Hoyaman (さよなら ほやマン, Teruaki Shoji, 2023)

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According to Hoyaman, a kind of superhero in the guise of a mutated sea squirt, the sea squirts’ lifecycle involves swimming around like tadpoles after hatching from an egg and then finding a nice rock to sit on at which point they lose their brains. This is what the hero of Teruaki Shoji’s quirky island comedy Hoyaman (さよなら ほやマン, Sayonara Hoyaman) is becoming afraid of, worried he’s about to lose his brain forever stuck in the home he inherited from his parents but also afraid to leave its safety to venture forth and explore some other rocks before it’s too late.

He’s jolted out of his sense of inertia by a mysterious woman, Mahiru (Kumi Kureshiro), who suddenly arrives and tries to buy his house off him though of course Akira (Afro) is not willing to sell despite being so heavily in debt he’s about to lose his fishing boat (and therefore his means of supporting himself) and he and his brother Shigeru (Kodai Kurosaki) are subsisting on a single pot of instant ramen a day. The house itself is like a kind of rock pool where the brothers are trapped in a protracted adolescence having lost their parents in the 2011 tsunami, thereafter floundering around unable to move on with their lives. As their bodies were never found, Akira hasn’t even got round to registering his parents’ deaths or dealt with any of the practical matters surrounding their living arrangements but now realises that he’ll have to something to secure a financial future for himself and Shigeru who seems to have some kind of learning difficulties and is unable to work.

That’s one reason he decides to accept the deposit from Miharu, a manga artist fleeing her life in Tokyo feeling all washed up as she too drifts onto the shore looking for a good rock to sit on. They are all looking for a kind of escape but unsure where to to find it, Akira wondering if it’s time to leave the island just as Miharu arrives. The old woman next door, Haruko (Yoneko Matsukane), who acts like a kind of surrogate mother figure to the boys, confesses that she would have liked to try living off the island and was resentful when their father mentioned the possibility of leaving. She encourages Akira to swim out into deeper waters but he continues to struggle with himself consumed by the trauma of the earthquake, his guilt, and complicated feelings about the responsibility of looking after Shigeru who likely would not be able to adjust to life outside of the island or remain behind on his own.

Madcap schemes ensue including an unlikely bid to become YouTube stars by resurrecting a mascot character created by their father to promote the island, Hoyaman. Miharu tries to explain to them that like everything else in the village they’re ten years behind the times, but the boys are naively excited about their prospects while simultaneously trying to recapture the past in the same way Miharu may be in admitting that she based her manga on her own younger brothers of whom Akira and Shigeru remind her. Well meaning gestures eventually backfire, but also lead to a kind clarity that allows each of them to realise who they are and where they want to be or at least what kind of rock they want to be sitting on when it’s time to jettison their brains. 

Even so, it’s not all rainbows on the island as Akira discovers when his bid for YouTube success turns sour and the villagers turn against him for embarrassing them on national scale while Miharu also has her fair share of haters along with a troubled past she’s struggling to overcome. What they rediscover is a sense of community and solidarity among those who wash up on the island whether by virtue of birth or some other happy accident. Meeting his trauma head-on, Akira is able to find an accommodation with his guilt and loss but also a way forward that might not necessarily be the one most would expect as does Miharu though buoyed by her serendipitous connection with the zany brothers, nice old lady, and the gentle rhythms of an island life.

Hoyaman screens Feb. 18 as part of Family Portrait: Japanese Family in Flux

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Er Woo Dong: The Entertainer (어우동, Lee Jang-ho, 1985)

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“The commoners get to have all the fun” a lady in waiting laments to her mistress in Lee Jang-ho’s historical drama set in the reign of good king Sejeong, Er Woo Dong: The Entertainer (어우동, Eo Udong). It is however the titular heroine Eoudong’s (Lee Bo-hee) determination to enjoy herself that becomes a threat to the social order, not only in her ability to subvert the Confucianist philosophies of the era by making men her playthings but doing so with those not of noble birth. 

Legends seem to surround Euodong, a little more of her history revealed with each step in the investigation into the murder of a man she had slept with at a festival. The man had attempted to rape her, but Eoudong was soon able to gain the upper hand in the situation, realising that he is a servant boy who often visited her home. She sleeps with him willingly, dominating him by getting on top and making it about her pleasure and agency rather than his. Soon after she leaves, however, the boy is killed by an assassin apparently hired by her cruel and perverse husband, who is technically the king’s uncle, to tidy up after her. 

