Singing Lovebirds (鴛鴦歌合戦, Masahiro Makino, 1939)

January 25, 2019by Hayley Scanlon2 Comments

With things the way they were in the Japan of 1939, you might have expected cinema to have taken a universal turn to the dark side but surprisingly enough there was still room on the silver screen for silliness as the improbable marvel of Singing Lovebirds (鴛鴦歌合戦, Oshidori Utagassen) makes plain. Legend has it that musical master of the jidaigeki Masahiro Makino threw Lovebirds together in record time in order to fill a production gap after big time star Chiezo Kataoka was struck down by appendicitis in the middle of filming On the Road with Yaji and Kita. Kataoka is also Lovebird’s nominal male star though his appearance is understandably limited (his scenes were shot later and apparently in a matter of hours) leaving veteran actor Takashi Shimura to pick up the slack as an antiques obsessed disenfranchised former samurai who finds himself at the centre of a dastardly plot orchestrated by the higher ups to solve an ongoing romantic crisis among the youngsters.

The crisis revolves around the handsome Reizo (Chiezo Kataoka) – a young ronin betrothed to a young lady from a well to do family, Fujio (Fujiko Fukamizu), whose father is keen to make the marriage official as quickly as possible. Reizo, however, has fallen for Oharu (Haruyo Ichikawa) – the daughter of ronin umbrella maker Shimura (Takashi Shimura). Meanwhile, Reizo has also become an object of affection for the daughter of a wealthy local merchant, Otomi (Tomiko Hattori), who is spoilt and entitled to the extent that Reizo’s resistance only enflames her ardour. If all that weren’t enough to be going on with, a randy local lord (Dick Mine) is also actively chasing most of the women in the area and after getting turned down by Otomi has his sights set on Oharu.

Peaceful times allow for small bursts of chaos and ongoing romantic silliness which is where we find our conflicted heroes, yet there is a persistent strain of anxiety in the precarious lives of the disenfranchised ronin who find themselves trapped in a cycle of wilful degradation which prevents them from taking on work unbefitting of a gentlemen and, consequently, permanently on the brink of starvation. Umbrella making, a frequent ronin-friendly occupation in the world of the jidaigeki, is one such way of making ends meet, but Shimura can only afford to feed his daughter barley much to her consternation. Rather than use his meagre resources for short term satisfaction he’s decided to “invest” them in various “antiques” which he believes both bolster his status and can be sold to provide a dowry for Oharu when she decides to marry.

Unfortunately, Shimura is mistaken – he’s not got as good an eye for antiques as he thought and is a well known mark for the local hawker. Everything he has is a fake and he’s wasted a small fortune on useless trinkets. Shimura’s antiques mania also leaves him open to other kinds of scams and manipulation when he gets himself into a small amount of debt to the randy lord and Fujio’s dad (Mitsuru Toyama) who have tricked him in order to try and get Oharu out of the Reizo picture and into the lord’s bedchamber. Unlike many Jidaigeki dads, however, Shimura is a nice guy and tells the higher ups where to get off because what kind of father sells his daughter for the price of a pretty tea bowl?

Shimura’s logic might not make much sense to the lords, or to many other residents of the jidiaigeki world, but is perfectly in keeping with the film’s surprisingly humanist morality in which all are made to realise that greed is bad, money is silly, and at the end of the day all that really matters is true love (even if you have to live in a hovel and survive on barley gruel for the rest of your life). Even the spoilt Otomi is finally forced to realise that you can’t force love and the best you can do is try to support other people’s happiness while you wait for yours to come along (which it is more likely to do once you start being nicer to everyone including your long suffering manservant).

Bright, cheerful, and filled with zany humour Singing Lovebirds is a refreshingly warmhearted piece of eminently hummable escapist fluff providing a much needed distraction from the austere world of 1939 in which its particular brand of anti-capitalist humanism would seem to be extremely out of place. Nevertheless, the corrupt and oppressive samurai order gets a much needed comeuppance, the little guy realises he doesn’t need to play their game anymore, and a young woman realises the only person she needed to feel good enough for was herself. A happy ending for all and an umbrella wielding dance routine to boot – who could ask for anything more?

Brief clip (extremely poor quality, no subtitles)

A Way Out (出路, Zheng Qiong, 2016)

January 24, 2019July 21, 2019by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

The duplicitous dichotomies of the modern China have become a permanent fixture in the nation’s cinema though mostly as a symbol of conflicted ideologies as some yearn for a return to an imagined past egalitarianism and others merely for a brake on the runaway train of capitalist materialism. Zheng Qiong’s documentary A Way Out (出路, Chūlù) follows the lives of three youngsters chasing the “Chinese Dream” albeit in their own particular ways only to discover that, in the end, despite the best intentions of those who might seek to lessen the advantages of privilege, birth may be the biggest factor in deciding one’s destiny.

Zheng opens with a little girl, Ma Baijuan, in rural Gansu. Her sing-song voice playing over her cheerful stride to school through the narrow mountain paths hints at a natural curiosity, a desire to know the “why” of everything, but Baijuan is only reciting by rote what it is says in her school book. Her education, which is received at a village school segregated by sex where she is one of only two little girls learning simple facts about the world around her while the boys next-door get a crash course in elementary maths, is largely a matter of questions and answers rather than thought or enquiry. Nevertheless, she excitedly tells us that she will soon be going on to the middle school in the nearest town and then hopefully to a college in Beijing after which she will make a lot of money and buy a new house for her family with a proper well so they can get water.

