In the Distance (距ててて, Saki Kato, 2022)

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Can two people who have completely different outlooks and ways of living learn to get along and eventually become friends? A pandemic-era dramedy, Saki Kato’s In the Distance (距ててて, Hedatetete) asks just this question when two women are unexpectedly forced to co-exist on a greater level after their roommate is suddenly stuck abroad. A series of surreal adventures might leave them with no option other than to confront their differences, but also shows them that difference can be complementary rather than disharmonious. 

The main issues between Ako and San are those which are common to any house sharing arrangement particularly if the people involved did know each other well previously. Ako is an aspiring photographer who sees part-time work as a necessary evil but continues to struggle amid the vagaries of the covid-era economy. She is neat and tidy and likes the house to be in order. San, meanwhile, is picking up most of the rent and has a job which has not been too badly affected by the pandemic. But she’s also a total mess when it comes to her share of the housework and has an annoying habit of picking up everyone’s post and stuffing it somewhere in her room without letting her roommates know a letter has come for them. Obviously, this is also an invasion of privacy on top of simply being annoying so Ako’s irritation is understandable but she has a kind of animosity towards San simply for being what she sees as a boring wage slave while she’s just slumming it until she gets a break with her photography.

But then again, San is “artistic” if in a problematic way in that her accordion playing has caused complaints from neighbours but when their property manager comes to have a word with them he ends up bringing his ocarina to join in the fun. San vents her frustrations to a friend, Tomoe, who has a similar problem of her own in that she’s in the process of breaking up with her boyfriend because they keep disagreeing over trivial things like brands of rice or misaligned printing on greetings cards. They only talk to each other in terms of metaphor with Tomoe apparently sick of their mismatched pairing and hoping to find a new partner with more common interests while the boyfriend seems near distraught by the thought of the relationship ending. 

Ironically it’s San who points out their relationship may be fairly complementary and it’s more the case that they can get along together because they are different yet she still struggles with her relationship with Ako whom she finds uptight and pretentious. Ako, meanwhile, is having a strange encounter of her own with a teenage girl looking for a misdirected letter presumably spirited away by San. She claims not to have a phone or use a computer and implies that her mother is very strict, though when she actually arrives at the house she’s incredibly nice and even cooks a hearty meal though there is something a little sinister in her manner lending the pair a kind of supernatural quality like something out of a fairytale. 

In any case, a misplaced keepsake eventually prompts a confrontation between the two women that allows them to clear the air and find a way to work together. Turning somewhat surreal in its final section, the film hints at a transportational quality of their new alliance that drops them in a new and unfamiliar place with only each other to rely on. The lesson seems to be that sharing an environment necessarily gives rise to various interpersonal issues which can be dissolved while outside of it, and that even if two people seem completely incompatible they can still find common ground and learn to get along especially against the stressful backdrop of a global pandemic in which enforced isolation can exert additional pressure on an already strained relationship just when mutual cooperation becomes an absolute necessity. Filmed with everyday naturalism and a surrealist, deadpan humour Kato’s indie dramedy hints at the strangeness of the ordinary but also discovers the small moments of unexpected connection often brokered by casual misunderstanding.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Decoded (解密, Chen Sicheng, 2024)

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International geopolitics is reduced to a battle wits between two men, each in their way lonely exiles and perpetual outsiders in Chen Sicheng’s adaptation of the novel by Mai Jia, Decoded (解密, jiěmì). Originally an actor (and here making a meta self-cameo), Chen is best known as a director for the smash hit Detective Chinatown franchise which boasts both well-plotted mysteries and zany, lowbrow comedy. Decoded is a slightly different kettle of fish, displaying its own kind of whimsicality but also darker and stranger in its concentric enigmas.

The narrative’s timeline seems to be slightly hazy, but loosely follows an prodigious orphan born to a prominent family though his father, the black sheep, had already died before his mother too died in childbirth. A rather complicated set of circumstances led to Rong Jinzhen (Liu Haoran) being raised by an Austrian dream interpreter who for unexplained reasons kept him locked up in a small hut isolated from the world while teaching him all about dreams with the consequence that by the time the old man dies, 12-year-old Jinzhen is a strange boy with few social skills but a once-in-a-generation grasp of mathematics.

It’s this genius that sees him saved by distant relative Xiaolili (Daniel Wu) who was originally going to send him to an orphanage but decides adopt him instead. Jinzhen then gains early entry to university where he’s tutored by Liseiwicz, an exiled Polish professor who fled his homeland to escape persecution by the Nazis as a Jew. The film seemingly doesn’t mean to, but undermines this backstory through the casting of John Cusack who plays the part as all American and is not convincing as Polish man who ended up in China because he had nowhere else to go and is unable to return to his homeland thereby lessening the intended impact of his speeches about nationhood and patriotism which counter those Jinzheng has already been given by Xiaolili in addition to making him seem suspicious possibly long before she should. 