Set in 1479, the film is clear in its criticism of the feudal order while insisting that it is the nobles who are the most constrained because they must act by these arcane codes to which the commoners are not subject. The commoners revel at their festival, something more or less forbidden in the revered word of the court and most particularly for a woman like Euodong who craves freedom and excitement, longing to fly like a bird. People of often say of her that should have been born a commoner where her behaviour would not be regarded as so deeply problematic to the social order in its direct attack on notions of class and gender. Though she herself is niece to the prime minister, an assassin (Ahn Sung-ki) is later hired to neuter the threat she poses though there is a kind of care in the unusual request, instructing that death should come suddenly and without pain. Afterwards, the assassin should be sure to bury her in her beautiful place. 

The assassin, however also has a painful past in which in which he was quite literally castrated for a similar kind of transgression of class boundaries having become friends with a young noblewoman. While he lost his penis, his friend lost his tongue so that he would never speak of what happened rendering them both outcasts left with no option but to serve the system that had harmed them by becoming spies and assassins. Eoudong’s rebellion is towards this same system, a system in which women are regarded as worthless if they do not serve their proper function. Married at an early age, some recount that Eoudong was once cheerful but less so after her marriage. Her husband rarely visited her and in fact took a concubine but she was still blamed for the “failure” to conceive a child and threatened with the shame of being sent back to her birth family. In this era, a woman was forbidden from remarrying even in widowhood while it was relatively easy for a man to divorce his wife. Simply “talking back” was enough grounds to send a woman packing. 

The opening and closing text reminds us that the feudal era was “the hardest time for Korean women” if also perhaps inviting us to consider what our times are like too, insisting that Eoudong lives on in the hearts of oppressed women as one who fiercely resisted the constraints of her era. Lee roots the corruption firmly in the king, who is indeed the patriarch of a nation and presider over an oppressive social order founded on shame and misogyny as a means of maintaining male power. Coloured with the softcore excesses of ‘80s Korean cinema, Lee nevertheless signals the crushing austerity of noble life which slowly erodes the soul in robbing it of emotional fulfilment or individuality saving the artiest of his sex scenes for that between the liberated woman and an emasculated man each betrayed by the society in which they live and seeking the only escape that it presents itself to them. 

The Shadow Play (风中有朵雨做的云, Lou Ye, 2018)

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The forever rebellious Lou Ye has had his share of troubles with the Chinese censors board. Suzhou River was banned on its release, while he received a five-year filmmaking sanction for screening his provocative Tiananmen Square drama Summer Palace in Cannes without clearing official permission first. Stuck in censorship limbo for two years, the aptly named The Shadow Play (风中有朵雨做的云, fēng zhōng yǒu yù zuò de yún), taking its title from characteristically well-placed retro pop song, sees Lou steeping into the increasingly popular genre of Sino-Noir once again critiquing the the corrosive corruption of the Modern China through the prism of crime. 

Many of Lou’s films pivot narrative around a single implosion from which everything radiates like cracks in a pane of shattered glass. The Shadow Play is no different only there are perhaps three distinct, interlinked points of fracture each connected in a complex web of corruption and frustrated desires. He opens therefore with a moment which occurs in the mid-point of the narrative, the accidental discovery of decomposing body by a young couple venturing into the wilds of nature for a little privacy. The action then moves to the “contemporary” present of 2012 in which a small village is engulfed by “rioting” as residents attempt to protest the demolition of their community by the Violet Gold Real Estate Company. CEO Tang (Zhang Songwen) turns up to do some ineffectual damage control, slipping into Cantonese as he reminds them he’s a local boy too and only wants to bring about “the transformation of our community” insisting that the “beautiful future” is possible only by tearing down the old. As he’s speaking, however, protestors manage to knock down the neon sign bearing his company’s name from the building behind him and later that night Tang himself is found dead, impaled its framework after apparently “falling” from the rooftop. 

Young and idealistic policeman Yang (Jing Boran) was assigned to the detail that night and thereafter to the investigation into Tang’s death, quickly growing suspicious over his ties to shady property tycoon Jiang (Qin Hao). As a brief montage sequence explains, Tang and Jiang who met at university in 1989 each prospered from the capitalist explosion of China’s ‘90s reforms but their complicated relationship is founded on resentment and dependency partly connected to their mutual love for campus sweetheart Lin Hui (Song Jia) who first dated Jiang but as he was apparently already attached later married Tang. Many suspect that Jiang has something to do with Tang’s death even as others point out that he needed him to preserve his access to government bureaucracy, but the investigation is further complicated by witness sightings of a third person thought to be Jiang’s Taiwanese former lover/business partner Ah-yun whose mysterious disappearance in 2006 Yang is convinced is connected to the traffic accident which left his veteran policeman father in a catatonic state. 

