking almost by chance. While studying law at Kyoto University, he’d become deeply involved in the leftist student movement and reportedly joined Shochiku’s assistant director program in 1954 solely because no other company would hire him. His path there too was hardly typical and saw him become a leading light of the studio’s extremely temporary bid to play Nikkatsu at their own game with a series of gritty youth dramas which included the melancholy Cruel Story of Youth and infinitely bleak The Sun’s Burial. It was his fourth film, however, which proved the most controversial perhaps unexpectedly given its otherwise dry subject matter. Named for Alain Resnais’ incendiary documentary, Night and Fog in Japan (日本の夜と霧, Nihon no Yoru to Kiri) was pulled from cinema screens following the assassination of the leader of Japan’s Socialist Party by a right-wing nationalist just three days after the film’s release.

Oshima’s film is in itself an attack on the left, though one from an entirely different angle. The failure of the student movement would become a preoccupation for the left-leaning avant-garde movement of the early ‘70s, but one could argue that though the movement had been dealt a huge blow by the failure to stop the renewal of the ANPO treaty despite the mass protests of 1960 it had not yet “failed”. Indeed, protests continued and intensified throughout the 1960s until weakened by a government crackdown in the run up to the treaty’s renewal in 1970 and were only really ended by the horror exposed by the Asama-Sanso Incident in 1972.

In a strange way, Oshima’s impassioned attack on the misguided rigidity of radical student politics almost presages the dark place into which the movement would eventually fall through the already emergent generation gap between the earnest contemporary students keeping up the fight, and the jaded post-war generation who have long since given up the struggle for bourgeois comforts. He opens, of all places, at a wedding notable for its solemnity as a young student radical, Reiko (Miyuki Kuwano), weds a newspaper reporter, Nozawa (Fumio Watanabe), she met at the climatic June 15 protest. The wedding is later interrupted by two melancholy outsiders – one the leader of the students currently on the run from the police, and the other an older man coming in from the cold, though both with the intention of confrontation.

As we might have assumed, the younger man, Ota (Masahiko Tsugawa), is not the jilted lover of the bride. It’s the revolution he’s come to accuse her of betraying through her rejection of their comrade, Kitami – missing since the failed raid on the Diet building, whom Ota assumes to have been her lover now thrown over for the “cage” of family. Reiko’s “betrayal” is mirrored in the drama between the older generation as we gradually discover the complicated history between the groom and Misako (Akiko Koyama), the dejected wife of the current head of the Socialist Party, Nakayama (Takao Yoshizawa).

The demands of ideological purity are mirrored in the strangely moralistic attempts to police female desire in suggesting that both women have made “practical” choices at the expense of their personal integrity. The major drama, however, revolves around the older students’ overreaction to having caught a “spy” in their dorm, keeping him imprisoned while they try to bully him into betraying his true masters. One student however, Takao (Masahiro Sakon) – nursing an unrequited crush on Misako, refuses to believe the man is guilty and is thereafter accused of betraying the movement by allowing him to escape. Takumi (Ichiro Hayami), the second ghost at the feast, has come to ask if it was the movement which betrayed Takao by ignoring his emotional fragility, causing him to abandon faith not only in it but in himself.

Throughout it all, Nakayama remains the stoical voice of authority, blaming anything negative on the nebulous figure of the “imperialists” while insisting on superficial “unity” which really means do as I say and don’t rock the boat. The students want more and they look to the older generation for guidance, but the old guard have lost the faith. Even among the youngsters, few think the cause can be won. The struggle is between those who give up, and those who keep fighting anyway for the right to “march towards a brighter tomorrow”. As a student, Nakayama had dismissed the “spy” as unworthy of their revolution because he was an uneducated worker, but now dismisses the students because they exist outside of the economic structure and therefore cannot occupy a space within a workers’ movement. This wedding, which might have been the unification bringing together the old and the new, has become a funeral that marks the death of post-war idealism, betrayed by the bourgeois need for respectability. The students know their movement will fail, but they move anyway. Nakayama, meanwhile, makes speeches about unity to his dejected contemporaries, berating the students for their lack of “realism” as if insisting that the route to social change lies in concession to populist conservatism.

“I feel empty and sad” the post-war students lament, watching their movement withering on the vine. Betrayed by the older generation, the contemporary students have no role models to follow and no real hope for the future, but still they fight on earnestly. A fierce condemnation of political hypocrisy, dogmatic rigidity, and bourgeois paternalism, Night and Fog in Japan sees no way out of its existential malaise as its would-be-revolutionaries remain lost in a fog confusion with no exit in sight.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

A Dobugawa Dream (ドブ川番外地, Asato Watanabe, 2018)

September 24, 2019September 24, 2019by Hayley Scanlon

Can you outrun sorrow or should you just accept defeat and remain within a bubble of despair? Forced out of his self-isolation, the hero of Asato Watanabe’s debut feature A Dobugawa Dream (ドブ川番外地, Dobugawa Bangaichi) tries to find out, looking for a home among those who’ve fallen through the cracks. This down and out ditch town maybe where you end up when you don’t know where else to go, but there’s comfort in knowing others got there before you, if not so much in realising that they have all failed to leave, either accepting the imperfect present in rejection of a possible future, or wilfully residing in the past.