Nevertheless, this may also add to his sense of untrustworthiness and perhaps duplicitous treatment of Jinzheng which edges towards the exploitative in hoping to make use of his genius for his research into the evolution of computing. In the early days of the Chinese civil war, Liseiwicz is approached by agents from the PLA who want him to decode a telegram that may save thousands of lives. Liseiwicz claims he doesn’t want to get into politics though superficially supportive of the Communist cause only to later be exposed as a collaborator with the KMT on his return to the US where he designs encryption codes to be used between Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists in Taiwan and the US troops backing him in the hope he’ll retake China and end Communism in Asia. 

Of course, Jinzheng gets picked up by the CCP to work in their secret spy division in which he becomes a virtual prisoner forbidden from leaving the compound while expected to spend all of his time breaking codes such as those designed by Liseiwicz. In truth, it becomes a kind of game between the two but one that the guileless Jinzheng little understands. It takes it him an unreasonably long time to understand that Liseiwicz is just messing with his mind, sending him misinformation as a distraction intended to drive him mad culminating in dispatching a copy of the The Beatles’ I Am the Walrus in order both to disrupt his political consciousness with decadent Western pop music and drive him out of his mind as he struggles to understand how this nonsense verse about egg men and marine animals is supposed to relate to the code.

Then again, there is something a little subversive in the celebration of Jinzheng’s ability to think about the box, instantly understanding that the correct answer to the entrance test is not to waste his time taking it because it’s obvious they’ve already cracked the code concerned. The use of dream interpretation taught to him by his adoptive Austrian father maybe simply be an ability to work things out on a deeper level of consciousness, but it’s also left him with a fragile mental state already unable to discern dream from reality. The strain of constant codebreaking further pushes him towards madness while he perhaps loses sight of his original mission, only later coming to realise that Xiaolili’s vision of nationhood was the correct one after all.

Though Chen appears to have been influenced by Christopher Nolan in his use of oneiric imagery, he crafts a number of beautifully designed, whimsical dream sequences some which later become hellish or strange but reflect an innate innocence in Jinzheng while disclosing to him something of the real world which he had not understood. It’s ironic in a sense that he’s forever trying to decode the world around him, such as in taking instructions from his adopted sister/cousin Biyu (Chen Yusi) on how to know if girls are interested which he nevertheless slightly misunderstands. The film goes to some surprisingly dark places such as in a brief sequence which Biyu and her mother seemingly if potentially anachronistically fall victim to the Cultural Revolution while Jinzheng is the victim of several assassination attempts by KMT agents well into the ‘60s. Even so his story emerges as tragedy more than triumph, a fine mind broken by the society around him and used as an unwitting tool in the nation’s path to perfecting an atomic bomb having seemingly decoded everything but his place within the world.

International trailer (English subtitles)

School of the Holy Beast (聖獣学園, Norifumi Suzuki, 1974)

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“Why is sex wrong?” a rebel nun enquires, hinting at the hypocritical atmosphere of the convent which comes to stand in for the patriarchal superstructure of the contemporary society. That it does so might in a way be surprising given that Christianity has relatively little cultural relevance in Japan save its stance as a persecuted religion during the feudal era. Director Norifumi Suzuki jumps on the nunsploitation bandwagon but does so with a baroque romanticism mixed with punkish youthfulness as two young women find themselves rebels in the house of God.

They are both there for reasons largely unconnected to religion. 18-year-old Maya (Yumi Takigawa) is searching for the truth behind her birth and her mother’s death, while Sister Ishida (Emiko Yamauchi) claims she’s been sent there by a wicked stepmother. Ishida also kicks up a stink during a class by questioning the truth of immaculate conception which is quite odd for someone who wanted to become a nun, while otherwise punished for drinking whisky in the middle of the night. Punishment does seem to be the main thrust of their religious practice with the transgressions of “adultery”, which includes all impure thoughts, murder (!), and theft taken the most seriously. On her first night at the convent Maya is woken by the sound of another nun furiously whipping herself though in fairness there just isn’t much else to do. 

Suzuki rams home the erotisicm of ritual in the baptism Maya undergoes during her initiation as a nun in which she is totally nude and instructed to stand with her arms out as if on the cross in front of the altar. She must then bend to kiss the crucifix before receiving her veil as a bride of Christ. The nuns talk of lives of eternal virginity while burying themselves in asceticism in an effort to deny their natural desires but have to a degree sublimated their lust in violence. The most common form of punishment is whipping, while Maya is later tortured with thorns and artfully battered by roses. When one nun steals money in guilt for having abandoned her impoverished family to begin her spiritual journey to Christ, she confesses herself to a priest who offers her the same amount so that she can help her family and ease her conscience by returning it. But in reality the priest has tricked her. He resents that she feels as if her sin has been forgiven and she may forget her guilt, cruelly telling her that she will never hear the voice of God before going on to violate her. 

