The Love in Okinawa (琉球之戀, Lin Fu-Ti, 1968)

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Though he may be captain of his own boat, a young man finds himself powerless in the matters of love in Lin Fu-Ti’s Taiyupian romance, The Love in Okinawa (琉球之戀). Long thought lost and recently restored from a Mandarin-dubbed print discovered in San Francisco’s Chinatown, the film was a collaboration between Taiwan and locally based film companies completed shortly before the islands’ return to Japanese sovereignty after an extended period of American occupation. Though the two nations share a degree of common ground in their experience of Japanese colonialism, the film seems to suggest that nothing really good comes of trying to do business here and events might have progressed differently if the family had not delayed its return to Taiwan.

Nevertheless, the real problem is that Hung-hai is a boat captain who in theory possesses the total freedom of the wide open seas yet he is unable to defy his father and marry the woman he loves out of a sense of filial piety. Hung-hai and Hsui-ling were childhood friends and their fathers were once like brothers only to be forced apart by a business dispute ending in a court case which Hung-hai’s father lost. Hsiu-ling’s father’s business later went bust anyway and he has been dead for several years but Hung-hai’s father still harbours fierce resentment towards him. The family went through a period of financial hardship following the court case during which Hung-hai’s mother worked herself to the bone gathering money for their new start. Hung-hai’s father blames his former friend for hastening his wife’s early death which is why he can’t accept Hsiu-ling, to whom he was once like an uncle, as his daughter-in-law.

But on the other hand he also has his own plans for his son’s life which include marrying Yoshiko. Yoshiko is the current “Miss Okinawa” and a minor celebrity who appears on television singing Japanese songs such as Mari Sono’s 1966 hit Yume wa Yoru Hiraku. She is always dressed in kimono, while Hsui-ling wears more westernised contemporary fashions but is later seen in more recognisably Chinese-style after her return to Taiwan. To that extent, Yoshiko represents a closer union with the growing economic powerhouse of Japan as mediated through Okinawa, while Hsui-ling represents an unsullied Taiwan yet one still restrained by increasingly outdated notions of filiality.

Eventually, after a series of ironies, Hung-hai’s father is forced to admit that his authoritarianism and refusal to allow his son to chart his own destiny has destroyed his family’s future. Unable to marry Hsui-ling who thinks that he has married Yoshiko after seeing her announce their engangement on television while he was away on his boat, Hung-hai falls into depression and takes to drink. Though he had long favoured Hung-hai to take over the business over his older son Ah-qin who has a physical disability and was therefore left behind in Taiwan to babysit the domestic business, Hung-hai’s father begins to realise the mistakes he has made and that in this ruined state Hung-hai will never amount to anything nor prove a worthy heir for his business empire.

Ah-qin, meanwhile, is oblivious to all this and the soul of kindness and decency. In some ways, he might play into a stereotypical vision of disabled people as saintly and innocent, yet is unwittingly drawn into his brother’s romantic drama knowing nothing of his father’s animosity towards Hsui-ling and her family nor of his brother’s love for her which is the cause of his depression. He wants only for everyone in his family to be happy, and in the end is willing to sacrifice his own happiness to facilitate it (which is a paradoxical expression of “positive” filiality). Hung-hai had suggested simply running away and eloping to Taiwan but Hsui-ling’s mother was on her deathbed and neither of them really had the stomach to abandon their parents in a “foreign” land. Thus this kind of filiality that divides the lovers is nothing but destructive. Not only does it ruin the family entirely, disrupting the relationship between the brothers as well as between father and sons, but leads only to futility and heartbreak in which true freedom is found only in death.

The Love in Okinawa screens as part of this year’s Cinema at Sea.

Trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

99% Cloudy… Always (99％、いつも曇り, Midori Sangoumi, 2023)

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Why do some people feel themselves entitled to ask insensitive questions at emotionally delicate moments? Kazuha (Midori Sangoumi) may have a point when she calls her oblivious uncle a bully when a lays into her about having no children at the first memorial of her mother’s passing, but still his words seem to wound her and provoke a moment of crisis in what otherwise seems to be a happy and supportive marriage.