The Shadow Play is in some respects unusual in its strong yet often implicit hints of police corruption perhaps mitigating its mild attack on the mechanisms of state through Yang’s idealistic, though flawed, goodness. Seduced by the lonely Lin Hui, he finds his name blackened but refuses to give in even when forced on the run after being framed for murder. Like Lin Hui’s daughter Ruo (Ma Sichun) however he is also representative of the post-90s generation who have grown up in the world created by men like Jiang and Tang. He is obviously uncomfortable in being introduced as his father’s son but also carries with him a desire for justice that lies adjacent to revenge. Ruo, meanwhile, though now an adult, longs for the restoration of her family despising her father Tang while obviously close to Jiang who has been supporting her financially by funding her education, using his wealth to game the system. “She’ll be happier than we are,” Jiang insists, ironically echoing Tang’s insistence that the village must be destroyed so they can give their children better futures. 

Tang meanwhile is a representative of China’s resentful petty bureaucrats forced into a middle-man existence unwilling to admit that he owes everything to Jiang, the man he knows to be sleeping with his wife. His toxic sense of male inferiority sees him take out his frustrations those with the least power, subjecting Lin Hui to years of domestic abuse before eventually having her locked up in a psychiatric institution claiming that she self-harms and is mentally unbalanced. The facade of the elegant, prosperous middle class family is well and truly imploded while it becomes difficult to tell if Tang is just a sleaze, exposing his misogyny in bringing up Ah-yun’s bar girl past, or his ill-advised pass at her is an attempt to get back at Jiang for his relationship with his wife while undercutting his rival’s manhood by sleeping with his woman. There is widespread impropriety in this incestuous world of corporate politics, but there’s also personal pettiness, hurt, and heartbreak that eventually blossoms into an ugly violence. 

In characteristic non-linear fashion Lou zips between the three points of fracture from the trio’s meeting in a 1989 through the disappearance of Ah-yun and the death of Tang, the layers of corruption deepening as the two men make themselves rich taking advantage of the unregulated capitalism of the modern China while slowly destroying themselves in their mutual unhappiness. It’s no surprise that the film found itself on the wrong side of the censors with its brutal footage of anti-redevelopment riots, hints of political corruption, and the depiction of the destruction of a body though we get the now customary title cards appearing at the end reminding us that the guilty parties have been caught and punished outlining exactly how long for everyone went to jail even if Lou subtly undercuts the sense of the State in action the card is intended to portray. Elliptical and somehow hard, ending like Summer Palace on the innocent image of the trio dancing back in 1989, The Shadow Play is cutting indictment of a morally bankrupt society and the corrosive effects of corruption but perhaps implying that the younger generation will in one way or another have its revenge for the ravages of their parents’ greed. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Japan Society NY & ACA Cinema Project Present Family Portrait: Japanese Family in Flux

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Japan Society New York and ACA Cinema Project will present Family Portrait: Japanese Family in Flux from February 15 to 24, a series focussing on the changing nature of the family in Japanese society.

February 15, 7pm: Still Walking

Family divisions, secrets, and prejudices are brought to the surface as a family gathers for the memorial service for their eldest son who was killed trying to save a child from drowning in Koreeda’s classic family drama. Review.

February 16, 7pm: Tsugaru Lacquer Girl

A young woman’s desire to take over her family’s traditional lacquerware business is frustrated by outdated social codes and a narrow definition of the traditional all while the art of lacquerware itself faces extinction in Keiko Tsuruoka’s gentle drama. Review

February 18, 4pm: Hoyaman

Island-set comedy featuring ramen, superheroes and tsunamis in which two brothers encounter a mysterious artist.

February 18, 7pm: Tokyo Sonata

Kiyoshi Kuroawa’s tale of urban hopelessness in which a family faces separate and parallel extential crises as a stereotypical salaryman is unceremoniously made redundant.

February 22, 7pm: Yoko (Screening at IFC Center)

Moving roadtrip drama from Kazuyoshi Kumakiri starring Rinko Kikuchi as an isolated middle-aged woman who begins to rediscover herself while hitchhiking to her estranged father’s funeral.

February 23, 7pm: Her Love Boils Bathwater

Introduced by filmmaker Ryota Nakano and followed by a Q&A and reception

Poignant maternal drama in which a mother receives a terminal cancer diagnosis and secretly begins trying to repair her family and prepare it for a world without her all while saving the family bathhouse. Review.