The act of betrayal, of himself breaking the code to which he should subscribe, is only a echo of an societal corruption which allows men to abuse their power often with the complicity of the women around them such as the abess who has long been in love with him. Kakinuma (Fumio Watanabe) is a man whose faith has been shaken. He bears the scars from exposure to the atomic bomb in Nagasaki which is centre of Christianity in Japan. After telling Hisako (Yayoi Watanabe) that God will not see her, he asks if anyone has actually seen him and why he does nothing when his people suffer. 

Both he and the abbess are trapped in a hell of their own making, though as the girls both say the convent is akin to a prison. When Hisako’s sister visits her they talk to each other through glass as if she were a prisoner, though in many ways she is oppressed by her own repressed desires while those of the other nuns have begun to drive them quietly out of their minds and into sadomasochistic fury. This peculiar madness is only deepened by the arrival of a new Mother Superior who returns from Europe insistent on rooting out “witches” in league with the devil. Suzuki signals the absurdity by playing a chorus of elation when a tortured nun wets herself over a tablet featuring a crucifix in the inversion of a bizarre Edo-era ritual designed to identify secret Christians who were at that point illegal. 

To break free of the covent and return to her liberated life in contemporary Japan as seen in the cheerful opening sequences of her date with Kenta (Hayato Tani), Maya must also free her mother’s ghost and the souls of her sisters by forcing Kakinuma to reckon with his crimes if in the most ironic of ways. Suzuki shoots with febrile romanticism, the pastel colours of the church lending it a hellish glow even before the resurrection of a ghost enacts karmic revenge in a feverish atmosphere of romantic jealously and masochistic repression.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

*Norifumi Suzuki’s name is actually “Noribumi” but he has become known as “Norifumi” to English-speaking audiences.

The 12th Suspect (열두 번째 용의자, Ko Myoung-sung, 2019)

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An inspector calls on a small group of artists in the immediate aftermath of the Korean War in Ko Myoung-sung’s taut psychological thriller, The 12th Suspect (열두 번째 용의자, Yeoldu beonjjae Yonguija). Set almost entirely within a tiny tea house, Ko’s steely drama lays bare the contradictions of the new society in slide towards authoritarianism which is itself a product of the failure to deal with the legacy of the colonial past while preoccupied about the “communist” threat in the quite literally divided nation. 

The Oriental Teahouse is home to a collection of poets, painters, and Bohemians seeking refuge from the everyday difficulties of life in the post-war city. Their peaceful idyll is rocked by the revelations that one of their number, Doo-hwan, died on a mountain the previous evening most likely murdered. As it turns out, no one seems to have liked Doo-hwan very much. He was “hateful and ignorant” not to mention a bad poet though many are sceptical of the story wondering if he might simply have had an accident. In any case, the newcomer to the cafe turns out to be a policeman, Ki-chae (Kim Sang-kyung), who confirms that Doo-hwan died of a gunshot wound and sets about asking a series of increasingly intense questions about his relations with the cafe’s denizens. 

To begin with, Ki-chae seems to be a Columbo-like avuncular detective, polite and sympathetic in his questioning until revealing his true purpose at which he turns into something of a firebreathing demon with a very particular vision of “justice”, hunting down “communist spies” in order to keep the South safe. As the murder weapon appears to be a Soviet-issue pistol, he assumes the killer(s) may be linked to the North accusing one of the patrons of having aided and abetted a cousin who was on the other side while throwing a book on Stalin at a university professor who desperately tries to explain that he’s had it since studying in Russia in his youth when times were different. 

Meanwhile, the policeman’s authoritarian sense of justice is gradually exposed as a kind of fascim born of his experiences under Japanese colonial rule. Doo-hwan may have died because of his actions during in the war when he collaborated with Japanese officers agreeing to send young men from his village as conscript soldiers to die for Japan on the frontlines or else as exploited slave labour in the coal mines. Ki-chae is hiding his own dark past while his quest for justice is riddled with corruption masked as patriotism as he vows to wipe out the “communist” threat in order to build a more secure Korea. “The existence of communists is a great misfortune to this country and also a danger” he adds before descending into a violent rage stamping on the face of his interviewee. 