Kazuha is a very upfront person and fond of directly telling people that she thinks she has stopped menstruating so she doesn’t think she could have a child now even if she wanted one. One of the other relatives, however, suggests that her husband, Daichi (Satoshi Nikaido), may feel differently which somewhat alarms her. The questioning had made her angry and offended, not least by the implication that a woman’s life is deemed a success only through motherhood and that those who produce no children are somehow “unproductive”, but it was all the more insensitive of her uncle to bring it up given that Kazuha had suffered a miscarriage some years previously.

The miscarriage itself appears to have resulted in some lingering trauma that’s left Kazuha with ambiguous feelings towards motherhood. Having been bullied and excluded as a child because she is autistic, Kazuha is reluctant to bring a child of her own into the world in case they too are autistic and encounter the same kind of difficulties that she has faced all her life. As the film opens, she’s trying to get in touch with someone about the results of a recent job interview but getting flustered on the phone and asking what may be perceived as too many questions all in one go. She does something similar while trying to enquire at a foster agency about a clarification of their guidelines as to whether she would be eligible to adopt as an autistic woman which she fears she will not be. It just happens that no one is available to talk to her that day as they’re all at an outing leaving only a member of the admin team behind to man the desk while Kazuha repeatedly asks the same question in the hope of a response. 

The truth is, Kazuha might have liked to raise a child but not her own while for Daichi it’s the opposite. He may still want to have a biological child but is not particularly interested in raising someone else’s. This question which has reared its head again at a critical moment immediately before it may be too late places a strain on their marriage as they contemplate a potential mismatch in their hopes and desires for the future. Daichi is reminded he has no other remaining family as his younger sister passed away of an illness some years previously and his parents are no longer around either. As he tells a younger woman at work, Kazuha is his only family while others needle them that there’ll be no one there for them in their old age should they remain childless. 

Part of the issue is a lack of direct communication as Daichi talks through his relationship issues with a colleague in trying to process Kazuha’s revelation that she felt relieved after the miscarriage given her guilt and anxiety that the baby would also be autistic which is not something that had previously occurred to him nor that he particularly worried about. The film seems to hint that Daichi has the option of moving on, perhaps entering a relationship with his younger colleague, if his desire to have a biological child outweighed that to stay with Kazuha while that is not an option for Kazuha herself who is left only wondering if she should divorce him so he can do exactly that. In flashbacks, we see her reflect on some of her past behaviour and realise that she may have inadvertently hurt someone’s feelings in speaking the truth and been shunned herself because of it. Even so, she has a warm community around her who love her as she is and are in effect an extended family. The accommodation that she finds lies in fulfilling herself through art and building a relationship with her nephew while also helping and supporting those around her. It may be cloudy 99% of the time, but there’s still a glimmer of light and a radiance that surrounds Kazuha as she embraces life as she wants to live it rather than allow herself to be bullied by belligerent uncles and the spectres of social expectation.

99% Cloudy… Always screens as part of this year’s Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Hope (望み, Yukihiko Tsutsumi, 2020)

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What would you prefer, that your son is alive but a murderer, or that he’s dead but blameless? That’s the dilemma faced by the family at the centre of Yukihiro Tsutsumi’s Hope (望み, Nozomi) who find themselves wondering if they really knew their son at all or had been deluded by an image of familial harmony that was only ever superficial. Meanwhile, they’re also at the centre of a media storm, on the receiving harassment from the press and neighbours, along with the potential financial strain of lost business and fracturing relationships in the local community.

Teenage daughter Miyabi (Kaya Kiyohara) tells her father that she’s read online some families have to move after a relative becomes involved with a crime, that they lose their jobs and place in the community. She’s been studying hard to get into a top high school and is worried that they may not now accept her even if she passed the exam because of something her brother may or may not have done. Some might say that a being a part of the family means that you live or die together, but there is a persistent sense of unfairness felt by all they are being made to suffer because of something over which they had and have no control.

Tadashi (Koshi Mizukami) never explained of this to them and it’s true that he had been behaving differently, was sullen, stayed out all night coming home with bruises, and had in fact recently purchased a knife but it’s difficult for them to believe that he could really have gone on the run after murdering a classmate. At the beginning of the film, architect Kazuto (Shinichi Tsutsumi) had shown off their warm family home to some prospective clients remarking that they wanted to ensure close relationships with the their children and that the design is a good opportunity to plan ahead for the next 10 or 20 years but perhaps there’s something a little hubristic in that statement. Kazuto is trying to sell an image of familial bliss that his house design can bring, but when he knocks on Tadashi’s door the boy is rude and resents the intrusion. Typical teen behaviour, the clients might think, but still it’s a minor crack in the edifice of the image of a perfect family.