February 24, 4pm: A Long Goodbye

Touching drama in which a family attempt to cope with their father’s Alzheimer’s as he, a former headmaster, slowly loses the ability to read. Review.

February 24, 7pm: The Asadas

Introduced by filmmaker Ryota Nakano and followed by a Talk Session. 

Drama inspired by the life of photographer Masashi Asada who made a name for himself taking amusing photos of his family before getting involved with the relief effort after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami helping other families recover the photographs and precious memories they had lost.

Classics

February 17, 4pm: Muddy River

2K restoration

Quietly devastating coming-of-age tale set in the early 1950s in which a little boy befriends a pair of children living on a ramshackle barge. Review.

February 17, 7pm: Tokyo Twilight

35mm Presentation.

Ozu’s darkest drama follows the fortunes of a pair of sisters abandoned by their mother, one of whom contends with an abusive marriage while the other encounters an unexpected pregnancy. Review.

Family Portrait: Japanese Family in Flux runs Feb. 15 to 24 at Japan Society New York (with the exception of Yoko which screens at ICF Center). Full details for all the films along with ticketing links are available via the official website and you can also keep up with all the latest details by following the festival’s official Facebook page and X (formerly Twitter) account.

The Last Dance (大病人, Juzo Itami, 1993)

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A self-involved film director gets a lesson in what it is to live when he discovers that he has terminal cancer in a lighthearted melodrama from Juzo Itami, The Last Dance (大病人, Daibyonin). Itami was apparently inspired by his own stay in hospital after being attacked by yakuza offended by his previous film Minbo and like his debut The Funeral the film has a few questions to ask about the nature of death along with the functioning of the medical system. 

That’s partly because film director Buhei Mukai (Rentaro Mikuni) is not initially told of his diagnosis. His well-meaning doctor, Ogata (Masahiko Tsugawa) a old university friend of his wife, elects to tell him only that he has a stomach ulcer in keeping with an old-fashioned policy that worries patients may lose hope and give up too easily on discovering the extent of their illness. Buhei meanwhile continues to obsess about his condition, convinced it must be cancer and that his wife, Mariko (Nobuko Miyamoto), and the medical staff are lying to him, at one point pretending to be his own uncle in order to tease the truth out of Ogata over the phone and attempting suicide when he accidentally implies that Buhei may not have long left. 

His distress is compounded by the irony that in the film he was working on when he became ill he was starring as a composer with advanced cancer whose wife has also been diagnosed with a more aggressive form of the disease. Whatever we might think about Buhei, it’s fair to say that the film’s sexual politics have not aged well. Not only was he having an affair with the actress playing his wife, but continues to flirt inappropriately with the medical staff and at one point even tries to force himself on his wife who was in the process of leaving him when he was first diagnosed. His lechery seems primed to appeal to men of a similar age while hinting at his virility and desire for life, but is nevertheless crass and often uncomfortable. Nevertheless, as Mariko says he’s like a child inside cheekily joking with the doctors about his drinking and smoking habits while running away from anything unpleasant and trying to get out of having to undergo treatment. 

Itami had often remarked on the weaknesses of Japanese men who “can’t stand loneliness, can’t make decisions alone, can’t face anyone who disagrees with them and can’t accept responsibility for their mistakes,” Buhei seemingly possessing all four. In part regretting her decision to keep the seriousness of his illness from him, Mariko reflects that in the end all they did was leave Buhei alone in his fear and anxiety as the only one who didn’t know the truth, engineering a kind of conspiracy as they cheerfully told him to “soldier on” knowing there was no hope. Yet during his time in the hospital, Buhei is also confronted by the ethical dilemmas of medical treatment on witnessing doctors desperately try to resuscitate a man who was miserable, in pain, bedridden, and unable to communicate, just waiting for the end. As even his grieving wife calls out to the doctors to let him go, Buhei wonders if it’s right to preserve life at all costs especially when the patient has not been given a choice in his treatment and may not have been informed that they have no possibility of recovery. 

Coming to a new realisation he challenges Ogata’s conviction that death is his enemy, telling him that he should see it less as defeat than acceptance reflecting on the irony that he never felt so alive as when dying. Whimsical if occasionally maudlin, Itami throws in a surrealist dream sequence in which Buhei approaches the other side and comes to realise that death might not be so frightening after all even as he watches himself from above in an out of body experience witnessing the accidental violence inflicted on his body by those trying to save it. In some senses, Buhei is fairly unredeemed, winking at his indifferent mistress even on his death bed, but is in others humbled as he looks back on his life with its regrets and unfulfilled promises, repairing his relationship with his long suffering wife while admitting that under different circumstances he and Ogata might have become good friends. Offering a sometimes critical view of medical practice and ethics, Itami’s poetic meditation on what it is to die loses none of his ironic humour even in its unfolding tragedy. 