Meanwhile, 19-year-old Xu Jia has already repeated the final year of high school twice in the hope of bettering his exam grades to get into a good university. Like many of his contemporaries, Xu sees a degree from a reputable institution as the only “way out” of small town poverty. He is willing to sacrifice almost anything to make it happen and thinks of little else than achieving his dream of a getting a steady job at a stable company and then getting married in order to reduce the burden on his ageing single mother.

Xu may think that a white-collar job is the only path to success but others do not quite see things the same way. Yuan Hanhan is introduced to us as a 17-year-old “high school drop out” but is in fact a talented artist and bona fide free spirit. After brief stint in a hippy cafe, she eventually achieves her dream of studying abroad at art school in Germany where she struggles to adapt to the relatively laidback quality of European society, affirming that in a developed nation like Germany no one sees the need to go on developing. She complains that Germans only need to do their routine jobs like little stones arranged in a line by the country – perhaps an ironic statement given the restrictive nature of Chinese society but also one with its own sense of logic which places the insistent work ethic clung to by Xu on parallel with an economic model which may already be out of date.

Xu gets his start as a telephonist making cold call insurance sales where the staff are drilled like a military cadre to regard their pencils as machine guns as their mics as grenades, their jobs not means of survival but an enterprise for the common good which drives tax receipts to benefit the entire nation. In a sense he has found his “way out” though his life will be one of soulless corporate drudgery, a fact brought home by his mother’s casual appraisal of his wedding album which features her son in a series of intensely romantic photographs in which he has “absolutely no expression”. Meanwhile, Hanhan remains a free spirit. Even if she never quite felt at home in Germany, she maintains a healthy interest in the wider world and is determined to forge her own path rather than become simply one of many identical “little stones”. For Baijuan, however, the future is much less rosy. Her grandfather, commiserating that perhaps she didn’t have the kind of aptitude for schooling that she might have liked, regards a woman’s education as unimportant, as Baijuan’s only “way out” is a “reliable” man whom they would like to find for her as soon as possible.

As Hanhan puts it in her philosophical closing speech, when it comes down to it birth is the most important factor of all. Simply by being born wealthy in Beijing she had advantages that others do not have. Baijuan’s fate is sealed in being born to a poor farming family in a remote rural region, while Xu constantly refers to his “family situation” as the reason he feels he has to become a success as soon as possible, hitting all the social landmarks at all the expected junctures. Each of our protagonists is looking for a “way out” of their unsatisfactory circumstances, and each of them finds it, but perhaps not quite in a way everyone would view as ”satisfactory”. Zheng’s vision of the new China is one in which the old ideology has failed, leaving behind it only an entrenched social hierarchy from which there may be no “way out” save a willing refusal to comply.

A Way Out was screened as part of the Chinese Visual Festival’s New Year programme at the BFI Southbank and is also available to rent online via Vimeo.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Boyhood (少年期, Keisuke Kinoshita, 1951)

January 23, 2019by Hayley Scanlon1 Comment

It’s easy to look back in judgement with the benefit of hindsight, but much less so to see clearly in the moment. Keisuke Kinoshita’s Boyhood (少年期, Shonenki), arriving just six years after the events that it depicts, is a painful if sympathetic look at the conflicts of the age seen through the eyes of a conflicted adolescent as he struggles to understand his place in a world which is becoming ever colder.

In the spring of 1944, 16-year-old Ichiro (Akira Ishihama) and his mother (Akiko Tamura) investigate the possibilities of retreat, back to the country and away from the increasingly fraught and dangerous city. Their first prospect which offered the comfort of family nevertheless proves too inconvenient and so Ichiro’s mother decides perhaps Suwa, a rural area not quite so out of the way, might be better even if it would mean starting all over again with no friends or family to offer support. Ichiro, however, doesn’t want to leave at all. He is afraid of being thought a coward and doesn’t see why he should have to leave his school and classmates behind just because there’s a war on. If he had his druthers, he’d be a pilot dropping bombs, not a resentful schoolboy torn between his feelings for his family and the increasingly austere demands of militarism.

Ichiro may be 16, and if it were not for his poor health perhaps he might already have been drafted, but he seems younger and is trapped in the difficult gulf between boy and man which makes him petulant and occasionally unreasonable. His father (Chishu Ryu), a professor of English literature, is a well known social liberal which is a problem that eventually makes it impossible for the family to stay on in the city. They decide to sell the house and move to Suwa, allowing Ichiro to stay behind alone as a lodger for the family of greengrocers who are the new occupants, but despite his insistence on his independence Ichiro is not yet ready for self sufficiency and misses his family, especially his mother, dearly, while he also experiences harsh treatment from the military instructors at school thanks to his general lack of soldiering aptitude.

Like his nation, Ichiro is lost in a fog of confusion – torn between the prevailing ideology of the age and that of his gentle hearted father. His problem is that as he is still “a child” and the conditions in which they find themselves make openness difficult, nobody is willing to talk to him seriously about the issues at hand – his father perhaps less out of fear or reticence than because he is acutely aware that his son must come to his own conclusions even if those conclusions prove contrary to his own. Thus, much to Ichiro’s consternation, he refuses to allow him to enrol at a military academy but does not explicitly state why, leaving him with only the vague idea that his father is “anti-war” and therefore a social pariah in a nation where everyone is expected to do their duty.