But for all that it’s Kazuto who most strongly resists the idea that Tadashi may really have killed his friend and clings fast to the hope that he may be a victim too even though, as mother Kiyomi (Yuriko Ishida) points out, that might mean that he’s already dead and was killed alongside him. For Kiyomi, she just wants Tadashi, whose name means “correctness”, to be alive even if that means he really did do it. If that were the case, the family would also face constant harassment for the rest of their lives, Tadashi would be in prison for the next 15 years, and they would likely have to compensate the other family financially for the boy’s lost future and 50+ years’ worth of lost earning potential. None of that matters to her so long as Tadashi is alive, but to Kazuto it seems more important that Tadashi not be guilty and he reclaim the image he had of his son as a good and honest young man rather than a delinquent killer and bully.

Investigations among the teens turn up contradictory reports, some saying that Tadashi was aloof and arrogant while a group of girls insist on his innocence and even contemplate going to the police to help clear his name. What’s clear is that everyone seems to have taken football far too seriously and a situation among hotheaded young men went way out of control. As a policeman later says, problems often occur at this age because children who are mature enough to think for themselves start wanting to solve their own problems without worrying the adults around them but don’t always know the best way to do it and end up making everything worse. The irony may be that in the end Tadashi may indeed restore a sense of hope for his family that they can turn things around and regain a more genuine sense of familial harmony no matter what the outcome may be.

Hope screens as part of this year’s Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Scoop! (新米記者トロッ子 私がやらねば誰がやる！, Keiichi Kobayashi, 2024)

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The print media industry in Japan has often come in for criticism because of its perceived toothlessness in which it is often afraid of speaking truth to power lest it lose its access. Of course, as we’ve seen all too well just recently, that’s not a problem limited to Japan, but it’s something that’s preoccupied the students at the centre of Keiichi Kobayashi’s teen drama The Scoop! (新米記者トロッ子 私がやらねば誰がやる！, Shinmai Kisha Torokko: Watashi ga Yaraneba Dareka ga Yaru) whose unofficial newspaper club is threatened by the school because of its tendency to expose scandal and oppose the elitism which has otherwise taken over the institution.

Yui (Karin Fujiyoshi) only enrolled here because of the famous literature club and the possibility of meeting her idol, Konoha Midorimachi, the winner of a prestigious student writing competition. But as she quickly finds out, the Literature Club is pretty high up in the school hierarchy and only really open to those in the “advanced” class. All of its members wear red scarves to distinguish them from the other students who wear blue. You have to take a test to get in, but Yui’s dreams end before they’ve even started when she’s hit by a rogue drone and knocked out. They won’t let her retake the test because they say it would be unfair to the other students, but the club president, Mari (Rinka Kumada), has another proposition for her. It turns out that Konoha Midorimachi isn’t a member after all but a mysterious person using a pen name. Mari wants to know who it is too so she suggests they team up to find out. Following a lead to the unofficial Newspaper Club, Mari advises Yui to sign up there and win their trust to find out Konoha’s true identity on the promise of being admitted to the Literature Club once she’s solved the mystery.

Yui isn’t really happy with this plan in part because the Newspaper Club has a bad reputation for being a bunch of cranks and nerds. The Newspaper Club isn’t really all that keen on talking about Konoha either but is glad to have Yui on board while she also begins to embrace the opportunity to hone a different side to her writing skills. While there, she’s confused by the tactics employed the editor, Kasane (Akari Takaishi), whom she describes as more like a con-artist than a journalist as she employs some unorthodox methods to get to the truth, but also wakes up to the myriad problems at the school and comes to understand that the newspaper is necessary for exposing them. 

This does not, however, endear them to the headmaster, Numahara (Masahiro Takashima), who is a fascistic elitist intent on ruling the school with an iron fist. Backed into a corner, he agrees to make the Newspaper Club “official” with funding from the school but only as a gambit to control it. If Kasane accepts his offer, they will have to abide by his rules which means puff pieces and propaganda only. “Submit to me,” he snarls, inappropriately pinning the teenage Kasane to a wall while making her an ultimatum to join his side or get the hell out. “Women should be compliant,” he advises shortly before Kasane socks him on the jaw. What happens after that is a neutering of the paper while Numahara strengthens the elitism of the school by deepening the privileges held by the so-called “advanced” class represented by the Literature Club. 