Night in Paradise (낙원의 밤, Park Hoon-jung, 2020)

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Sometimes being too good at your job can be a definite liability. So it is for the hero of Park Hoon-jung’s melancholy gangster noir, Night in Paradise (낙원의 밤, Nagwonui bam). Park’s worldview is often nihilistic and sometimes downright unpleasant, though it’s a sense of fatalistic sadness that dominates this otherwise over familiar tale of a noble gangster cruelly misused by those who choose not to obey their shared code and thereafter finding himself on a dark path towards if not exactly redemption then at least an inevitable ending. 

Rising foot soldier Tae-gu (Uhm Tae-goo) has found himself in the middle of an old-fashioned gang war, serving an ambitious boss, Yang (Park Ho-san), who has unwisely decided to press into territory operated by the well established Bukseong gang. Getting some of his guys back after being kidnapped by Bukseong and held in an apartment block where the community is currently protesting the take over and demolition by gangster redevelopers, Tae-gu is told by his opposing number that Yang is a crazy upstart who would be a nobody without him and that he made a mistake turning down a job offer from Bukseong boss Doh. Tae-gu is however an old school mobster loyal to his gang which is why he doesn’t stop to think things through when someone close to him is killed in a car accident in which he assumes he was the intended target, believing Doh is striking a low blow. Encouraged by Yang, he meets with Doh in person and daringly knocks him off at a swimming pool sauna escaping through a window in the nude. Yang arranges to send him to Jeju Island to lay low before moving on possibly to Russia, but Yang has also been engaging in a failed pincer movement which left them all in hot water after failing to take out Doh’s no. 2, Ma. 

As the title might hint, even the island “paradise” of Jeju is not free of death and crime as Tae-gu discovers after bonding with their contact, Kuto (Lee Ki-young), a fixer smuggling guns from Russian mobsters hidden inside consignments of fish. Like Tae-gu’s sister, Kuto’s niece Jae-yeon (Jeon Yeo-been) is suffering from an undisclosed terminal illness that seems to have few obvious symptoms but has left her with suicidal tendencies. Kuto’s decision to take Tae-gu in is motivated by his desire for money to take Jae-yeon to America for treatment though she and Tae-gu are also much the same both having lost people close to them because of their proximity to the gangster world while he and Kuto search for ways to make up for the harm their lives of violence has caused. 

Jae-yeon is quick to remind Tae-gu that she will soon be dead and that therefore nothing really matters and her life has no meaning while he perhaps as a gangster feels something similar that his life ended the day he first picked up a gun yet there are also ways in which he must act in satisfaction of his code. His tragedy is that he’s operating under a misapprehension, blindly trusting in the wrong people when the truth is painfully obvious to all but him.

Park inserts a series of ironic pillow shots of the idyllic Jeju night scene with comforting lights swinging from tropical trees and gentle waves rolling on the horizon, before closing with a series of eerie daytime shots of familiar locations now devoid of people as if this were a hell our heroes had recently been haunting, ghosts of a violent landscape. His fight scenes are visceral yet also occasionally cartoonish, several taking place in the confined space of a car expertly framed by Park as the heroes fight desperately for life while constrained by their environment. A high octane chase through an airport with its ubiquitous escalators soon gives way to an impressive motorway-bound set piece with an unexpected resolution, the gangsters later scattering on hearing far off police sirens though as we also realise police collusion is an inescapable factor in the fragile equilibrium of the underworld even if it might not stretch all the way to idyllic Jeju. “Don’t waste your tears” Tae-gu unironically offers in weary resignation to his fate, a noble gangster to the last too good to survive in a world of nihilistic futility. 

International trailer (English subtitles)

The Storm (大雨, Yang Zhigang, 2024)

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A cosmic storm is likened to the chaos of life in Busifan’s beautifully drawn but narratively obscure family animation, The Storm (大雨, dàyǔ). Set seemingly in a fantasy past which is also a kind of post-apocalyptic future in which mankind has ruined itself through greed, the film is at heart a kind of redemption story in which those left behind attempt to exorcise the negative emotions of the past and ease the destruction they have wrought by abandoning outdated ideas of wealth and status. 