His almost hysterical anti-communism is manifested in a general hatred for the kind of people who frequent the Oriental Teahouse, firstly taking them to task for their lifestyles in a time of chaos and privation while later viewing them as cowardly shirkers evading their duty to go to war. “I won’t let you ruin our country” he snarls while simultaneously embarking on an ill thought through argument that the communists are unfairly benefitting from the dire economic situation to “provoke good people”. He justifies his actions in insisting that everything he does is in order to prevent another “horrible war” while continuing to intimidate them into some kind of confession. His questioning reveals the petty jealousies and minor tensions between the artists along with the unreliability of their testimony while eventually exposing their small acts of resistance, cafe owner Suk-hyeon (Heo Sung-tae) determined to stand up to authoritarianism rather than forever be oppressed by it though others it seems are frightened enough by the potential dangers of rebellion to consider turning on their friends and allies. Locked in the tiny cafe with two soldiers blocking the exit, the artists are cornered and terrified as Ki-chae pits one against the other while all around them the prognosis looks bleak in a society in which men like Ki-chae wield ultimate power controlling the future through burying the past.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Ajin: Demi-Human (亜人, Katsuyuki Motohiro, 2017)

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Katsuyuki Motohiro’s 2001social drama Transparent: Tribute to a Sad Genius had attempted to show the government acting with compassion having discovered humans with a potentially dangerous power, in that case the unfortunate ability to broadcast their every thought. Rather than locking them up in labs, the government had allowed the Transparents to live in the community under the caveat that they must never be told of their ability while continuing to monitor them secretly and in fact micromanaging their lives with less than ethical attention. 2017’s Ajin (亜人), adapted from the manga by Gamon Sakurai, is in many ways Transparent’s flip side in which the government has discovered the existence of a series of people known as Demi-Humans with super fast healing ability meaning that they cannot die from injury and has been conducting what is essentially vivisection on them justifying themselves that “the Ajin are the precious key to the evolution of mankind”. 

Nevertheless, they are mindful that the public would not accept it if they knew the government’s claims of “protecting” Ajins was a smokescreen to disguise the fact they’ve been experimenting on them, let alone selling the results to commercial companies for the production of chemical weapons among other things. Previously a regular medical student, Kei Nagano (Takeru Satoh) is the third Ajin to be unmasked in Japan after being hit by a bus only to heal rapidly and stumble away. After a brief period of torture, Kei is “rescued” by crazed terrorist revolutionary leader Sato (Go Ayano) and his underling Tanaka (Yu Shirota), escaped Ajins 1 and 2, but becomes their enemy after he refuses to turn against the scientists who had been torturing him pointing out that killing them would only make him feel worse and is therefore counterproductive. 

The implication is that 20 years of brutal torture at the hands of mad scientists has turned Sato into a crazed fascist hellbent on the extinction of the human race, seeking an “autonomous” space for Ajin along with full civil rights for Demi-Humans. Though we are told that only three Ajin have been unmasked so far in Japan, the implication is that there are many more living quietly some of whom Sato recruits after putting out a call for all disenfranchised Demi-Humans to join his revolution not for equality but domination. It’s this movement Kei can’t support, the classically “good” Ajin who disapproves of Sato’s actions and wants to leave peacefully alongside humanity. As such, there’s something a little uncomfortable in his inevitable decision to team up with the people who were just vivisecting him in order to stop Sato achieving his goal of guaranteed civil rights for people like him asking for nothing more than that his family be protected and he be left alone and given a new ID to live quietly in somewhere in Japan when all of this over. 

The unpalatable implication seems to be that minorities are only worthy of respect if they serve those in power, both Kei and another closeted Ajin benefiting directly and individually by siding with humanity though humanity may not honour the various promises it makes while they are partially complicit in the torture and exploitation of other Ajins. Sato’s basic request is only to given his full rights in the freedom from torture, but even this cannot be granted because of the threat he presents to humanity in that the inability to die means that he cannot be controlled through violence. Ironically enough Sato does seem to believe himself to be the next step in human evolution, after 20 years of brutal torture believing that humanity is a lesser being which those like him are intended to replace. 

Kei meanwhile encounters kind humans such as Mrs. Yamanaka (Kazuko Yoshiyuki) who kindly offers him a place to hideout because when you see someone is in trouble you just help them even if a baying mob later turn up at your door to ask why. There may be a minor allegory in the way the Ajins are treated, feared by and excluded from regular society, forced to keep their true natures secret in order to live a “quiet” life but than again Sato and his cohort of equally crazed young Demi-Humans who presumably have never been tortured are depicted as quasi-fascist radicals selling their own organs on the medical black market and eventually prepared to unleash a chemical weapon on Tokyo to make it unliveable for regular humans in order to claim their own space. Nevertheless, Motohiro’s drama is at its best during its high impact, well choreographed action sequences displaying some top quality visual effects as the Ajins produce their ghostly avatars or reassemble themselves after catastrophic injury even if the discomfort of the underlying messages cannot be entirely escaped. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Target (薔薇の標的, Toru Murakawa, 1980)