The Japanese title of the film is the more evocative “Rookie Reporter “Trolley”: If I don’t do it, who will?” As Kasane had said to Numahara, silence changes nothing. Kasane later claims that she started the Newspaper Club because she lost faith in the power of fiction, but also wanted to bring about real change and expose Numahara’s corruption. Though their paper is suppressed, they do eventually manage to bring about something like a more egalitarian revolution and expose Numahara for what he really is by using the same tactics he used against them. In some ways, it’s an allegory for the wider society and an advocation for the power of journalism to bring about real change by refusing to shrink from the truth or be cowed by those in power, as much it is a coming-of-age tale in which the heroine learns that things aren’t always what they seem and a club that’s founded on the principle of excluding others isn’t one you want to join.

The Scoop! screens as part of this year’s Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme.

Trailer (English subtitles)

What Happened to Our Nest Egg!? (老後の資金がありません！, Tetsu Maeda, 2021)

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A minor controversy erupted in Japan in 2019 when then finance minister Taso Aso issued a statement recommending that couples should have 20 million yen (£104,620 total at the time of writing) saved for their retirement on top of the state pension in order to live a comfortable life in old age. All things considered, 20 million yen actually sounds like quite a low sum for two people who might live another 30 years post-employment. Nevertheless, Atsuko (Yuki Amami) and her husband Akira (Yutaka Matsushige) are now in their mid-50s and don’t have anywhere near that amount in savings. They’re still paying off their mortgage and though their children are grown-up, neither of them seem to be completely independent financially and both still live at home. 

Tetsu Maeda’s familial comedy What Happened to Our Nest Egg!? (老後の資金がありません！, Rogo no shikin ga arimasen!) explores the plight of the sandwich generation which finds itself having to support elderly relatives while themselves approaching retirement and still needing to support their children who otherwise can’t move forward with their lives. Seeing an accusatory ad which seems to remind her personally that even 20 million yen isn’t really enough when you take into consideration the potential costs of medical treatment or a place in a retirement home, Atsuko has a sudden moment of panic over their precarious financial situation. The apparently sudden death of Akira’s 90-year-old father acts as a sharp wake up call especially as Akira’s apparently very wealthy but also selfish and materialistic sister Shizuko (Mayumi Wakamura) bamboozles him into paying for the entirety of the funeral while pointing out that they’ve been footing most of the bill for the parents’ upkeep over the last few years.

There was probably a better time to discuss the financial arrangements than with their father on his deathbed in the next room, but in any case Shizuko doesn’t pay attention to Atsuko’s attempt to point out they’ve been chipping in too. Akira’s mother Yoshino (Mitsuko Kusabue) also reminds them that their family was once of some standing and a lot of people will be attending the funeral so they need to make sure everything is done properly. The funeral arranger is very good at her job and quickly guilts Atsuko into spending large sums of money on pointless funeral pomp to avoid causing offence only to go to waste when hardly anyone comes because, as she later realises, all of the couple’s friends have already passed away, are bedridden, or too ill to travel. 

Yoshino is however in good health. When Shizuko suddenly demands even more money for her upkeep, Atsuko suggests Yoshino come live with them but it appears that she has very expensive tastes that don’t quite gel with their ordinary, lower-middle class lifestyle. Having lived a fairly privileged life and never needing to manage her finances, Yoshino has no idea of the relative value of money and is given to pointless extravagance that threatens to reduce Atsuko’s dwindling savings even more while in a moment of cosmic irony both she and Akira are let go from their jobs. Now they’re in middle age, finding new ones is almost impossible while their daughter suddenly drops the bombshell that she’s pregnant and is marrying her incredibly polite punk rocker boyfriend whose parents run a successful potsticker restaurant and are set on an elaborate wedding.

The film seems to suggest that Atsuko and Akira can’t really win. They aren’t extravagant people and it just wasn’t possible for them to have saved more than they did nor is it possible for them to save more in the future. Instead it seems to imply that what they should do is change their focus and the image they had of themselves in their old age. One of the new colleagues that Akira meets in a construction job has moved into a commune that’s part of the radical new housing solution invented by his old friend Tenma (Sho Aiwaka). Rather than building up a savings pot, the couple decide to reduce their expenses by moving into a share house and living as part of a community in which people can support each other by providing child care and growing their own veg. Yoshino too comes to an appreciation of the value of community and the new exciting life that she’s experienced since moving in with Atsuko. It may all seem a little too utopian, but there is something refreshing in the suggestion that what’s needed isn’t more money but simply a greater willingness to share, not only one’s physical resources but the emotional ones too in a society in which everyone is ready to help each other rather than competing to fill their own pots as quickly as possible. 