Highschooler Tatsumi (Yuwa Kitagaki) is a lost young man filled with pent-up rage and frustration. He hasn’t filled in his career survey because he has no idea what to put in it and no amount of irritated cajoling from a less than well-meaning teacher is likely to change that. His only outlet is the dream of sailing away with his best friend on the makeshift raft they’ve crafted from refuse at a disused boatyard, but that dream dies when he discovers him hanging, barefoot his body swaying in the breeze. Unable to process his loss and the guilt that accompanies it, Tatsumi imprisons himself in his room watching VHS tapes of old TV shows until a series of angry voices from the other side of the door eventually forces him out of his place of safety and into a strange new world.

Running blindly, Tatsumi wanders through a dream until he is eventually engulfed by a cheerful street funeral which turns out to be in honour of a man still alive – Tsuchiro, a middle-aged former shogi champ now a drunken rogue and what passes around here for a guardian spirit. Questioned by the local bobby, Tsuchiro passes Tatsumi off as his own son, a ruse no one believes but one with a grain of truth. In Tsuchiro, an infinitely cool presence all sunshades, yukata, and shit-eating grin, Tatsumi finds both a father figure and a double. Just as he is chasing the ghost of a friend he couldn’t save, Tsuchiro is in flight from himself, uncertain of his own identity now he no longer sees it reflected in the eyes of an opponent.

Trapped in this strange netherland, Tsuchiro has chosen oblivion. He drowns his sorrows but secretly plays shogi alone by nights while Tatsumi listens in silent consternation from the next room as his tiles click down on the bloodied board. Originally reluctant, Tatsumi finds himself becoming the older man, dressing in the cast-off clothes of the street and drinking himself out his sorrow but quickly becomes disillusioned with what he sees as Tsuchiro’s hypocrisy. The older man offers him a home among those who have nowhere else to go, but the wily bar hostess, though trapped herself, cautions him that he might not want to stay here, among the perpetually lost, for evermore.

A climactic argument sees Tsuchiro offer some tough love, telling Tatsumi that if he wants to stay he needs to leave his darkness at the door, but Tatsumi doesn’t want the superficial solution the older man has found. He’s angry, and he’s powerless, and not yet ready to face his pain but there are other people he will fail to save precisely because of his solipsistic rage – a lesson age tried to teach him but he was too impatient to see. Further loss and an altruistic act of sacrifice push him towards a reckoning in a deeper dream which allows him to interrogate the ghosts of the traumatic past and, perhaps, make his peace with them.

Alternating between bleak despair and absurd humour, A Dobugawa Dream takes its broken hero on an oneiric odyssey through grief, despair, and eventual rebirth as he learns to reconnect with the world around him and prepares to sail away from the traumatic past into the dreamed of future. Escaping the Dobugawa dreamscape, he takes its wisdom with him, no longer running but moving forward all the same. A beautifully composed and remarkably assured debut from Asato Watanabe, A Dobugawa Dream is both a tale of marginalised lives and the corrosive effects of unresolved trauma, and a gentle hymn to the sadness of letting go.

A Dobugawa Dream made its international premiere at Raindance 2019 courtesy of Third Window Films.

Teaser trailer

Burning Mountain (山불 / 산불, Kim Soo-yong, 1967)

September 23, 2019by Hayley Scanlon

In his 1965 film The Seashore Village, Kim Soo-yong had presented a broadly positive vision of a community of women who had learned to survive without men by supporting each other. 1967’s Burning Mountain (山불 / 산불, Sanbul, AKA Flame in the Valley) revisits a similar theme but with much less positivity. This time around, the women have been deprived of their men not because of nature’s cruelty, but because of man-made corruption. Set during the Korean War, Burning Mountain finds a collection of wounded, lonely women condemned by patriarchal social codes and hemmed in by political strife not of their making struggling against their baser instincts as they determine to survive in an often hostile environment.

A small village near Jirisan has lost all of its men. Pressed by communist guerrillas for food, the lone women are hungry and afraid. Consequently, they are often at each other’s throats and united only in a shared futility of waiting for men they are almost certain will never return, either because the war has taken them or they have taken the opportunity to seek a better kind of life. The drama begins when Jum-rye (Ju Jeung-ryu) discovers a communist deserter, Kyu-bok (Shin Young-kyun), hiding in the bamboo grove and is seduced by him, satisfying her long repressed desire and escaping her loneliness through a transient bond with a captive man.

Unlike the fishwives of The Seashore Village, the women of Burning Mountain are a more conservative bunch though they too are largely unafraid to talk plainly of their unanswered desire in the absence of men. Rather than embracing each other as the fishwives had, the mountain women allow their sexual frustrations to make them bitter and irritable, forever at each other’s throats and unable to let go of past grievances. They dwell on the possibility of escape, but do not believe it to be real. One of the younger, unmarried women, talks of going to the city to find work as a maid but is confronted by a world of checkpoints and soldiers which restricts both her movement and her freedom in ways she is ill-equipped to understand.

The village stands as a tiny enclave, caught between North and South, part of both and neither as if lost in some eternal netherland. The bamboo grove represents the innocent natural freedoms which have been taken from the villagers by civilisation and by later by the folly of men and war. It’s in the bamboo grove that Jum-rye first encounters Kyu-bok in a meeting which begins as rape but ends in seduction as Jum-rye surrenders herself to a rough stranger in desperation and loneliness. The affair continues and relations between herself and the other women improve until Sawol (Do Kum-bong), a woman with whom she’d been on bad terms because their absent husbands had been on different sides, discovers Kyu-bok’s existence and blackmails the pair into allowing her to make sexual use of him in order to ease her own frustration.