Ichiro begins to resent his father for the family’s plight, certain that he is the reason they were forced out of their home and also the ongoing cause of his mother’s suffering as she finds herself becoming the family breadwinner as an unlikely milk lady – a job she was only able to get thanks to the friendship of a gregarious neighbour, herself a fellow evacuee in a similar position. Far from the community spirit such situations are said to engender, Ichiro and his family find themselves perpetually excluded, viewed with suspicion as “outsiders” and at the bottom of the pile when it comes to the distribution of resources. “Extra” people get only the extra after the real villagers have had their fill. Meanwhile, Ichiro is bullied by the full on fascists at school, one of whom is the son of a local military commander and has fallen completely under the militarist spell.

Everyone is always telling Ichiro that he will come to understand when he is older. Being young, he resents this intensely but eventually comes to see that they were right, some things can only be understood with the weight of experience. With the war’s end and the eventual defeat of militarism, the fog begins to lift, allowing him to see that the prevailing ideology is not always the correct one and that there’s something to be said for quiet resistance and sticking steadfastly to one’s principles even if it would be much easier to go along with the majority. His father, however, reminds him that those who chose to do just that can hardly be blamed and will likely suffer in whatever is to come. They will need the all love and compassion in the world in order to find a new, less destructive path than the one they had been obliged to walk through a time of fear and madness. Using imperialistic song and propaganda to ironic, somewhat chilling effect Kinoshita presents a characteristically empathetic portrait of a “difficult age” in the life of a young man and his country who each find themselves emerging from chaos and confusion into something completely unknown and perhaps frightening but open and filled with possibility.

Title sequence and opening (no subtitles)

Something Like, Something Like It (の・ようなもののようなもの, Taiichi Sugiyama, 2016)

January 22, 2019by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

Sadly passing away at the young age of 61 in 2011, Yoshimitsu Morita had been relatively prolific in his 25-year career, leaving behind him a hugely varied back catalogue that ran from zany idol movies to prestigious literary adaptations. His recurrent concerns, however, were relentlessly populist – he wanted to make films that ordinary people could enjoy which intensely reflected the time in which they were made. Five years after his death, one of his early ADs chose to pay tribute to his mentor by drawing inspiration from Morita’s 1981 feature debut, Something Like It. Something Like, Something Like It (の・ようなもののようなもの, No Yona Mono no Yona Mono) brings the original cast back together with a few new faces from the late director’s more recent works to recreate yesterday’s pleasures for today’s audiences.

Our hero this time round is young Shinden (Kenichi Matsuyama). Well, he’s not really all that young despite being the lowest ranking rakugoka on the roster. Now 30 and beginning to lose hope, Shinden is a former salaryman well known for taking his time. Meanwhile, the 13th memorial service for the late master is fast approaching and the troupe’s patron has decreed she wants to see the return of an old friend – Shintoto (Katsunobu Ito) who abruptly disappeared right after the funeral. Seeing as Shinden is not so hot at rakugo, the other guys task him with tracking down Shintoto in the hope of convincing him to make a return to the stage so the patroness doesn’t decide to remove her patronage.

Rakugo – the traditional art of comic storytelling, is a rarefied affair. It requires extreme rigour from the performer in order to make often extremely familiar tales funny in all the right places. Shinden isn’t very good at it because he’s too stiff all over. Poor at reading social cues, he has an urge to point out tiny and embarrassing mistakes like a slightly frayed curtain or a wonky sign. He might not be best placed for finding and then convincing a sad old man to take back up the career he’d sworn to lay down. Nevertheless, once Shinden manages to find Shintoto and realises he’s made an extremely circular journey, he makes himself his disciple and commits himself to doing all Shintoho’s odd jobs in the hope he’ll finally finish the “Pop-Eyed Goldfish” routine that the patroness so wants to hear.

Taiichi Sugiyama* was an AD on Something Like It but is only making his own feature debut 25 years later. Reassembling the old cast, Sugiyama remains true to an old formula and his genial retro comedy certainly has an old fashioned quality right down to the cutesy jazz score which feels right out of the ‘80s. More modern additions come in the form of Kenichi Matsuyama (who starred in Morita’s final film, Train Brain Express) back on comedy form with a typically left of centre performance as the archetypal “cannot read the air” aspiring rakugoka whose tendency towards literalism as well as that to be distracted by minor imperfections threatens to ruin his career before it’s even really begun. That’s not to mention his nascent crush on his mentor’s daughter Yumi (Played by Keiko Kitagawa who made her feature debut in Morita’s Mamiya Brothers) and mild jealousy over the other various young and good looking men she seems to take an interest in.

Through getting closer to the now somewhat schlubby but basically good hearted Shintoto, Shinden learns to loosen up a bit and his Rakugo perhaps improves even if he also figures out when it’s best to make a sacrifice on someone else’s behalf. Shintoto too rediscovers his talent for comedy, if not the love. Morita never had much of a “signature” style – his films were in a sense tailor made to suit a particular purpose, but Sugiyama remains firmly within the world of early ‘80s comedy, allowing the everyday to brim with silliness as Shinden pursues his roundabout quest before coming quite literally full circle and then finding his feet again. A man pays tribute to his late mentor, mentors someone else, and then absents himself from the frame to let his pupil grow. One generation retreats and another rises – an age old story, but one that like a rakugo tale shines in the telling.