What Happened to Our Nest Egg!? screens as part of this year’s Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Cinema at Sea Announces Complete Programme for 2025

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Cinema at Sea – Okinawa Pan-Pacific International Film Festival has announced the full programme for its second edition which runs 22nd February to 3rd March, 2025. This year’s festival opens with Ocean Elegy: The Tragedies of Mudan and Ryukyu, a documentary exploring the Mudan incident, and closes with New Zealand drama, Tinā. The festival will also feature a special focus on Maori filmmaker Mike Jonathan.

Here are the East Asian features screening in this year’s programme:

Indonesia

  • Tale of the Land – drama revolving around a young woman who believes she is living with a curse that prevents her from setting foot on land.

Japan

  • Asia is One (1973) – the Nippon Documentarist Union explore the destructive legacies of imperialism and exploitation through the stories of migrant workers in the Okinawan islands. Review.
  • BOuQuET – experimental drama directed by actress Sahel Rosa.
  • Enlightenment – drama revolving around a man who uses media to escape reality.
  • Paradise of Solitude – human drama in which a blocked writer receives a letter from a woman looking for lost love.
  • River Returns – poetic and elliptical drama from Masakazu Kaneko in which a little boy goes on a journey into the folkloric past.
  • Rules of Living – drama in which a woman opens her home to a befuddled tourist.
  • Step Out – Okinawa-set drama from Yukihiko Tsutsumi following a young man who dreams of dancing.
  • YUUHO：No Border – documentary focusing on disability activist Yuuho.

Malaysia

  • Next Stop, Somewhere – two people head abroad in search of freedom only to end up trapped by pandemic quarantine and a loveless marriage.

Philippines

  • Gensan Punch – drama from Brillante Ma Mendoza in which a Japanese boxer heads to the Philippines after he is rejected by the Japanese Boxing Association on the grounds of his disability.

South Korea

  • Boy in the Pool – gentle drama about a boy a girl who meet at the pool but then take different paths in life.
  • Okinawa Blue Note – a best-selling Korean romance novelist travels to Okinawa only to experience unexpected complicattions.

Taiwan

Thailand

  • Rivulet of Universe – mystical drama in which a Cambodian migrant worker meets a young couple with relationship issues mirroring those of an ancient myth.

Cinema at Sea – Okinawa Pan-Pacific International Film Festival takes place at cinemas across the islands 22nd February to 3rd March 2025. The full programme can be found on the official website while you can also follow Cinema at Sea on Facebook, Instagram, and X (fomerly known as Twitter).

SAKURA (朽ちないサクラ, Hiroto Hara, 2024)

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Sakura, or cherry blossoms, are often seen as emblematic of “Japan”. A potent poetic symbol, they blossom only for a short time and then slowly fade away. In the case of Hiroto Hara’s conspiracy drama SAKURA (朽ちないサクラ, Kuchinai Sakura), however, the title refers to a nickname for the security services. In fact, the title could be read either as the “sakura never decays,” or perhaps “will never be tarnished”, “will never die,” echoing the frequent messages that you can never really escape your past for like sakura it will always blossom again while the security services themselves will never fall.

In this case, the event that reverberates is a nerve gas attack on a station that is clearly an allegory for that conducted by Aum Shinrikyo in 1995. Like Aum which is now known as Aleph, the cult in the movie simply changed its name and carried on. Now the head of the police PR department for which the heroine works, former security agent Togashi (Ken Yasuda), is haunted by a mistake he made as a rookie cop and blames himself for not being able to stop the disaster. As fate would have it, the case they’re currently investigating ties back to the cult suggesting a much wider conspiracy in play than the simple intention to cover up a murder.