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By 1980 Toru Murakawa was an in-demand director thanks largely to his extremely successful collaborations with late ‘70s icon Yusaku Matsuda. Fresh off the back of the Game series, Toei Central Film hired him to do for their aspiring star Hiroshi Tachi what he’d done for Matsuda with grimy noir Target (薔薇の標的, Bara no Hyoteki). Interestingly enough Target shares its Japanese title with the 1972 drama The Target of Roses, a truly bizarre thriller in which a hitman stumbles on an international nazi conspiracy that was penned by the same screenwriters but is otherwise entirely unconnected with the earlier film and shares no common plot elements whatsoever. 

Set firmly within the contemporary era, the action takes place in Yokohama and is essentially a tale of proto-heroic bloodshed as the hero, Hiroshi (Hiroshi Tachi), seeks vengeance for the death of his best friend, Akira, during a drug deal which is ambushed by a third party who make off with both the drugs and the money killing Akira in the process. Hiroshi goes to prison for four years and then sets about getting some payback on his release by chasing down the Idogaki gang through gunman Yagi who he believes was directly responsible for Akira’s death. 

The plot is perhaps straight out of the Nikkatsu playbook, a little less honour than you’d find in the usual Toei picture though also cynical and nihilistic in keeping with the late ‘70s taste for generalised paranoia. Hiroshi is soon targeted by the Idogaki gang, but is saved by an old prison buddy, Kadota (Ryohei Uchida), who is a little older than he is and to an extent has a noble reason for his life of crime in that he has a son who became disabled after contracting polio and wants to get enough money together to make sure he’ll be alright when he can no longer look after him. Kadota then adds a third a man, Nakao, a former narcotics cop who jokes that he was kicked off the force for rape but according to Kadota was forced out for noble reasons after his attempt to help a friend backfired. The three men team up to turn the tables on Idogaki by ambushing his own drug deal with, in a throwback to ‘60s Sinophobia, gangsters from Shanghai. 

Meanwhile Hiroshi is caught between the life he had before and the contemporary reality in reuniting with his former girlfriend Kyoko (Yutaka Nakajima) who has evidently become the mistress of a wealthy man and is presumably the mysterious benefactor who paid all his legal fees. After a meet cute at a florist he also strikes up a tentative relationship with a wealthy young woman, the daughter of a CEO who plans to move to Mexico. Despite the rising prosperity of Japan in the early ‘80s, pretty much everyone has their sights set on going abroad, Kadota planning to head to Canada after making sure his son is well provided for. Yet Hiroshi is trapped in the Japan of the past, obsessed with vengeance for his friend while torn by his relationship with Kyoko who similarly wants to exit her comfortable yet compromised life to return to a more innocent time at Hiroshi’s side while unbeknownst to him the mistress of high ranking Idogaki boss Hamada. 

What becomes clear is that there is no prospect of escape from contemporary Japan, not even perhaps in death, Hiroshi left alive but dead inside at the film’s conclusion having committed a kind of spiritual suicide born of the dark side of what remained of his honour in seeking vengeance for the death of his friend who had seemingly only participated in the drug deal at Hiroshi’s command in an effort to improve the fortunes of their gang. Once again produced by Toei’s subsidiary Toei Central Film, Target has lower production values than the films Murakawa was making with Matsuda (who has a small yet memorable cameo as a rockstar whose life has been ruined by drugs) with non-synchronised dialogue and a grimy aesthetic which only adds to its sense of fatalistic nihilism otherwise enlivened by Murakawa’s artful composition and atmosphere of moral ruin in which there is no more humanity nor justice. 

The Big Heat (城巿特警, Andrew Kam & Johnnie To, 1988)

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A Hong Kong cop struggles with his sense of responsibility when faced with the fatalistic existential threat of the imminent Handover in Johnnie To’s first foray into the genre with which he would later become most closely associated outside of Hong Kong, the action crime drama. After a handful of Cinema City comedies, To is credited as a co-director along with Andrew Kam Yeung Wah though the production of The Big Heat (城巿特警), loosely inspired by the Fritz Lang film of the same name, was notoriously complicated passing through several hands over its unusually long gestation of almost two years, according to an interview with screenwriter Gordon Chan Kar-Seung, with producer Tsui Hark also heavily involved in the shooting. 