*IMDB and some other sites list his name as Yasukazu but according to the JFDB and Shochiku the official reading of his name is Taiichi.

Chinese release trailer (English & Traditional Chinese subtitles)

One Cut of the Dead Triumphs at 61st Blue Ribbon Awards

January 21, 2019February 10, 2019by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

Ahead of the official ceremony on 6th February, the Blue Ribbon Awards has released its list of winners for the 61st edition which honours films released in 2018. Runaway box office hit One Cut of the Dead (released on 28th January in the UK courtesy of Third Window Films) has taken the top spot while Kazuya Shirashi, who took last year’s prize for Birds Without Names, has retained the Best Director award for the three films he released last year – The Blood of Wolves, Dare to Stop Us, and Sunny (not to be confused with the remake of the Korean film by the same name which also makes it into the top 10).

Individual Awards

Best Film: One Cut of the Dead

Best Actor: Hiroshi Tachi (Life in Overtime)

Best Actress: Mugi Kadowaki (Dare to Stop Us)

Best Supporting Actor: Tori Matsuzaka (The Blood of Wolves)

Best Supporting Actress: Mayu Matsuoka (Shoplifters / Chihayafuru Part 3)

Best Newcomer: Sara Minami (Shino Can’t Say Her Name)

Best Director: Kazuya Shiraishi (The Blood of Wolves / Dare to Stop Us / Sunny)

Top 10

In addition to naming individual prizes, the Blue Ribbon Awards also reveals its “Best 10” films of the year which are presented in no particular order.

One Cut of the Dead (カメラを止めるな！)

One Cut of the Dead has already devoured the Japanese box office and now finds itself the winner of the prestigious Blue Ribbon Award for best film. Opening with a 40 minute single take of zombie mayhem, this hilarious horror comedy begins with a film crew trying to make a zombie movie in an abandoned water filtration plant with a dark past only for some uninvited guests to turn up and join the fun…

Released in the UK by Third Window Films on 28th January.

The Chrysanthemum and the Guillotine (菊とギロチン)

The recently prolific Takahisa Zeze retreats to the Taisho era for a tale of sumo and revolution as a band of anarchists known as the Guillotine Society find themselves fascinated by an itinerant troupe of female sumo wrestlers shortly after the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923.

The Blood of Wolves (孤狼の血)

Kazuya Shirashi, winner of this year’s best director award, pays tribute to the world of Battles Without Honour in an ’80-style neo-noir in which a straight-laced rookie is partnered with a veteran rogue cop who leads him straight into the heart of darkness. Review.

Sunny: Tsuyoi Kimochi Tsuyoi Ai (SUNNY 強い気持ち・強い愛)

Not to be confused with Kazuya’s Shiraishi’s Sunny, Hitoshi Ohne’s Sunny: Tsuyoi Kimochi Tsuyoi Ai is a remake of the classic 2011 Korean film by Kang Hyeong-cheol in which a dying 40-year-old woman reunites with her high school friends from 1990 to relive her memories of a bubble-era adolescence.

Recall (空飛ぶタイヤ)

A CEO discovers dark secrets about his own company when a tire comes off one of their trucks and kills a young mother.

Dare to Stop Us (止められるか、俺たちを)

Another of three films released this year by Best Director winner Kazuya Shiraishi, Dare To Stop Us revolves around the legendary figure of Koji Wakamatsu – a hugely influential director of pink film who sadly passed away in 2012 following a traffic accident. Set at Wakamatsu Productions between 1969 and 1972, the film is told from the point of view of female crew member Megumi Yoshizumi, played by Best Actress winner Mugi Kadowaki.

Every Day a Good Day (日日是好日)

Starring the legendary Kirin Kiki in one of her final performances, Every Day a Good Day is inspired by the writings of Noriko Morishita and revolves around the serene elegance of the traditional tea ceremony.

Asako 1 & 2 (寝ても覚めても)

A conflicted young woman struggling to move on from lost love falls for a guy who looks just like her ex but can’t decide whether to embrace the fantasy of unresolved romance or the security of a steady relationship in Hamaguchi’s complex yet playful comedy drama adapted from the novel by Tomoka Shibasaki. Review.

Shoplifters (万引き家族)

This year’s Palme d’Or winner, Shoplifters earns Hirokazu Koreeda another spot in the top 10 with a hard hitting tale of marginal lives and manufactured families which continues the long line of Japanese films asking what exactly family means in an increasingly disconnected society. Review.

Yakiniku Dragon (焼肉ドラゴン)

Directed by third generation Zainichi director Wishing Chong, Yakiniku Dragon revolves around a Korean-Japanese family in the early ’70s who run a yakiniku restaurant on the outskirts of Osaka.

Source: Eiga Natalie

Woman of the Mist (朧夜の女, Heinosuke Gosho, 1936)

January 21, 2019by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

The 1930s are often thought of as an era of social rigidity and implacable conservatism, yet even before the war things were changing. The young wanted something different than their parents often had and dared to dream of getting it even if their hopes were often dashed by the times in which they lived. Heinosuke Gosho’s Woman of the Mist (朧夜の女, Oboroyo no Onna) is the story of two youngsters who find themselves in a difficult situation and are offered a solution by elders acting kindness which they are persuaded to take only to find themselves progressively more miserable, burdened by the weight of the sacrifice their society has asked them to make.