Roles interestingly reversed, Kyu-bok takes exception to his new status as a kept man, resenting the feeling that he is nothing more than a pet, breeding stock kept to scratch an itch. Nevertheless, he stays while the women, increasingly conflicted, urge him to turn himself in to the authorities sure that if he explains himself they will not treat him harshly. Already emasculated in having been forced into the mountains against his will, Kyu-bok remains impotent in all ways other than the sexual, pleading with Jum-rye that she let him stay in the bamboo grove “until the world gets better”.

Sadly, the world shows little sign of doing that, though thanks to their shared transgression a strange kind of camaraderie arises between former enemies Jum-rye and Sawol, now disposed towards female solidarity having eased their own frustrations. They want to trap Kyu-bok and keep him for themselves, but at the same time they dwell on the idea of the unseen woman waiting somewhere for him just as they are waiting for their menfolk and know they cannot have him for long. Where the constant refrains of “we are all the same” had rung somewhat hollow, they ring true now in the two women’s commitment to a woman they don’t know who is, in some senses, their rival.

Yet, the liminal space of the bamboo grove cannot be allowed to stand in the increasingly straitened future. Already subversive in his frank depiction of female desire, Kim subtly undercuts the austerity of the times in making accidental villains of the South Korean army who arrive to burn the bamboo grove down to smoke out the guerrilla fighters, taking from these women the symbol of their freedom in the natural pleasure of the forest. The cowardly communist, while fulfilling the demands of the censors’ board, is both passive victim of his times and a representative of the frustrated masculinity which has caused them in the first place. The corruption of the war has come to the bamboo grove and set light to the last vestiges of hope in taking from these already impoverished women their very source of life. A sorry tale of despair and futility, Burning Mountain spins a tale of weak men and resilient women whose solidarity is bought through a mutual satisfaction cruelly ended by an austere and unforgiving regime.

Burning Mountain is available to stream online via the Korean Film Archive’s YouTube Channel.

Bento Harassment (今日も嫌がらせ弁当, Renpei Tsukamoto, 2019)

September 22, 2019by Hayley Scanlon

Childhood’s a funny thing. Obviously lacking life experience and used to being the centre of someone’s universe, children can be curiously self-centred, little knowing the hard work their parents put in to try and make them happy until they suddenly realise years later that their mothers must have toiled through the night just to finish that costume for fancy dress that they didn’t really want to wear. Fed up with her teenage daughter’s sullen indifference, the heroine of Bento Harassment (今日も嫌がらせ弁当, Kyo mo Iyagarase Bento) comes up with an ingenious solution – increasingly elaborate lunchboxes designed to vent her frustration in a way that’s impossible for her daughter to ignore.

12 years previously Kaori (Ryoko Shinohara) was blissfully happy with her two little daughters, Wakaba (Rena Matsui) and Futaba (Kyoko Yoshine), but then her husband was killed in an accident and her life was turned upside down. Now she lives alone with her youngest daughter Futaba who has entered something of a rebellious phase, never directly talking to her mother but communicating through pithy, passive aggressive texts. In a bid to get her attention, Kaori decides to play her at her own game – by becoming so annoying that she’s impossible to ignore. From the day that Futaba enters high school she commits herself to making one “annoying” bento every day, eventually adding a message or two into the mix. Much to Futaba’s chagrin, her mother’s bento becomes a cause of daily excitement among her school friends who can’t wait to see how her mother has chosen to troll her on this particular day.

Perhaps tellingly, Kaori and her daughters live on a small island, Hachijojima, which is technically classed as “Tokyo” though in another sense almost as far from the bustling metropolis as it’s possible to get. There are no trains, or shopping malls, or convenience stores, just cows and wholesome wisdom. Caught between one thing and another, Futaba quits her after school athletics club to sit in a field and write angsty poetry about how she’s all alone in the universe. She doesn’t understand why her mum’s so extra and is confused by her attraction to a childhood friend (Kanta Sato) who has now become buff after developing an obsession with taiko drumming. Beginning to figure out why her daughter’s so moody lately, Kaori doubles down on the annoying bento plan but tries to put a little guidance in there too to push the indecisive Futaba towards making concrete decisions about her future.

Unlike the typically self-sacrificing mothers of “hahamono”, Kaori has her spiky side and never particularly looks for thanks or recognition from her daughters only basic civility. She works two jobs (one in a bento shop and another in a pub) and still makes time to devote herself to the petty art of annoying bento which she also posts online on a blog which becomes an instant hit with similarly stressed out parents looking for a little innocent revenge. Through the blog she finds herself bonding with Shunsuke (Ryuta Sato), a widowed father of a five-year-old boy who is struggling to perfect the art of bento though his aim is less revenge than trying to bond with his son who obviously misses his mum. Yet even “annoying” bento comes from a fundamental place of love – after all, you don’t spend all night cooking to send a passive aggressive message to someone you don’t like. Rising to the challenge, Futaba refuses to admit defeat and makes a point of eating all of the annoying bento without a word of complaint, allowing a kind of communication to arise between herself and her extremely patient mother.

Seeing all her dreams crushed on one extremely bad day, however, makes Futaba lose faith in her mother’s gentle wisdom. Kaori tries to convince her that nothing’s ever really “wasted” because even when things don’t work out the way you hoped they still teach you something else but that’s a hard lesson to learn when you’re young and unused to disappointment. Nevertheless, thanks to her mother’s relentless trolling and some careful words from her sister, she comes to realise just how much her mother has sacrificed on her behalf and understand her mother’s love. A warmhearted tale of mother daughter bonding and an ode to persevering through life’s various difficulties, Bento Harassment is a wholesome treat and inspirational tribute to living life without regrets.