The hero, Bun, is a young orphan adopted by the elusive Biggie who found him drifting down a river in a chest. Biggie decided to adopt the boy as his own but never allowed him to call him father while himself struggling the stigma of having been a criminal. Biggie sometimes leaves Bun on his own while he goes off to try and earn money to give him a better life and justifies his actions that everything he’s doing is only for Bun. Later in the film he expresses regret for “lying” to him, pretending the world was not so chaotic as is it is as the pair become embroiled in a supernatural curse while looking for the famed Nuralumin Satin said to be aboard a mysterious black ship filled with monsters. 

According to biggie, the Black Dragon Army hunting the Nuralumin birds into extinction led to an explosion in the jellyfish population while a prophesy states that the jellyfish will soon unite with another monstrous force during a cosmic storm becoming an awesome dragon that casts a shadow over the land. The ship itself seems to be a symbol of insatiable greed, a kind of floating marketplace in which people entered in search of riches but did not leave again. Inside, they became monsters devoid of all humanity and hungry only for material gain. 

The king’s own mother is said to have fallen victim to the curse, while his nephew also knew a troupe of opera singers who boarded the boat in search of an audience but have apparently lost their way. The spirits of the opera singers recount their plight, that as lowly entertainers they were only ever looked down on and abused no matter if they entertained the king himself and all his other royals. That they fell victim to the curse seems to be a condemnation of outdated ideas about social class and the stigmatisation of a profession, while Biggie’s fate seems to imply something similar. No matter how much he tried to turn himself around and be a good father to Bun, the world continued to reject him and he was left only with crime as a means to support himself. That’s one reason he wants the Satin, so that Bun will be looked after for the rest of his life and they won’t have to debase themselves anymore. 

We can see that the area they live in which is close to the famed Dragon Bay where the Black Ship eventually resurfaces is rundown and abandoned perhaps itself because of the lore that surrounds the area. Even so, the backgrounds are gorgeously animated with flowers in full bloom and Bun making his way through colourful and lively vistas of rural beauty. Yet it’s just this beauty that mankind’s greed has destroyed in the Dragon Army’s senseless killing of the Numalurin birds for which their guardian tribe has never forgiven them. Only the return of these birds and the giant deity that protects them can help end the curse, restoring the proper balance to the land in which the jellyfish are kept in check and the dragon cannot be formed. 

It has to be said that narratively the film is incredibly confusing and difficult to follow, at least for viewers who do not speak Mandarin. Nevertheless, what shines through is Bun’s redemptive power as he desperately tries to rescue Biggie from his own worst impulses, his greed and desperation in being drawn to the black ship like moth to a flame and in danger of being turned into one of the monsters. Constantly accompanied by round ball of fluff he encounters several other cute creatures while otherwise guided by a handsome young man who seems to be made of cloud while his wish that he really could stop Biggie from leaving by treading on his shadow might in an odd way come true. Boundlessly inventive, the film’s ideas sometimes get ahead of itself but are more than made up for in the unshowy beauty of its fantasy world. 

International trailer (Simplified Chinese / English subtitles)

The Wolves (狼, Kaneto Shindo, 1955)

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Post-war desperation drives a collection of otherwise honest men and women towards a criminal act that for all its politeness they are ill-equipped to live with in Kaneto Shindo’s biting social drama The Wolves (狼, Okami). “Wolves” is what the criminals are branded, but the title hints more at the wolfish society which threatens to swallow them whole. After all, it’s eat or be eaten in this dog eat dog world, at least according to a cynical insurance salesman hellbent on exploiting those without means. 

Each of the five “criminals” is an employee at Toyo Insurance where they’re immediately pitted against each other, reminded that in order to qualify for a full-time position they need to meet their quotas for six months. The orientation meeting is cultilke in its intensity, the boss insisting that only in insurance can you become a self-made man while recounting his own epiphany as to the worthiness of his profession. They are told that the only two things they need are “faith and honesty”, and then “faith and pursuasion”, while encouraged to think of their work as an act of “worship”, “for the salvation of everyone”. 

Yet they’re also told to exploit their friends and family by pressuring them into taking out life insurance policies in order to help them meet their quotas. As one man points out, friends and relatives of the poor are likely to be poor themselves, but these are exactly the kind of people they’re expected to target. They’re told there’s no point going after the weathly because they’re already insured, but there’s something doubly insidious in trying to coax desperate people who can’t quite afford to feed themselves into paying out money they don’t have on the promise of protecting their families from ruin. One man even asks if the policy covers suicide and is told it does if you pay in for a year, sighing that he doesn’t want to wait that long.