Tsui’s involvement is apparently responsible for the unusual level of explicit violence more usually found in horror exploitation rather than gangster noir, though there is perhaps something in the constant bodily destruction that aligns with the pre-Handover setting in which the “big heat” hanging over the city is an increasing existential panic which has created the maddening environment in which this surreal violence can occur as revealed in the opening dream sequence which features a drill piercing a man’s hand with small pieces of flesh speeding off it. The dream will turn out to be a prophecy foreshadowing the final shootout in which Inspector Wong (Waise Lee Chi-Hung) is shot thought the hand though at this point it signals both a psychological and physical fracturing. Owing to a neurological condition, Wong has lost full control over his right hand which leads him to question his ability to protect his city if he is unable to pull the trigger when needed which might also explain why he is frequently seen practicing his marksmanship at the firing range. 

Because of this anxiety, Wong had planned to resign but changes his mind on learning that his former partner who sustained an injury that Wong felt himself responsible for has been brutally murdered by Hong Kong gangsters in Malaysia after coming across a secret folder “by chance” containing photos used to blackmail a shipping magnate over his his homosexuality and an incriminating invoice. To do the right thing, Wong also temporarily breaks up with his forensic scientist girlfriend Maggie (Betty Mak Chui-Han) whom he was due to marry in a fortnight’s time suggesting that they not see each other until he’s solved his friend’s murder and then presumably plans to retire from law enforcement. 

Essentially, he deprioritises his personal, romantic relationships in favour of the homosocial brotherhood of the police both avenging his friend and dedicating himself to protecting Hong Kong from an oncoming threat represented by gangster Han (Paul Chu Kong) who is later revealed to be in cahoots with Russian mafia who ironically have a large portrait of Lenin on their boat and hammer and sickle flags everywhere while vowing to continue “selling drugs and capitalism” in the seemingly lawless environment of pre-Handover Hong Kong where everyone apparently wants to make enough money to be able to leave if the situation declines, “communist” Russians perhaps standing in for looming Mainland authoritarianism. Han even offers to sell “everything including Hong Kong” passing a list of names of “important people in the government” he apparently has access to in vast network of corruption. “Cheers to 1997” they ironically toast for their burgeoning business opportunity. 

It’s this corruption that is the source of Wong’s anxiety, fearing he doesn’t have the strength to stop it while his compromised hand is a symbol of both fate and an impotence that is later exorcised when he receives the corresponding physical injury yet is saved by a crucifix necklace that previously belonged to his girlfriend while in another instance of foreshadowing the corrupt policeman is eventually taken out by his own malfunctioning gun backfiring just like that which ruined an assailant’s hand in the drug bust in which Wong’s partner was injured. Having regained mastery over his hand, Wong is therefore more assured in his ability to protect Hong Kong from whatever it is that’s coming remaining within the police force while those who pay the heaviest price are an idealistic young rookie unable to adapt to the morally compromised world of pre-Handover Hong Kong, and Wong’s fiancée who becomes a symbol of that which he could not protect having prioritised his role as a police officer. Though somewhat disjointed having passed through so many hands, there are some typically To flourishes in the fluidity of the camerawork in the early stretches along with a gloomy romanticism in the fatalistic noir of the pre-Handover society even as he continues to find his feet as a purveyor of moody policier. 

Trailer (no subtitles)

Baby Assassins: Nice Days (ベイビーわるきゅーれ ナイスデイズ, Yugo Sakamoto, 2024) [Fantasia 2024]

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After beginning to conquer the demands of adulthood, Mahiro (Saori Izawa) and Chisato (Akari Takaishi) are taking a well-deserved break, or more like a working holiday to be precise, but soon find themselves with another unexpected mission to clean up a messy situation on behalf of the Guild. Baby Assassins: Nice Days (ベイビーわるきゅーれ ナイスデイズ, Baby Valkyrie​: Nice Days), the third in series of deadpan slacker action movies from Yugo Sakamoto, adjusts the balance of the previous two films shifting more towards action than the girls’ aimless lives while setting them against an opponent who is anything but aimless.

In fact with the girls find their way to the home of Kaede Fuyumura (Sosuke Ikematsu), is plastered in ironic motivational slogans that seem to be a kind of parody of salaryman’s kaizen obsession. Fuyumura likes to rank things and wants to make sure he’s at the top, but also wants out of the game because he’s bored with it and also fed up with difficult clients frustrated when one takes ages to decide whether or not he should kill the target resulting unnecessary stress for them and an unsatisfying kill for Fuyumura. That’s largely why he’s agreed to this one last job of killing 150 people who took part in cancelling a university student online. The problem is that Fuyumura is a freelancer which presents a problem for the Guild which has decided he must die for violating their rules and bringing the profession into disrepute. Thus Mahiro and Chisato find themselves in an awkward position when they turn up to kill their latest target and realise they’ve been double booked to take out Fuyumura ’s kill.