But there are also two killings here that are likely connected, the first being that of a woman whose allegation of stalking was ignored by the police who, rather than investigate, went off to enjoy themselves on some kind of outing The press is having a field day with the implication the police are both lacking in compassion and negligent in their work. Predictably, the PR division’s main intention is to uncover the source of the leak with Togashi seemingly already suspecting a woman in his department, Izumi (Hana Sugisaki), whose boyfriend, Isokawa (Riku Hagiwara), was himself on that outing. Izumi had accidentally let slip about the police’s activities to her best friend Chika (Kokoro Morita), a reporter who works at the local paper that broke the story. Chika insisted it wasn’t her who wrote the article, but Izumi didn’t believe her. Chika is then found dead after vowing to investigate more fully and prove Izumi wrong with an original hypothesis that she took her own life in guilt over betraying her friend.

Obviously, there’s more to it than that and it soon becomes clear she was murdered probably because she got too close to the truth. Izumi isn’t a detective, but finds herself trying to investigate out of a sense that she contributed to Chika’s death by not believing her when she said she never broke the promise she made not to tell anyone else about the police outing. One might legitimately ask why she is allowed to do this, and the lead detective is not originally happy about it, but as they’re grateful for the leads she turns up, Izumi effectively gets a sort of promotion to investigator. Later events might lead us to wonder if she isn’t being manipulated as part of a wider conspiracy, but then the central intention remains unclear as does the reason the shady forces in play would allow her to investigate Chika’s death knowing the possibility that she may stumble on the “real” truth in the process.

It could be that they simply don’t need to stop her because they know there’s nothing she can do. She has no evidence for her final conclusions and no one would believe her if she spoke out, but it seems odd that conspiracists who’ve already bumped off several other people would allow her to simply walk away knowing what she knows if there were not some grander plan in motion. The question is, is it justified to cause the deaths of a small number of people in order to save the lives of hundreds more who might otherwise die if the cult carries out another terrorist attack before they can be stopped? Sakura apparently have spies and informants everywhere and will do everything they can to protect them in order to facilitate their goal of protecting the nation. Thus the famed cherry blossoms now become another symbol of constant threat and oppression in the spectre of the security services who watch and oversee everything but remain in the shadows themselves. Hara homes in on this sense of paranoia and injustice but in the end cannot resist indulging Izumi’s plucky rookie investigator spirit. Her final decision may not make an awful lot of sense while essentially pitting one authority figure against another. Nevertheless, the tension remains high as Izumi presses forward towards the truth no matter what the danger while like her policeman boyfriend determined to pursue justice wherever it may lie.

SAKURA screens as part of this year’s Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Images: ©2024 SAKURA Film Partners

Panda Plan (熊猫计划, Zhang Luan, 2024)

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Now 70 years old, Jackie Chan’s later career has mostly seen him trying to find ways to mitigate his age. Often he’s played the role of a mentor figure taking part in a limited number of action scenes while a younger actor does the heavy lifting and takes care of any romantic subplots. Rest assured, there’s no romance in Panda Plan (熊猫计划, xióngmāo jìhuà) but it does otherwise see Chan trying to recapture past glory in seemingly appearing in lengthier action scenes while playing a version of himself.

As the film’s Jackie, he tells young panda nanny Zhuzhu (Shi Ce) that the reason he can’t bring himself to retire is that as soon as someone shouts “action” he can be an all powerful hero rather than a flawed human being that gets sad or tired or beaten down. He even pokes fun at himself with an early scene of Jackie shooting a movie and challenging the director that it’s unrealistic for him to take out all these bad guys all on his own. Though he is apparently sick of doing action, all of the directors future ideas for him sound like they will once again involve quite a lot of fighting. 

It is then a bit ironic that Panda Plan’s action scenes are often choppily edited because it’s obvious that they’re cutting back and fore between Chan and a stunt double with quite a lot of CGI filling in the blanks. You can even clearly see the heavy duty knee pads Chan is wearing under his suit, not that he shouldn’t have them, only that more care wasn’t taken to make them less visible considering there’s no situational explanation for why he’d be wearing knee pads to attend this ceremony marking his decision to “adopt” a baby panda at a random zoo in a fictional country where almost everyone speaks Mandarin. 