“Suicide or robbery, choose one,” one of the salespeople reflects after failing to make their quota once again. They each have reasons to be desperate, all of them already excluded from the mainstream society and uncertain how they will find work if the job falls through. Akiko (Nobuko Otowa) is a war widow with a young son who is being bullied at school because of his cleft palate for which he needs an expensive operation. She’s already tried working as a bar hostess but is quiet by nature and found little success with it. Fujibayashi (Sanae Takasugi) is widowed too with two children and five months behind rent for a dingy flat in a bomb damaged slum where the landlord is about to turn off her electric. Harajima (Jun Hamamura) used to work in a bank but was fired for joining a union and is trapped in a toxic marriage to woman looking for material comfort he can’t offer. Mikawa (Taiji Tonoyama) too is resented by his wife, a former dancer, having lost his factory job to a workplace injury while the ageing Yoshikawa (Ichiro Sugai) was once a famous screenwriter but as he explains people in the film industry turn cold when you’re not hot stuff any more. 

Their unlikely descent into crime has its own kind of inevitability in the crushing impossibility of their lives. They may rationalise that what they’re doing is no different from the insurance company that exploits the vulnerable for its own gain, thinking that if they can just get a little ahead they’d be alright while feeling as if robbery and suicide are the only choices left to them and at the end of the day they want to survive. Perhaps you could call them “wolves” for that, but they’re the kind of wolves that give the guards from the cash van they robbed their train fare home after bowing profusely in apology. The real wolves are those like Toyo who think nothing of devouring the weakness of others, promising the poor the future they can’t afford while draining what little they have left out of them. As the film opens, Akiko looks down at a bug writhing in the dirt attacked by ants from all sides and perhaps recognises herself in that image as the sun beats down oppressively on both of them. Breaking into expressionistic storms and unsubtly driving past a US airbase to make clear the source of the decline, Shindo paints a bleak picture of the post-war world as a land of venal wolves which makes criminals of us all. 

One and Only (热烈, Dong Chengpeng, 2023)

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An aspiring street dancer from an impoverished background just can’t seem to catch a break no matter how hard he works in Dong Chengpeng’s inspiring dramedy One and Only (热烈, rèliè). A mild rebuke against a rising fuerdai generation of obnoxious narcissists who don’t think twice about using their money to game the system, the film not only emphasises the virtues of hard work and perseverance but the importance of camaraderie and fellow feeling over an individualistic drive to succeed. 

The conflict is encapsulated in the opening sequence in which hotshot dancer Kevin starts a fight with one of his own team members in the middle of dance competition over a move that didn’t go as planned. The problem is that Kevin is an obnoxious rich kid whose US-based father has been bankrolling the team. He plans to sack most of the other dancers and replace them with foreign ringers, only manager Ding (Huang Bo), who dared to suggest the problem was he doesn’t practice enough with his teammates, isn’t so sure. In an effort to appease him, he hires a ringer of his own in Shou (Wang Yibo), an aspiring dancer who auditioned for the team but didn’t get through, booking him to stand in for Kevin during rehearsals with the caveat that he won’t actually get to perform in any of their concerts or competitions. 

Kevin is not untalented, but his path has been easy wheareas Shou is doing a series of part-time jobs in addition to helping out in his mother’s restaurant while burdened by debts as a result of his late father’s illness. Yet he never gave up on his street dancing dream, working with his uncle doing a series of humiliating gigs at shopping malls and birthday parties never complaining but grateful for the opportunity to dance. The offer from Ding is the answer to all his prayers, but also a cruel joke in that he’s only there to sub in for rich kid Kevin until such time as he feels like showing up again. 

Ding is aware of the choice he faces even as he forms a paternal relationship with Shou whose father was also a breakdancer. To redeem himself and achieve his dreams of national championship glory, Ding thinks he has to choose Kevin and his unlimited resources but is also drawn to Shou’s raw passion and pure-hearted love of dance if also mindful of the “realities” of contemporary China where money and connections are everything and boys like Shou don’t really stand a chance because socialist work ethics are now hopelessly outdated. Ding may be outdated too, even his old friends who got temporarily rich during an entrepreneurial boom have seen their dreams implode in middle age and are currently supplementing their incomes as substitute drivers for partying youngsters. 