Bento Harassment screens in Chicago on Sept. 27 as part of the ninth season of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Wuthering Heights (嵐が丘, Kiju Yoshida, 1988)

September 21, 2019by Hayley Scanlon

“In this decadent age, who believes in the gods’ anger?” asks a cynical priest, willingly inviting evil into his home in the hope of brokering a change in his constraining circumstances. A key figure of the avant garde, Kiju (Yoshishige) Yoshida, like many of his contemporaries, struggled in the heavily commercialised cinema industry of the 1970s and beyond, finding the international arena more receptive to his arthouse concerns. 1988’s Wuthering Heights (嵐が丘, Arashi ga Oka), a distinctly Japanese take on Emily Brontë’s classic novel, found funding in France where it perhaps neatly sits alongside superficially similar efforts from his similarly constrained contemporaries, but as always Yoshida’s vision is darker, more disturbing than that of the big budget epics which aimed to recapture golden age glories.

Yoshida swaps the desolate Yorkshire moors for a smokey hellscape settled in ash on the side of an unpredictable volcano. The Yamabes are a priestly family in charge of conducting various rituals to keep the serpent god happy, preventing an eruption and ensuring good rains. The house is spilt in two with a feud underway between the East mansion and the West. The East mansion is where we lay our scene as old Yamabe returns from an extended sojourn in the city, bringing back with him a feral child he found starving under a bridge and later names “Onimaru” (Yûsaku Matsuda) in honour of his “demonic” appearance.

“Demonic” maybe an unkind word to use about any child and primed to become a self-fulling prophecy, but as someone later puts it Onimaru “does not belong to this world”. He is “an evil man” whose “cruelty knows no limits”, yet two women are drawn into his orbit and find themselves unable to break free of his passionate intensity. His step-sister, Kinu (Yuko Tanaka), our Cathy stand-in, bonds with him in childhood feeling a kind of elemental connection perhaps forbidden to her as a woman of feudal Japan subject to the whims of male society. Yet she alone sees through him to humanity buried below, “your curse is the proof you will never stop loving me” she offers darkly while seducing him the night before her marriage to another man (Tatsuo Nadaka). Later that man’s sister (Eri Ishida), positioning herself as potential bride, cites the fact that he is “consumed by jealousy” as further proof that he is more man than demon, but Onimaru himself seems uncertain so deep is he in rage and resentment.

That resentment is perhaps as much about class as about anything else. A feral child, living like an animal on the streets of an unforgiving city, he’s an ill fit for the rarefied mansion of a local lord with a spiritual mission, albeit one which imprisons him in his home and forbids him from associating with the world below. Yamabe took him in for his “boldness”, actively seeking his demonic dynamism while his own son, Hidemaru (Nagare Hagiwara), remains disappointingly conservative and wedded to his old-fashioned elite entitlement. Hidemaru’s resentment of Onimaru is not so much born of parental rejection in his father’s abrupt decision to go out and find a more satisfactory son than the one dutifully waiting at home, but irritation in Onimaru’s irregular status. He resents that a mere “peasant”, a man who should be among the servants, is permitted to share his space, and it seems, has usurped his position in his father’s eyes to be groomed as an heir to the illustrious Yamabe name.

Hidemaru eventually leaves in disgust, setting off to make a conventionally successful life for himself in the city, latterly returning with a wife and son to claim his birthright only after his father’s death. Yet Hidemaru suffers too. His wife is raped and murdered by bandits, agents of chaos and yet a product of the system he was so keen to uphold, leaving him a drunken, dissolute figure unable to fulfil his obligations to the god of fire while Onimaru prospers in a violent world and is eventually gifted that which he most wanted – stewardship of the Yamabe clan.

Even so, he cannot fully possess Kinu who remains lost to him, ruined by her own internal conflict between individualism and obedience. After coming of age, her father tells her women of the Yamabe clan must leave the mountain to serve as priestesses in the shrine, but Kinu wants to “live as a true woman”. She cannot have Onimaru, but does not want to leave him so she engineers a marriage with the rival West mansion and the kindly Mitsuhiko who brands his house as one of light as opposed to the gloomy shadows of the East. Kinu has attempted to seize her own future, at least in part, but finds herself conflicted, torn between her affection for Mitsuhiko who is gentleness personified and her need for Onimaru’s brooding intensity.

Yet Yoshida’s Wuthering Heights is less a story of forbidden, transgressive loves than it is of elemental destruction, the anger of the gods manifested as imploded repression and its fiery aftermath. Yamabe, the father figure, brings “evil” into his home, infecting it with dark desire and deep resentments seemingly in the knowledge it will burn it to the ground. The third generation, orphaned and finally independent, are left to make what restitution they can and so the tale begins to reset and repeat with cousins, Hidemaru’s grown and now subjugated son Yoshimaru (Masato Furuoya), and Kinu’s fiesty daughter (Tomoko Takabe), returning their ire to the force of their oppression – Onimaru, still fearsome and implacable though ageing and maddened by his unanswerable love for a dead woman whose corpse he has begun to covet.

Kinu, on her deathbed, promised to drag Onimaru to hell (assuming they weren’t already there) if only to protect her new family and finally does just that as he finds himself expelled by the next generation, dragging a coffin off into the fiery distance. “In every way, our world is accursed” insists an exasperated retainer. Everything here is corrupt, rotten, suppurating under the weight of oppressive traditions which restrict freedom and insist on order at the price of humanity. Yoshida’s noh-inspired aesthetics add to the atmosphere of fable as his embattled protagonists attempt to reconcile their natures with their civility but find there is no answer for repressed desire other than destruction and eventual rebirth.