The baby panda has become a viral star because of its “unique” look with one eye patch smaller than the other. A sheik apparently decides he must have this panda and hires a bunch of mercenaries to kidnap it when his attempts to buy it fail. Of course, Jackie can’t let this happen and is determined to protect the baby panda from the international kidnappers. A panda is after all a symbol of China itself which can’t simply be bought by outside powers or the super rich while many of the mercenaries, who it’s implied are probably Eastern European, speak with American accents though in a stroke of luck, the main two turn out to be huge Jackie Chan fans and decide to help him so they aren’t that bad really while the leader actually seems to be Chinese anyway. That said, the guards at the zoo are both American and are shown to be slacking off at their job, eating donuts while remarking that they have an easy day ahead of them. It turns out the sheik had a heartrending reason for wanting the panda which wasn’t about the excesses of the super rich and Jackie’s decision to help him out paints China as generous and compassionate rather than coldhearted and possessive over its pandas.

In any case, despite the mild violence of the action scenes the film appears to be aimed at a family audience and has plenty of farcical humour as Jackie and Zhuzhu try to outsmart the kidnappers and save the panda who is eventually deposited at a panda park in China proper which is to say brought home again, where it belongs. The panda is rendered in unconvincing CGI but as using an actual panda would not be appropriate perhaps that really is the best solution and at least it’s a pretty cute CGI panda even if it’s obvious that it was added afterwards. The panda rescue being so successful, Jackie also gets asked to rescue the late Queen’s kidnapped corgis though it’s quite clear that he already has a very busy social calendar and is really getting fed up with doing action. Even so it has to be said that there’s already a Panda Plan 2 scheduled for release later this year, so he’ll presumably have to do some rescuing again.

Panda Plan is released in the US on Digital, Blu-ray & DVD February 18 courtesy of Well Go USA.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Scent of a Spell (魔性の香り, Toshiharu Ikeda, 1985)

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Esaka (Johnny Okura) feels like someone’s watching him. He has this sense of being observed by some otherworldly force along with a generalised feeling of uneasiness. But his paranoia seems to melt away after rescuing a young woman, Akiko (Mari Amachi), whose attempted suicide he witnesses during a rainstorm on his way home. He takes her in and one thing leads to another. For a time, they’re blissfully happy but then something starts to nag at him. Is Akiko really who she claims to be, or a demonic force of monstrous femininity?

It’s this malevolent quality to which the title of Toshiharu Ikeda’s noirish romance Scent of a Spell (魔性の香り, Masho no Kaori) alludes. Esaka is captivated by a hint of mystery and his own white knight syndrome, bewitched by Akiko but also perhaps growing tired of her and fearful of romantic commitment. He has after all been married before and his friend’s comments seems to suggest the cause of marital breakdown may either have been his womanising or his wife’s baseless jealousy. Akiko tells him that she’s on the run from an abusive husband prone to jealous rages and that though she has escaped from Osaka to Tokyo he always manages to track her down. Her sense of being pursued and Esaka’s of being watched seem to perfectly align while he seems to appreciate the fact that she needs him and he is quite literally sheltering her from danger.

Nevertheless, there are cracks in Akiko’s story beginning with the fact the bridge she threw herself off wasn’t the kind to pose a serious risk to life. The drop is only a few feet and though she resolutely refuses to be taken to a hospital because her husband might find her, she may be exaggerating the extent of her injuries. Meanwhile, she seems to have something of a jealous streak becoming irritated when Esaka talks to the proprietress of a local bar, thereafter apparently submitting herself to the attentions of his over-friendly colleague. Perhaps she had a reason to be annoyed given that she didn’t previously know any of these people and he inadvertently excluded her from the conversation, but it’s difficult for Esaka to know if she’s actually being unreasonable or he’s overreacting to a threat to his male pride and autonomy.

It’s this threat to his freedom that’s inflamed when he overhears another man talking to the lady behind the counter at a cafe he regularly goes to about his own girlfriend who is also named “Akiko” written with the character for “autumn”. Though there must be dozens of women with this not all that uncommon name combination in the city, it plants the seed of doubt in him that perhaps his Akiko and the other are the same and she’s two-timing him with this other guy while he’s at work. It also adds to his feeling that she has some kind of malevolent supernatural quality as if she were deliberately targeting lonely men for nefarious reasons. When the man from the cafe is found dead at home having been bludgeoned to death, he can’t help but feel that Akiko must have been involved and possibly intends to harm him too.