Set in the jovial working class world of Shitamachi, Woman of the Mist opens with the hero of the tale, Fumikichi (Takeshi Sakamoto), enjoying a historical lecture regarding Edo era sacrifice for the common good during which his wife, Okiyo (Mitsuko Yoshikawa), comes to fetch him. Members of a local association he belongs to have come looking for him, it turns out for a favour. They want him to assist with some fundraising for a stone lantern to mark the association’s anniversary. Much to his wife’s exasperation, Fumikichi is only too happy to comply. It might seem that Fumikichi is a much respected pillar of the community only it is also true enough that he basks in the flattery of being regarded as someone to be depended upon and is therefore a soft touch (something undoubtedly well known to all around him).

Nevertheless, despite his slight tendency towards narcissistic attention seeking, Fumikichi is a salt of the earth type and willing to help those who need it for largely altruistic reasons. He therefore finds himself a surrogate father (though childless himself) to the son of his widowed sister Otoku (Choko Iida) who enlists him to talk some sense into his law student nephew, Seiichi (Shin Tokudaiji), who has apparently been “disrespecting” his mother and neglecting his studies by reading too many novels. Fumikichi has a word but counsels Seiichi that there’s nothing wrong with reading novels save that it obviously upsets his mum who has worked herself to the bone for the last 20 years dreaming of the day Seiichi becomes a fully fledged lawyer, which is to say a member of the middle classes.

Fumikichi, as he often will, becomes the conciliatory voice at the centre of generational conflict. Seiichi is a young man at the crossroads of life and finds himself torn between youthful idealism and a duty towards his family. He has become disillusioned with the law and would rather transfer to literature, secure in the knowledge that only in novels can you find the truly humane. Fumikichi is careful not to patronise but gives him a knowing look, realising that his confusion is partly born of resentment towards his well meaning yet accidentally possessive mother who has railroaded him into a career he doesn’t want to buy him a future which is her only dream. What he wants is control over his life, but when it comes to it he is still a boy and woefully unprepared for the demands of adulthood.

This becomes obvious when he falls in love and gets his girlfriend into trouble. Teruko (Toshiko Iizuka), a former geisha apparently known to Fumikichi in his younger days now working as a bar hostess, is not exactly the kind of wife his mother might have had in mind. The pair are careful to keep their relationship a secret for just this reason as Seiichi remains conflicted – one moment declaring that he no longer cares if everyone finds out and lying to his mother about her the next. Pregnancy forces the issue. Teruko, mindful of Seiichi’s bright future, declares that she can raise the child alone, glancing sadly at a picture of herself in her former life as a sex worker as if accepting what future sacrifices might be expected of her while half hoping Seiichi will rush forward to save her from such a fate. Seiichi doesn’t exactly rush but does tentatively accept his responsibility in reassuring her that he will soon come of age and is ready to become a father with all of the joys and obligations that entails.

Lost he turns to Fumikichi who hatches a plan which might be accounted a neat solution but is also another instance of the older generation making decisions on behalf of the young without really asking them. Despite being a rather feckless old man, Fumikichi tells his wife the child is his and asks for her forgiveness while also suggesting that they adopt the baby as their own. As expected, Okiyo is not exactly enthused but as Fumikichi calculated she would eventually comes around, ironically enough after a conversation with Otoku who has no idea the baby is really her grandchild. Once the decision is made, everyone rallies round to look after Teruko who finally becomes a (temporary) member of Seiichi’s family even whilst barred from ever becoming his wife and in fact of ever seeing him again as a result of the bargain which has been struck by Fumikichi. Nevertheless, Seiichi vacillates and attempts to change his mind by asking Teruko to marry him only for her to urge him to study hard and live well, sacrificing her happiness for his future.

Uncomfortably enough, it is Teruko who must pay for a series of transgressions against the norms of her society – for being a young woman with a past who seduced a nervous young man and dared to dream of a happier future with a person of her own choosing, though the very fact of her suffering is in itself an attack on these rigid and unfair social codes which do their best to destroy the happiness of ordinary, basically good people who have done nothing wrong other than attempt to live their lives. Fumikichi and his wife are doing their best and they too are good, compassionate people who have made good compassionate choices hoping for the best in a difficult situation even if their choices are defined by the prevailing conservative morality which places Seiichi’s future above a young woman’s life and love.

Then again, Fumikichi’s objections are largely practical – it’s hard to keep a family with no money coming in and Seiichi is still a student with no prospect of immediate employment that would pay enough for a wife and child. Could they be happy after a shotgun wedding and years of penury? Seiichi’s diffidence hints at no, but Teruko’s “purity” hints at yes as she vows to make the kind of sacrifice that proves her “goodness”. The youngsters find themselves beholden to the demands of their elders, torn between their personal desires and duties to those they love. Whatever they do, they lose and are destined to remain unhappy, unable to seize their individual chance of happiness in an oppressive, conformist society. Gosho may leave them at the mercy of such a system, but he does so with immense sympathy and not a little anger as we watch these good people making the best of things while asking ourselves if all of this is really for the best.