Aberdeen (香港仔, Pang Ho-cheung, 2014)

September 20, 2019by Hayley Scanlon

Families, eh? Too much history, not enough past. In Aberdeen (香港仔), Pang Ho-cheung applies his cheeky magic to the family drama, taking a long hard look at an ordinary collection of “close” relatives each with individual secrets, lies, and hidden insecurities which could destroy the whole at any given second. Fishermen driven ashore by the tyranny of “progress”, these troubled souls will need to decide in which direction to swim – “home” towards sometimes uncertain comforts, or away towards who knows what.

Grandpa Dong (Ng Man-tat), a Taoist priest, lost grandma a long time ago and is now in a relationship with Ta (Carrie Ng), a night club hostess. Dong’s son Tao (Louis Koo Tin-lok), a celebrity motivational speaker, does not entirely approve, feeling that the slightly taboo nature of Ta’s profession tarnishes his own veneer of glamour and may eventually cause him a public image crisis. Meanwhile, Tao’s wife Ceci’s (Gigi Leung Wing-kei) showbiz career is floundering now that she’s no longer as young as she was and she finds herself slipping into the seedier aspects of the business as her manager encourages her to “entertain” wealthy men to secure roles while her friend keeps inviting her to paid “parties”. Dong’s daughter, Wai-ching (Miriam Yeung), is married to a doctor, Yau (Eric Tsang Chi-wai), who unbeknownst to her is involved (unlikely as it seems) in a passionate affair with his nurse (Dada Chan) which she seems to think is more serious than it is.

Dong laments that his family can’t seem to stand being in the same room for more than a few seconds before someone ruins the whole thing with a stupid argument which might be a fairly common phenomenon in many families, but he worries that it’s all down to the fact that his ancestors were fishermen and now they’re paying for the bad karma of having killed all those fish. In fact, bad karma was one of the reasons his dad got him apprenticed to a relative who trained him up to be a Taoist priest so he could atone for generations of sin but it seems like the well ran far too deep.

Each of our protagonists is individually insecure, lacking the confidence that their family members truly accept them. Tao, vain and deeply cynical, doubts his daughter Chloe (Lee Man-kwai), whom he insists on calling “Piggy”, is really his because he thinks she isn’t very pretty and doesn’t fit with his slick, celebrity image. Nevertheless, he does love her deeply and worries that she will suffer in the long term through her lack of looks though this too is partly a self-centred projection stemming from long buried guilt over having bullied another “plain” girl while they were at school. He is also blind to the effect his constant references to Chloe’s supposed plainness are having on his wife, Ceci, who is carrying the scars of longterm insecurity regarding her appearance on top of the difficulties she is facing in her career.

Wai-ching’s problems run a little deeper in that she is convinced her mother stopped loving her after a slightly embarrassing childhood incident. The past literally returns to haunt her in the form of some paper offerings she made to her mother’s spirit which have been mysteriously sent back “return to sender” by the Hong Kong Post Office. Wai-ching’s mental instability seems to be a worry to her husband, but not so much so that he can’t just forget about it when his nurse comes calling with one of her cute little notes announcing that she’s in the mood.

Dong and Yau are in similar positions, each identifying with the figure of a beached whale – all washed up with nowhere else to go. As Dong puts it, as soon as you’re beached a part of you at least has died. Each of the older men has to accept that a choice has already been made and the energy needed to change it is no longer available. Pang allows each of the family members to find some kind of individual resolution, the family seemingly repaired as they chow down on generic fast food without making too much of a fuss, but then their solutions to their issues are paper thin and perhaps the family itself is merely the ribbon that flimsily binds an imperfectly wrapped gift that everyone has to pretend to like to avoid creating a scene. Still, sometimes the wrapping is the best part and it doesn’t do to go peeking inside lest you get a disappointing surprise.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

The Enchantment (誘惑者, Shunichi Nagasaki, 1989)

September 19, 2019by Hayley Scanlon

“A broken romance affects everybody” a sympathetic psychiatrist tries to reassure a patient suffering a dangerous romantic obsession with a possibly imaginary woman. Like so much of his work, they’re soft words offered casually as a path towards something deeper but in this case it’s not the patient we need to worry about but the doctor. The aptly named The Enchantment (誘惑者, Yuwakusha), somewhat less subtly titled “Temptress” in Japanese, takes its “hero” on a dark journey into fascination, the male need for domination, and the self delusions of irresolvable disappointment.

The film opens with genial psychiatrist talking to a patient, Hirayama (Tsutomu Isobe), who proclaims himself more or less cured from a nervous breakdown born of a broken heart. Hirayama’s love affair may be largely imaginary, and he seems far from “cured”, but Doctor Sotomura’s (Masao Kusakari) failure to challenge him on his new affirmation that he’s over her because he’s realised she was “just a bitch” who treated him “like trash” might be a worrying oversight. Hirayama was supposed to be his last patient of the day, but a last minute walk-in, Miyako (Kumiko Akiyoshi), piques his interest enough to keep him in the office rather than on a planned date with his receptionist fiancée and surgeon best friend.