The admin mixup, though it isn’t one really, rams home the series’ persistent absurdity that this weird world of assassins isn’t so different from contemporary corporate culture while the girls are still subject to the same problems as any other 20-something. This time around, we’re introduced to another prominent agency which is run out of a farmer’s agricultural co-op and hides weapons inside boxes of vegetables, while Mahiro and Chisato get a pair of supervisors with the de facto team leader Iruka (Atsuko Maeda) going off on lengthy rants about why it’s impossible to work with Gen Z while the girls struggle with her uptight dismissiveness. Yet even when there’s tension or discord, the fact remains that the Chisato and Mahiro are also part of a team and have a vast network of support to rely on including their cleanup squad while Fuyumura is a lone wolf who’s driven himself half out of his mind with his quest to be the best, a message is brought home to him when he approaches the farmer’s union to ask for “a replacement” after getting one of their guys killed only to be told off and reminded the farmers work as one big family rather than a series of disposable minions. 

There is something a little poignant about Fuyumura’s wondering when his birthday is as if this small forgotten detail represented his missing humanity. The only time he feels like a human being is doing something mundane like cleaning his microwave and brushing his teeth. As she had the brothers in the previous film, Mahiro finds a kind connection with Fuyumura as they each discover a worthy match but knowing only one of them can survive. In an introspective movement, Mahiro asks Chisato if they can still hang out together on the other side if the worst happens, but she shuts the question down perhaps more in an attempt to shift Mahiro’s mindset but also berating herself for forgetting her birthday and making hurried plans to coverup her crime against friendship.

For all the absurdity about hitman union rules and rights of employment in an illegal profession, the films has a genuine affection for the relationship between the two girls as well as that between the wider team who are always around to have their back while they also take care to protect each other. Perhaps having to field a work crisis during their “holiday” is their final test of adulthood, and one they largely pass in enforcing their boundaries and defiantly having a good time anyway even if they did have to cancel their reservation at local barbecue restaurant to stakeout the home of a crazed killer. Once again featuring a series of well choreographed and innovative action sequences, the series’ third instalment seems to come into its own expanding the world of the Baby Assassins but setting them free inside it evidently a lot more at home with the concept of adulting.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

May 18 (화려한 휴가, Kim Ji-hoon, 2007)

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Following the assassination of president Park Chung-hee in 1979, many assumed that democracy would return and that the society would be liberated from its authoritarian past. That did not, however, come to pass. While the government floundered, general Chun Doo-hwan launched a coup that led to nothing other than a second military dictatorship. Citizens continued to press for democratisation and the lifting of the martial law that had been declared in the wake of Park’s death. In order to cement his authoritarian rule, Chun embarked on an oppressive crackdown of resistance activity, actually expanding martial law and sending troops to monitor universities where the majority of protests were taking place.  

It’s against this backdrop that Kim Ji-hoon’s May 18 (화려한 휴가, Hwaryeohan hyuga) unfolds, so named for the first day of Gwangju Uprising in which citizens of the small provincial city were subject to beatings, torture, rape and murder at the hands of military forces. He opens however with pleasant scenes of the local countryside as taxi driver Min-woo (Kim Sang-kyung) heads back into the city eventually arriving to pick up his younger brother Jin-woo (Lee Joon-gi) from high school and deliver him to the local church. Min-woo also has a crush on mutual friend and fellow attendee, Shin-ae (Lee Yo-won), who works as a nurse at the local hospital. For some reason even though this is a fairly small place, Min-woo also seems to be unaware that Shin-ae is the daughter of his boss Heung-su (Ahn Sung-ki ), a former army captain now retired and running a taxi firm. 

In an attempt to make the political personal, Kim spends the first hour on Min-woo’s awkward romance which by modern standards is quite problematic in that he basically ends up following Shin-ae around and offering to give her free lifts even though she seems annoyed to see him and isn’t keen on him effectively deciding where she doesn’t and doesn’t go. Meanwhile, as he and his brother are orphaned he’s adopted a paternal role towards Jin-woo who is bright and studying hard with the aim of getting into Seoul University to study law while Min-woo most likely had to give up school to drive the taxi so he could support them both. This is also in its way a little uncomfortable in its emphasis on Jin-woo’s bright future which is about to be destroyed by the uprising as if his life is worth more because of all the ruined potential rather than just because he was an ordinary human betrayed by his government and trapped by hellish atrocity. Even so, it hints at a conflict within Min-woo as he wants to keep his brother safe but also has a natural desire to resist injustice and is moved when Jin-woo explains that one of his best friends has been murdered by state violence. 

Then again, the film’s framing is also in a sense reactionary in Jin-woo’s intense offence against being branded as a “rebel” or a “communist” rather refocusing on the fact the military’s actions are inhuman and the their attempt to slur the local people only a means of justification. As the local priest accurately suggests, the military provokes them in order to have an excuse to crack down with extreme prejudice ensuring that there will be no further resistance to increasing authoritarianism. Some army officers begin to ask questions but are quickly shut down by their overzealous commander who claims the North may be on its way to link up with these “communists” and is quite clearly prepared to wipe out the entire town rather than back down and risk a further escalation of their resistance. 