Running Turtle (거북이 달린다, Lee Yeon-woo, 2009)

January 20, 2019January 20, 2019by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

One has to wonder why anyone becomes a policeman in Korea, or at least in the world of Korean movies. A policeman’s work is never done, yet they rarely prosper and often succeed in making themselves look ridiculous. The hero of Running Turtle (거북이 달린다, Geobuki Dalinda), played by The Chaser’s Kim Yoon-seok, is a case in point. Unlike Joong-ho, Pil-seung is still on the force (for the time being) but even for a small town beat cop he’s pushing his luck. It’s not surprising then that he gets himself all fired up when he comes into contact with a notorious fugitive from justice.

Pil-seung (Kim Yoon-seok) is among the least well-respected on a small team of police officers nominally upholding justice in a tiny fishing village. Mostly his day job involves harassing local sex workers which he mostly does by means of entrapment whilst hanging out with petty crooks like local loser gangster Yong-bae (Shin Jung-geun). Looked down on at work, things don’t improve much for Pil-seung at home where, despite the admiration he receives from the older of his two daughters, Pil-seung fails to pull his weight leaving his wife to supplement the family income by running a moribund manwha cafe whilst reduced to folding socks for the extra pennies. Then again, home is a place Pil-seung rarely goes, preferring to waste his life drinking and gambling.

On a rare occasion of busting his gut for justice, Pil-seung takes things too far with a pimp who’s a little on the heavier side and ends up almost dying after an “undue force” provoked heart attack. Suspended, Pil-seung has another set of problems in being without money for three months and being too afraid to tell his wife the truth. Stealing her savings and betting them on a local bull-fight Pil-seung’s luck comes up only to go down again when escaped fugitive and martial arts expert Gi-tae (Jung Kyung-ho) pinches the money off Yong-bae in payback for Yong-bae getting fresh with his girl (to be fair, Yong-bae had it coming).

What follows is a locking of horns as filled with macho posturing as the central bullfight between the “Bear” and “Typhoon”, though possibly not as elegant. Gi-tae, softly spoken and melancholy, has returned to an old love and means to leave the scenes of his crimes behind him for good. This whole thing with Pil-seung is a major irritation but he has no especial interest in the portly policeman other than needing to get rid of him long enough to escape with his patient lady-love.

Pil-seung’s motivations are different. Yes, he’s originally pissed off and wants his money back, but Gi-tae also represents an opportunity for him prove himself as everything he’s hitherto failed to be – a success, a strong man, someone worthy of respect. Sadly, Pil-seung will have to work quite hard to convince himself he can be any of these things, let alone convince anyone else. Trapped in his tiny rural town, Pil-seung has long felt impotent and oppressed. He can’t provide for his wife whose lack of respect for him is real enough, though noticing the holes in her underwear as he goes in for a not altogether romantic overture reminds Pil-seung that perhaps he needs to shape up and make something of himself before it’s too late. Generally he eases his feelings of inadequacy and existential despair through alcohol, gambling, and being the big guy around petty gangsters to whom he is useful but again, not a figure to be feared, loved, or respected.

Going up against a top criminal like Gi-tae all alone is a fairly stupid proposition in the first place, one only someone as deliberately pig-headed as Pil-seung would ever attempt. It’s his particular quality of bloodymindedness which becomes Pil-seung’s trademark as he absolutely refuses to give up on clawing his way back into the hearts of his wife and family through an act of officially recognised heroism though it’s true enough that if he’s going beat a man like Gi-tae (who often seems the unfair target of Pil-seung’s petty quest) he’ll need to reawaken some of those little grey cells to do it. The turtle of the title, Pil-seung chases his hare with furious, if plodding, determination only to see victory within his grasp through no fault of his own. It just goes to show, slow and steady wins the race but obsessive hard headedness doesn’t hurt either.

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

Original trailer (English subtitles)

The Limit of Sleeping Beauty (リミット・オブ・スリーピング・ビューティー, Ken Ninomiya, 2017)

January 19, 2019by Hayley Scanlon3 Comments

Can you escape the past by evading it? The heroine of Ken Ninomiya’s The Limit of Sleeping Beauty (リミット・オブ・スリーピング・ビューティー) does her best to find out as she approaches the point at which she can no longer bear the weight of all her sorrows. A rising star of the Japanese indie scene, Ken Ninomiya had some minor festival exposure with his first film, post-apocalyptic cyberpunk drama Slum-polis, back in 2015 before making a complete about turn in releasing a terse mockumentary about a resilient actor hammering on the door of Japanese show business. Sleeping Beauty was, apparently, originally conceived as a mid-length picture before producers suggested expanding it into a full length feature and in many ways marries the twin concerns of Ninomiya’s earlier films in its high concept examination of a fracturing psyche unable to let the past go and move on from trauma and disappointment.

At 19, Aki (Yuki Sakurai) ran away from a bad family situation and ended up in Tokyo with the hope of becoming an actress. With nowhere else to go she wandered into a random bar which is where she met the love of her life, Kaito (Issey Takahashi) – a melancholy photographer and owner of cabaret club Aurora. Kaito takes her in and she begins working at Aurora as a magician’s assistant but ten years pass and, as a TV presenter later put it, it’s unheard of for a Japanese actress to make it in her 30s.