Of course, this may just be his fear that she will hurt him emotionally and his growing paranoia is a defence mechanism designed to protect himself against her abandonment or an infringement on his freedom. Or, alternatively, Akiko really is a dangerously crazed and jealous woman and letting her into his life will mean not a moment’s peace until it’s over. Even so, the pair of them discover intimacy in connection in their raw, desperate love making. Every time Esaka’s doubts rise to the surface, Akiko seduces him or he her and he momentarily forgets. In this, the film may have a latent misogyny as a final twist suggests that in the end all women are prone to fits of jealous rage not to mention cunning and trickery directed against each other as much as men who are also, to be fair, faithless liars and cheats. Akiko’s tragic backstory suggests something similar, that she is the inheritor of a legacy of compromised maternity and paternal betrayal. In any case, Esaka is not quite the hero he imagined himself to be either and in the end cannot save Akiko who may also in a way be choosing to sacrifice herself for love of him. Echoing the ending of In a Lonely Place, Ikeda casts their romance as fatalistic tragedy and bathes the noirish closing scenes in a heavenly golden light that suggests true love ends only in futility.

Scent of a Spell is released in the UK on blu-ray 17th February courtesy of Third Window Films.

Cottontail (コットンテール, Patrick Dickinson, 2023)

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A recently bereaved widower travelling to Lake Windermere to scatter his wife’s ashes begins to reclaim an image of family in Patrick Dickinson’s melancholy character study, Cottontail (コットンテール). Having travelled to the Lake District in her childhood to visit her father who was working in the UK at the time, Akiko (Tae Kimura) recalled fondly a sense of familial connection symbolised by a photo she believes to have been taken on the lake’s shores and continued to wear a Peter Rabbit necklace right to her dying day.

In a poignant note to her husband Kenzaburo Lily Franky) written before her dementia worsened and left with a Buddhist priest until the time of her death, Akiko expresses regret that they were never able to go there again as a family while she was alive but would like him to scatter her ashes on Lake Windermere in the company of their Son, Toshi (Ryo Nishikido), who now has a wife and daughter of his own.

As we can see from the opening scenes, Kenzaburo is a man living at odds with the world around him. Emotionally distant, he finds it difficult to relate to his son and often quite literally shuts him out leaving Toshi hurt and resentful. To begin with, Kenzaburo insists he will go to Lake Windermere on his own and only later agrees to allow Toshi and his family to accompany him, making all the travel arrangements. Once there, however, he becomes impatient and after a minor argument over the itinerary takes off alone only to get on the wrong train and end up on the opposite side of the country as he’s kindly informed by a raucous hen party on their way to York. Forced to rely on the kindness of strangers, he’s taken in by a farmer (Ciarán Hinds) and his daughter (Aoife Hinds) who have suffered a bereavement themselves and attempt to help him process his loss while encouraging him to reconcile with his son. Presenting a kind of mirror he may bounce off while mediating these complex emotions in a second language allows Kenzaburo the opportunity to confront himself and his grief along with his feelings of inadequacy as a husband and father.

We can sense his own regret in a flashback to a meeting in a cafe shortly after Akiko was diagnosed with dementia in which she looks to Kenzaburo for reassurance but he remains in denial. She tells him that she’s afraid and can’t bear the idea of losing her family or becoming a burden to them but he simply tells her that it won’t come to that as if he were closing himself off to the reality but also from her in leaving Akiko alone to deal with her fear and loneliness in refusal to confront anything that is emotionally difficult or unpleasant. Yet Kenzaburo refuses to relinquish her memory, stubbornly carrying her ashes in a tea tin and at times holding it up as if he were showing her around and attempting to share this trip with her in a more literal way.

What threatens to devolve into a more conventional road trip drama in which Kenzaburo is helped on his way by a series of improbably kind and sagacious strangers develops into something deeper as he trudges his way through the English countryside which as it turns out is not all that aesthetically different from that of Japan and largely free of the often claustrophobic hedgerows that literally separate us from the surrounding scenery. The landscape further recalls scenes from Kenzaburo’s life as he begins to reflect on his time with Akiko and confront the reality of her loss along with his new life without her.

In effect, he’s journeying towards a recreation of Akiko’s photograph and its capture of a brief moment of familial unity in a gradual process of reconciling with Toshi and his own position as a father. Quiet and unassuming, Dickinson’s film is less a slow voyage through grief and learning to let go as it is one of gaining courage to open a door that had long been closed, Kenzaburo no longer the melancholy octopus hiding deep in the ocean but a bobbing rabbit eager to experience more of the world around him before it’s too late.

Cottontail opens in UK cinemas 14th February courtesy of Day for Night.

UK trailer (English subtitles)