Miyako, nervous and reticent, tells him the appointment is “about a friend” and takes some coaxing before beginning to explain that she has been physically assaulted by her female roommate apparently jealous over the unwanted attentions of a man who developed an attraction for her at her job as a tour guide. Miyako does not spell it out, but somewhat implies that her relationship with her roommate Kimie is romantic while Sotomura has the good sense not to push the issue, only to urge her that perhaps she should think about staying with a friend a while if she doesn’t feel safe at home. Miyako, however, doesn’t want to do that and is only worried about what might have provoked this sudden and unexpected change, fearing most of all that she herself will fall out of love with Kimie if her moodiness continues to intensify.

Overstepping the mark, Sotomura is fascinated with his mysterious new patient, particularly after he becomes a kind of white night rescuing Miyako from a dangerous encounter with Hirayama who is under the delusion that she is the embodiment of his romantic obsession “Junko”. The fascination only intensifies after he makes a surprising discovery – Kimie is not “real” but a secondary personality inside Miyako. Infuriated by Sotomura’s romantic overtures, Kimie takes control and stabs him in the leg while Miyako continues to visit him in the hospital, unable to remember what exactly happened between them.

Sotomura’s obsession is both sexual and professional, after all how many sufferers of MPD is he going to meet in the course of his career? He is indeed ambitious, casually dating his receptionist Harumi (Kiwako Harada) mostly because she’s the daughter of his former professor. Though the couple live together, Harumi is constantly frustrated by his indifference to their relationship and foot dragging over making it official. Sotomura’s best friend, Shinbori (Takashi Naito), is facing much the same dilemma but has resigned himself to an arranged marriage to further his career and keep his family happy. Sotomura instinctively thinks he ought to do the same and tells Harumi that he’ll sort things out with her father, but remains fixated on the mysterious Miyako and her unconventional love life.

A more cynical friend warns him that sex is the only thing that matters and it’s essential to avoid emotional entanglements. Nevertheless, Sotomura finds himself desperate to unlock the mystery of Miyako, but it remains open to debate which part of her he wants to “fix” – her MPD, or her sexual orientation. As we find out, Sotomura might assume that Miyako’s love for another woman has driven her “mad”, but in reality it’s more that a sense of impossibility led her to believe that there was no solution to her suffering other than death. Faced with unreconcilable loss, she internalised the figure of her fixation, literally becoming one with her lost lover in order to avoid facing that she was alone once again. Uninterested in Sotomura, Miyako/Kimie becomes fascinated with Harumi who eventually becomes so intensely obsessed with Miyako that she is willing to erase her own identity and become “Kimie” for her in order to support her sense of reality and protect the integrity of the Miyako personality.

Again, Sotomura has a few issues. The first is multi-layered sexual jealousy. Now that Harumi has moved on, found someone who “needs” her, and seems to be happier he is instantly irritated that she left him (for a woman) and desperate to win her back (along with the career boost he romanced her for in the first place). He resents Harumi’s differing vision of medical care, that she is willing to embrace Miyako’s delusion in order to keep her stable while wilfully abnegating her sense of self in a profound act of love. Sotomura the clinician wants to “cure” Miyako of her delusion, but his intervention is brutal, intruding on the mental space of her traumatic memory with physical violence designed to rip her from her safety of her artificial reality. He tries to insert himself between the two women, asserting his masculine “right” to dominate, but is eventually ejected by another knife blow to the thigh as the women assert their right to their own reality in the absence of men.

A strange psychosexual odyssey, The Enchantment spins a dark tale of obsession, delusion, and jealousy but ends on a broadly positive, if perhaps uncomfortable, note, in which the dominant psychiatrist is forced to recognise his irrelevance and the legitimacy of realities outside of his own. Broken romance affects everyone, as Sotomura said, but perhaps he doesn’t have the right to intrude on the broken hearts of others or judge the various ways in which they attempt to patch them back together again. A chronicle of bubble era Tokyo bathed in garish neon and a sense of infinite possibility, Shunichi Nagasaki’s heady feature is a surprisingly subversive affair in which trauma cannot be overcome but can perhaps become integrated in a mutually beneficial whole.

London East Asia Film Festival Announces Full Programme for 2019

September 18, 2019October 17, 2019by Hayley Scanlon9 Comments

The London East Asia Film Festival returns for its fourth edition on 24th October with a screening of Korean action drama Exit. This year the festival will host a special actor focus dedicated to Hong Kong star Aaron Kwok, as well as showcasing two films from North Korea, and paying tribute to the classic samurai movie.

Opening

Exit – an unemployed rock climbing enthusiast finds himself in his element when his family is trapped by a mysterious white mist in a high rise restaurant he booked for his mother’s 70th birthday only because an old flame works there. Director Lee Sang-geun will be present for a Q&A.

China

The Wild Goose Lake – Black Coal, Thin Ice’s Diao Yinan returns with another neo noir in which a smalltime mob boss tries to survive after he kills a policeman by mistake.
Balloon – Tibetan-language drama from Pema Tseden (Jinpa) following a sheep farming family.
Send me to the Clouds – a young woman diagnosed with ovarian cancer ends up writing a biography of an entrepreneur’s father and embarking on an existential journey.
Summer of Changsha – directorial debut from actor Zu Feng in which he also stars as a policeman investigating a possible murder after a severed arm is found in a river.
The Crossing – a teenage girl faces differing kinds of crossings as she finds herself embroiled in a world of crime smuggling phones across the Hong Kong/Shenzhen border. Review.