Her mind fracturing, Aki is often accompanied by “Butch” (Nino Furuhata), a strange clown with a scary white face who appears alternately supportive and enabling. Complaining that she feels unstuck in time, Butch reminds her that the idea of time as linear flow is a misconception and that all moments are indeed one moment which is one reason Aki never quite knows “when” she is. Accepting this fact she asks to be taken to the time at which she was happiest, only to be told that emotional time is not necessarily in sync with one’s perception of temporality. Nevertheless, her mind flies back to her first meeting with Kaito who we later surmise is no longer in her life but continues to define it all the same.

The picture we get of Aki is of a woman attempting to bury herself and her disappointments by revelling in a pleasant memory and then using it as raw material to read herself into an idealised version of her current life only one which is still marred by the tragedy of losing Kaito. Ninomiya opens with an orgy in dingy sex club where everyone is wearing creepy carnival masks and the older Aki is sporting a nasty bruise on her chin. The bruise, we later discover, was earned in a nasty encounter with a lascivious producer engineered by a soulless manager who promised her a career but in effect sold her to a man who assaulted and humiliated her. This final humiliation is only one of many acts of degradation that Aki suffers in her quest to make it as an actress – one of only two things Kaito urged her to do before disappearing from her life forever.

Unable to cope with the weight of lost love, defeated dreams, and a wasted youth Aki’s mind splinters into fragments, creating the strange entity known as Butch whom she seems to want to get rid of but cannot bear to be without. Aki’s quest is one of reintegration in which she must find the strength to put herself back together again and finally set light to the past, waking up from her self imposed slumber.

Kaito wants her to know the world is still wonderful, but his message seems curiously perverse considering his final course of action and Aki’s continuing descent into a spiral of depression, exploitation, and mental instability. Fantasy and reality remain hopelessly blurred, only gradually separating and becoming distinct as Aki begins to put herself back together. Ninomiya improves on Slum-Polis with similarly detailed production design and world building but occasionally allows his taste for music video aesthetics to slide into the indulgent with the success of such sequences depending on the viewer’s taste for the overused main titles song, Hummingbird by Kyla La Grange. Nevertheless there’s no disputing Ninomiya’s ambition and originality even if there is something unsettling in his urgency to inhabit the world he seems to be critiquing.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

The Garden of Women (女の園, Keisuke Kinoshita, 1954)

January 18, 2019by Hayley Scanlon1 Comment

Things changed after the war, but not as much as some might have hoped. Sadly still topical, Keisuke Kinoshita’s Garden of Women (女の園, Onna no Sono) takes aim both at persistent and oppressive patriarchal social structures and at a compromised educational system which, intentionally or otherwise, systematically stifles attempts at progressive social change. A short few years before student protests would plunge education into crisis, Kinoshita’s film asks why it is that the establishment finds itself in conflict with the prevailing moods of the time and discovers that youth intends to have its brighter future even if it has to fight for it all the way.

The setting is an exclusive private woman’s university in the elegant historical city of Kyoto. The ladies who attend this establishment are mostly from very wealthy families who have decided to educate their daughters at the college precisely because of its image of properness. As one student will later put it, there are two kinds of girls at the school – those who genuinely want to study in order to make an independent life for themselves and intend to look for work after graduation, and those who are merely adding to their accomplishments in order to hook a better class of husband. Everyone, however, is subject to a stringent set of rules which revolves around the formation of the ideal Japanese woman through strictly enforced “moral education” which runs to opening the girls’ private letters and informing their families of any “untoward” content, and requiring that permission be sought should the girls wish to attend “dances” or anything of that nature.

As might be expected, not all of the girls are fully compliant even if they superficially conform to the school’s rigid social code. Scolded for her “gaudy” hair ribbon on the first day of school, Tomiko (Keiko Kishi) rolls her eyes at the over the top regulations and enlists the aid of the other girls to cover for her when she stays out late with friends but her resistance is only passive and she has no real ideological objection towards the ethos of the school other than annoyance in being inconvenienced. Tomiko is therefore mildly irritated by the presence of the melancholy Yoshie (Hideko Takamine). Three years older, she’s come to college late and is struggling to keep up with classes but is, ironically enough, prevented from studying by the same school rules which insist she go to bed early.

Meanwhile, dorm mate Akiko (Yoshiko Kuga), from an extraordinarily wealthy and well connected family, is becoming increasingly opposed to the oppressive atmosphere at the school. However, as another already politically active student points out, Akiko’s background means there are absolutely no stakes for her in this fight. She has never suffered, and likely never will, because she always has been and always will be protected by her privilege. Fumie (Kazuko Yamamoto), a hardline socialist, doubts Akiko’s commitment to the cause, worrying that in the end she is only staging a minor protest against her family and will eventually drift away back to her world of ski lodges and summer houses. Despite her ardour, Akiko finds it hard to entirely dispute Fumie’s reasoning and is at constant battle with herself over her true feelings about the state of the modern world as it relates to herself individually and for women in general.

This is certainly a fiercely patriarchal society. Even though these women are in higher education, they are mostly there to perfect the feminine arts which are, in the main, domestic. They are not being prepared for the world of work or to become influential people in their own right, but merely to support husbands and sons as pillars of the rapidly declining social order that those who sent them there are desperate to preserve. For many of the girls, however, times are changing though more for some than others. Tomiko rolls her eyes and does as she pleases, within reason, and even if she eventually wants to see things change at the school it is mostly for her own benefit. She sees no sense in Akiko’s desire for reform as a stepping stone to wider social change, and perhaps even fears the kinds of changes that Akiko and Fumie are seeking.