While the soldiers are faceless and implacable, the townspeople are sometimes depicted as naive bumblers with significant time spent on a “loudmouth” comic relief character who is nevertheless one of the first to pick up a gun and join the town’s civilian army led by Heung-su who like the priest is under no illusions and assumes troops will soon storm the town. The comedic tone and melodramatic undercurrent often undercut Kim’s attempts to depict the horror of the massacre even in the irony of their juxtaposition as bullets suddenly rip into a cheerful crowd which had been laughing and joking only seconds before. The closing scenes in which a man refuses to surrender and is killed are framed as heroic but in the end seem futile, as if he’s thrown his life away for no reason. Even so there is something Shin-ae’s loudspeaker pleas to remember the citizens of Gwangju who stayed strong and resisted to the last rather than consent to their oppression even if she is in a sense condemned to be the storyteller bearing the horror of it all alone along with the loss of her own happy future crushed under the boots of violent authoritarianism.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Round Trip Heart (ロマンス, Yuki Tanada, 2015)

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“Somewhere in Japan, there’s someone waiting for me” sing the heroes of Yuki Tanada’s Round Trip Heart (ロマンス, Romance), each a little lost and unwilling to go home looking for something but also afraid to find it. In any case, they can only begin by stepping off the rails and taking a detour through their shared sense of loneliness bonding as they look for new directions and an accommodation with a disappointing reality. 

Ironically enough, Hachiko (Yuko Oshima) is a top operator of the refreshment cart aboard the Romance Car heading from Tokyo to the country by train. Hachiko claims to love trains because of their sense of certainty. After all they travel on rails, have a clear destination, and will definitely return after reaching the end of their journeys. She meanwhile feels a little lost and empty in her life of forced politeness with a feckless boyfriend who asks her for money before she heads off to work. An unexpected letter from her estranged mother, Yoriko (Megumi Nishimuta), and a strange encounter with a weird old man who tries to steal a packet of biscuits however force her change course, getting off the train and heading back into the past. 

Sakuraba (Koji Ookura), the biscuit pilferer, is a 45-year-old failed film producer on the run from the police and myriad loansharks. His sense of loneliness mirrors Hachiko’s own in that he is divorced with a 9-year-old daughter he hasn’t seen in two years and lifetime’s worth of regrets. Hachiko becomes for him a kind of surrogate daughter as he inappropriately reassembles the torn up letter and convinces Hachiko that it implies her mother may attempt to take her own life suggesting that they journey to the place it mentions, Hakone, where the family once spent a pleasant holiday. 

Familial breakdown is reason for their shared sense of displacement yet Hachiko has projected all of her resentment onto her mother who never got over her father’s decision to leave while Sakuraba fears that his daughter has grown to hate him and harbours a secret desire to restore his family but is too consumed with shame to approach them. By going to Hakone in search of her mother, Hachiko begins to reevaluate her childhood memories perhaps understanding a little more of her mother from the perspective of a grown woman rather than that of a small child who had sometimes felt left out by her parents’ closeness while they were together and rejected by her mother’s need for romantic validation once her father had left. In one particular scene we see Yoriko wearing dark glasses with what looks like a bruise over her eye while taking Hachiko to a restaurant where she orders steak only for her daughter presumably because she cannot afford two meals explaining that her boyfriend has broken up with her because of her lingering attachment to Hachiko’s father. 

The memory forces her back into a moment of resentment feeling as if her mother was only ever nice to her when men let her down, poignantly recalling her neediness in lamenting that everyone always leaves her while asking Hachiko to promise she never would. Sakuraba too complains that everybody leaves him though in his case in the wake of his repeated failures as a film producer and subsequent dealing with loansharks and other shady characters. Just as Yoriko had continued to dream of romantic fulfilment, Sakuraba continues to dream of success in film but crucially as a path back towards his family as perhaps finding a man might have been for Yoriko though she was never able to let go of the idealised image of her husband pining for the familial closeness of their Hakone trip. 

Even so the force that governs their lives is fatalistic passivity, Hachiko riding the rails to their certain destinations and back again, while Sakuraba makes every decision by tossing a coin, an action rendered meaningless by his inability to tell heads from tales. Only by rejecting their passivity in getting off the train and giving up the coin tricks can they begin to face themselves, deciding to set out and look for those who may be waiting for them rather than just sitting around waiting for something to happen. Then again perhaps if you sit in the same place long enough, what you’re looking for will eventually find you so long as you’re on the right track. 

Trailer (English subtitles)