Hong Kong

Europe Raiders – third in the “Raiders” series in which two bounty hunters go on a search for the “Hand of God”.
G Affairs – gritty social drama in which a severed head exposes the unexpected connections between a disparate group of people. Q&A with Director Lee Cheuk Pan
Still Human – touching drama in which a grumpy old man eventually bonds with his Filipina carer. Review
Three Husbands – latest from Fruit Chan in which a young woman lives a life at sea with her three husbands.
After This Our Exile – Aaron Kwok stars in Patrick Tam’s drama as a dejected husband and father who finds himself alone with his young son after his wife finally manages to leave.
Cold War – Aaron Kwok stars as an earnest ICAC agent trying to secure the release of kidnapped policemen. Plus talk with Aaron Kwok
Port of Call – Aaron Kwok stars as an eccentric detective investigating the death of a young girl in Philip Yung’s melancholy thriller. Review.
I’m Livin’ It – Aaron Kwok stars as a former finance worker rendered homeless. Closing gala with Kwok in attendance.
Butterfly – a closeted lesbian married with a child falls for a younger woman in Mak Yan Yan’s sensitive drama.
Green Snake – Tsui Hark’s take on the classic Lady White Snake legend starring Maggie Cheung and Joey Wong.

Indonesia

The Science of Fictions – a farmer wanders onto a film set where they’re filming a moon landing.

Japan

A Girl Missing – Koji Fukada reunites with Harmonium’s Mariko Tsutsui who stars as a carer implicated in a crime.
To the Ends of the Earth – Kiyoshi Kurosawa reunites with recent muse Atsuko Maeda as a lost TV presenter goes searching for herself while filming in Uzbekistan. Review.
Erica 38 – a middle-aged woman seeks chases illusionary success after getting involved with large scale fraud. Review.
The Woman Who Keeps a Murderer – Horror from Ring’s Hideo Nakata in which a traumatised woman’s world gradually collapses.
Under Your Bed – stalker drama from Mari Asato starring Kengo Kora as a lonely man obsessed with a former uni classmate now married with a child.

Korea

Long Live the King – comedy in which a mob boss aims to become president to win the heart of a woman who constantly rejects him and also save his friend who has been sentenced to death!
Another Child – teenage girls bond in unexpected friendship when they find out their parents are having an affair. Review.
Divine Fury – An MMA fighter battles his demons while teaming up with an exorcist priest! Review.
Money – a cynical stockbroker gets in over his head with an unscrupulous fixer. Review. Q&A with Director Park Noo-ri & Actor Ryu Jun Yeol.
Ms Purple – Drama set in LA’s Koreatown in which Korean-American siblings attempt to reconnect in their father’s final days.
The House of Us – Yoon Ga-eun’s The World of Us followup in which a young girl trying to get her parents to patch things up becomes a big sister figure to two other kids. Review.
The Battle: Roar to Victory – drama starring Yoo Hai-jin and Ryu Jun-yeol in which Resistance fighters in 1920 attempt to get funds to the Independence Movement in exile in Shanghai.
The House of Hummingbird – a young girl’s perspective widens when she connects with her enigmatic Chinese teacher. Review.
Tune in for Love – Romantic drama from Jung Ji-woo set in the ’90s following a baker who likes to call in to a radio requests show. Q&A with Actor Jung Hae-in
Inseparable Bros – two best friends, one who has a physical disability and the other learning difficulties, meet a woman who encourages them out into the world.
Juror 8 – comedy drama inspired by Korea’s first jury trial in which a strange young man refuses to abide by the majority opinion. Review.
The Gangster, The Cop, The Devil – Ma Dong-seok stars as a gangster attacked by serial stabber who teams up with a rogue cop to trap a serial killer. Review.
My Name is Kim Bok-dong – documentary exploring the life of “comfort woman” Kim Bok-dong who passed away last year after decades of trying to gain acknowledgement for women like herself forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese during the Second World War.
Rivercide: The Secret Six – documentary focussing on the outcome of President Lee’s Grand Canal project.
The Culprit – a man’s wife is murdered and circumstantial evidence suggests his best friend did it. He teams up with his friend’s wife to search for the truth!

North Korea

The Story of Our Home – propaganda drama about a teenage girl who adopts a series of orphans.
A Broad Bellflower – propaganda romance in which a man dreams of moving to the city while his wife wants to improve their town.

Philippines

Rainbow’s Sunset – drama in which an 84-year-old man tells his family he is gay because he wants to care for his longterm lover in his final days.

Singapore

Wet Season – Ilo Ilo’s Anthony Chen returns with a monsoon tale in which a Mandarin language teacher is drawn to one of her students. Review.

Taiwan

Cities of Last Things – tripartite story which begins with the protagonist’s suicide and then moves back to examine the events which led to it.
Nina Wu – psychological drama from Midi Z in which an actress gets her big break but is forced into uncomfortable situations by a difficult director.
Deep Evil – a top plastic surgeon is a prime suspect when a headless corpse is discovered.
Heavy Craving – a lunch lady hoping to lose weight strikes up unexpected friendships with a deliveryman and cross-dressing student.
Millennium Mambo – Hou Hsiao-Hsien drama starring Shu Qi as a young woman living in turn of the century Taipei.
The Tag-Along: The Devil Fish – spin-off to the Tag-Along series inspired by another urban legend in which fishermen notice a human face in their fish as they’re grilling it.