Akiko and Fumie, and to an extent, Tomiko, seem to have a degree of agency that others do not as seen in the tragic story of Yoshie whose life has been largely ruined thanks to the selfish and heartless actions of her father. From a comparatively less wealthy family, Yoshie worked in a bank for three years during which time she met and fell in love with an earnest young man named Shimoda (Takahiro Tamura). However, her father, having become moderately successful, developed an appetite for social climbing and is determined she marry “well” to increase his own sense of superiority as a fully fledged member of the middle classes. He sees his daughter as nothing more than a tool or extension of himself and cares nothing for her thoughts or feelings. In order to resist his demands for an arranged marriage, Yoshie enrolled in school and is desperate to stay long enough for Shimoda to finish his education so they can marry.

Yoshie is trapped at every turn – she cannot rely on her family, she cannot simply leave them, she cannot yet marry, if she leaves the school she will be reliant on a man who effectively intends to sell her, but her life here is miserable and there is no one who can help her. All she receives from the educational establishment is censure and the instruction to buck up or get kicked out. She feels herself a burden to the other girls who regard her as dim and out of place thanks to their relatively minor age gap and cannot fully comprehend her sense of anxiety and frustration.

Finally standing up to the uncomfortably fascistic school board the girls band together to demand freedoms both academic and social, insisting that there can be no education without liberty, but the old ways die hard as they discover most care only for appearances, neatly shifting the blame onto others in order to support their cause. “Why must we suffer so?” Yoshie decries at a particularly low point as she laments her impossible circumstances. Why indeed. The oppressive stricture of the old regime may eventually cause its demise but it intends to fight back by doubling down and the fight for freedom will be a long one even if youth intends to stand firm.

Titles and opening scene (no subtitles)

Manta Ray (กระเบนราหู, Phuttiphong Aroonpheng, 2018)

January 17, 2019September 26, 2019by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

Manta Ray (กระเบนราหู, Kraben Rahu), the directorial debut from Thai cinematographer Phuttiphong Aroonpheng, begins with a dedication to the Rohingya – a group some have described as the most persecuted on Earth, rendered technically stateless and brutally oppressed in their homeland of Myanmar. Many have attempted to escape, often to Thailand, but rarely find safe harbour instead becoming victims of governmental persecution or vicious human traffickers. Manta Ray is a poetic mediation on displacement and identity, but also on the various ways in which neglect of the other is also neglect of the self.

A young fisherman (Wanlop Rungkamjad) with a shock of blond hair gets up to some shady business in a forest but later turns humanitarian when he discovers a badly wounded man lying by the riverside. Discovering the man is still alive, the fisherman takes him to a backstreet doctor and then to his home where he nurses him back to health. As the man cannot speak and possibility does not understand what is being said to him, the fisherman rechristens him Thongchai (Aphisit Hama) after a classic Thai pop star. Despite the absence of verbal communication, the two men begin to bond and the fisherman teaches Thongchai how to live a life like his – how to fish, how to dive, how to find colourful stones in the forest and how to use them to call the manta rays which shelter in a nearby cove after a storm and are soon on their way once the storm has passed. Their peaceful co-existence is soon ruptured when the fisherman fails to return home, leaving Thongchai alone to inherit his life, slipping accidentally into the now vacant space the fisherman left behind.

The film’s earliest stretches serve as a beautiful tale of wordless connection in which the fisherman, perhaps in contrast to what we might expect given the darkness of his activities as glimpsed in the opening scenes, decides to be kind and rescues a man near death, literally giving him a new life and a place in his home for as long as he wants or needs it. Thongchai says nothing, perhaps he cannot speak in any language and probably does not understand the meaning of the fisherman’s words but seems to understand him all the same. Gradually the fisherman brings Thonghcai back to life through passing bits of his own back to him, relating his sad life story of the wife who left him for another man but himself remaining silent about whatever it is he does with the shady crew of a fishing boat out on the water. It is perhaps his sense of compassion which spells his doom – when he tells his “boss” that he doesn’t want to do “that” any more, the fisherman “mysteriously” goes missing at sea.

Thongchai does not steal the fisherman’s identity, but merely inherits a space which had been left vacant by another recently displaced person. He stays in the house and waits for his friend’s return, takes up his friend’s job, and then eventually begins living with the fisherman’s pregnant ex-wife (Rasmee Wayrana) who completes his transformation by dressing him in the fisherman’s clothes and dying his hair a bright gold that shines just like the stones in the forest. The fisherman and Thongchai merge and become one, sharing a single identity until the fisherman himself washes up, injured and bearing the scars of his long journey home.

Yet the forest is always there, waiting, and all roads lead back to it in Phuttiphong Aroonpheng’s elliptical tale. Thongchai digs but finds only death and emptiness, the colourful lights he softly danced to with the fisherman eerily echoed by the forest’s grim ghostliness and the glittery horror that stalks its natural beauty. Like the manta ray, Thongchai – a man without a name or a language, may be destined to a life of lonely floating broken by brief periods shelter and connection, always waiting for the storm to pass. Poetic and filled with images of extreme beauty, Phuttiphong Aroonpheng’s melancholy debut is a poetic meditation on identity and dislocation, arguing strongly for empathy and human warmth over fear and self-interest in an often cruel existence.

International trailer (English subtitles)