Thailand

The Pool – A man ends up having to clean a disused pool after a film shoot but falls asleep on an inflatable raft. When he wakes up, he finds that the water level has fallen so low he can no longer climb out. He screams for help, but the only creature to hear him is a crocodile…

Samurai Season

13 Assassins – Takashi Miike’s remake of the 1963 Eiichi Kudo classic in which 13 assassins go up against a corrupt lord.
Harakiri – Kobayashi classic from 1962 starring Tatsuya Nakadai as a ronin taking a principled stand against samurai corruption.
Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance – first in the Lone Wolf and Cub series which sees a noble samurai fall from grace and take to the road with his small son in tow. Review.
Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart at the River Styx – The second film in the Lone Wolf and Cub cycle in which Ogami is hired to take down a corrupt manager. Review.
Sword of Doom – blistering drama from Kichachi Okamoto in which Tatsuya Nakadai stars as an amoral samurai.

The London East Asia Film Festival 2019 runs at various venues in Central London from 24th October to 3rd November. Full details for all the films as well as ticketing links will shortly be available via the official website, and you can keep up with all the latest news by following the festival on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Flickr.

The Sun’s Burial (太陽の墓場, Nagisa Oshima, 1960)

September 18, 2019March 24, 2023by Hayley Scanlon2 Comments

“Love and hope for the youth!” reads a prominent sign in the middle of a hopeless slum in Oshima’s bitterly nihilistic youth drama The Sun’s Burial (太陽の墓場, Taiyo no Hakaba). Then at Shochiku, home of polite melodrama, Oshima was one of a handful of youngsters (that also included Kiju Yoshida and Masahiro Shinoda) bumped up to director ahead of schedule in an attempt to find voices who could speak to youth in much the same way Nikkatsu was doing with its incendiary tales of the new bright young things. The Sun’s Burial would be Oshima’s penultimate film for the studio before he stormed out after they pulled his next film Night and Fog in Japan from cinemas fearing its fierce critique of a divided left torn apart by dogmatic rigidity and generational conflict was too on the nose in wake of the assassination of the Socialist Party leader by a right-wing nationalist.

Set in the slums of Kamagasaki, Osaka, The Sun’s Burial follows a collection of desperate adolescents trying to survive in an intensely hostile environment. Our “hero” the conflicted Takeshi (Isao Sasaki), is inducted into a street gang after getting beaten up by young tough Yasu (Yusuke Kawazu). Along with his friend Tatsu, he is originally quite taken with the idea of becoming a gang member, but blanches when he passes a room full of captive women, one of whom is being beaten for having conceived a child.

Meanwhile, across town, his polar opposite, the cynical survivor Hanako (Kayoko Honoo) is running a blood racket, literally bleeding the proletariat to sell their bodily fluids on to the cosmetics trade. Technically operating under the aegis of her petty thug father Yosematsu (Junzaburo Ban), Hanako is in business with a doctor and a couple of minions but later has her authority undercut by a mad old imperialist known as “The Agitator” (Eitaro Ozawa) who keeps insisting that the Russians are coming and they have to be ready.

Not permitted to maintain power in her own right, Hanako is forced to shuttle between male protectors, occasionally pitting one against the other in a bid to come out on top. In addition to her blood business, she also engages in casual sex work and seemingly has no qualms about wielding her sex appeal as a weapon in order to manipulate male power. Pushed out by The Agitator, she turns to gang leader Shin (Masahiko Tsugawa) for a temporary alliance. When he too cuts her out, she thinks about tipping off the area’s big Yakuza boss, Ohama (Gen Shimizu), to Shin’s whereabouts, always looking a few moves ahead while the callous Shin remains wary and ever vigilant.

In a move which surprises and disturbs the naive Takeshi who is nevertheless captivated by her cynical self assurance, Hanako is entirely indifferent to the suffering of other women, willingly co-operating with Shin while knowing that he runs an abusive prostitution ring. Takeshi’s loss of innocence comes early when he is sent to go out and find some victims with his friend Tatsu who convinces him to club a high school boy canoodling with his girlfriend over the head so they can rob him. Takeshi looks on in mild confusion and horror as Tetsu proceeds to rape the young woman, turning to Hanako for guidance but all she does is shrug. The high school boy later commits suicide, presumably unable to bear the shame of having failed to protect his girlfriend, leaving Takeshi feeling as if he has blood on his hands. To Hanako, however, the boy’s death is no one’s fault but his own, a product of his own weakness. A strong person, she posits, would have sought revenge. What sort of person ups and dies without a fight?

Meanwhile, back in the slum, a man hangs himself after falling victim to The Agitator’s latest scam – getting involved with a dodgy gangster’s exploitative scheme to buy up legitimate IDs from desperate people and sell them to even more desperate undocumented migrant workers. Full of tales of Empire, The Agitator declares that he’s going to march them all up to Tokyo and teach those noisy students a lesson, proving somehow that populist militarism is not yet dead in quiet corners of Japan. The Agitator has several followers among the middle-aged and older denizens of Kamagasaki, taken in by his bluster and lacking any other sources of hope. They follow him because he demands to be followed and because he made them a series of promises. Only when they realise his plans rest on exploiting people even more unfortunate than they are, and suddenly realising he never got round to paying them either, do they finally rebel, burning down the slum in protest of their hopeless circumstances.

Berated for her cynicism by the now compromised Takeshi, Hanako offers only the defence that she has survived and will continue to survive where others may not if they allow their consciences to take precedence over self-preservation. Bleak as it gets, Oshima ends on with a note of anxious industry as his determined heroine dusts herself off and gets “back to work”, escaping from the ruins of the burned out slum in the bright morning sun. “No hope for Japan now” an embittered member of the older generation laments, and Oshima, it seems, is apt to agree.

Original trailer (no subtitles)