Tellingly, after Kevin has them kicked out of the gym he paid for, the team start training in an abandoned factory theatre from the pre-reform days where Shou’s parents used to perform, quite literally resetting their value systems after jettisoning Kevin to focus on team work and unity. Then again in a mild paradox, Ding realises that he shouldn’t lead the team by dominating It but support from within which results in a kind of democracy as he holds a secret ballot to decide whether they should stick with Kevin and a certain, easy victory, or reinstate Shou and take their chances the old-fashioned way. 

Of course, the team choose hard work and perseverance, never giving up even when it seems impossible, leaving the obnoxious Kevin to his self-centred narcissism. Kevin only really wanted backing dancers which is why he couldn’t gel with the team, whereas when challenged one on one Shou does each of his teammates signature moves proving that he’s mastered a series of diverse dance styles along with his own high impact headspring move. Heartfelt and earnest, the film shines a light on a number of issues from middle-aged disappointment and the moral compromises involved in chasing a dream but in the end reinforces the message that there are no shortcuts to success which can never be bought with money but only through sweat and tears along with teamwork and the determination to master one’s craft.

Original trailer (Simplified Chinese / English subtitles)

The Call (콜, Lee Chung-hyun, 2020)

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The call is coming from inside the house. It’s a final revelation intended to chill, the idea that the source of threat is located in the very place where you ought to feel safe, protected, invulnerable. Of course, there are many reasons someone might not feel completely safe at home, those who perhaps live with hidden threat every day, a hidden darkness that lies at the centre of twisty Korean thriller The Call (콜). Another in a small series of time travelling communication, The Call makes connection through outdated technology, an almost literal ghosting in a voice from the past that, like an inverted Strangers on a Train, offers the tantalising promise of mutual salvation only to prove extremely unreliable. 

28-year-old Seo-yeon (Park Shin-hye) has just returned to her rundown country home because her mother, whom she intensely resents blaming her for the death of her father in a fire, is suffering with a brain tumour. Though her strawberry farmer uncle Sung-ho (Oh Jung-se) describes the place as the most desirable property in town, the home in which Seo-yeon finds herself is cold and austere, a creepy old mansion decorated in an outdated style and filled with gothic furniture. To make matters worse, Seo-yeon has left her phone on the train but unexpectedly assures Sung-ho that she’ll be fine with the landline, later calling herself and getting through to a woman who claims to have found it but asks for a reward and then hangs up presumably to assess her options. Then, the landline starts ringing with calls from a young woman trying to reach a friend and claiming that her mother is planning to set fire to her. Though obviously disturbing, Seo-yeon assumes the calls are a simple wrong number until she discovers a hidden room with what looks to be some sort of tiled experimentation area along with a box of memorabilia which lead her to think the phone is somehow connecting her to the girl who lived in her room at the turn of the millennium. 

Also 28 only born 20 years earlier, Young-sook (Jeon Jong-seo) claims to be at the mercy of a wicked shamaness step-mother convinced that she has a dark destiny. The two women engage in a strange act of intergenerational bonding between two people who are the same age, Seo-yeon mystified by the meaning of the word “Walkman” while Seo-yeon struggles with the concept of the multifunctional smartphone. The force which unites them is parental dissatisfaction as Seo-yeon claims a hatred for her mother she does not perhaps really feel and cannot in any case compare with that of Young-sook for the religiously abusive stepmother who fully believes she is possessed by the devil. In in this the time difference proves useful, Seo-yeon realising that Young-sook has the power to prevent her father’s death, but only latterly that she also even from the future has the ability to change her new friend’s fate. 

Essentilally a Strangers on a Train scenario, the two women agree to save each other, Young-sook dutifully restoring Seo-yeon’s imagined fairytale future, the creepy mansion transformed into an elegant modern dwelling, her mother and father now both healthy and happy. Seo-yeon, however, begins to neglect her promise, too busy enjoying her repaired family life to remember that Young-sook is imprisoned in the house suffering horrifying abuse. Young-sook is, in a sense, the embodiment of Seo-yeon’s familial trauma, the violent resurfacing of a long buried memory that threatens to tear to her life apart but also has the ability to repair it in revealing the truth that allows her to reconnect with her mother who, we learn, has repeatedly sacrificed herself for her daughter’s sake. Nevertheless, you begin to wonder if the shamaness had a point and the lid was best left on Young-sook as her hurt and resentment in being neglected by her new friend eventually take a turn for the dark. 

In essence, Seo-yeon’s decision to interfere with the past engineers a chain of disastrous events robbing her of her illusionary happiness while eventually landing her right back where she started if perhaps with a little more insight and having healed her relationship with her mother. Part tale of millennial anxiety, part gothic nightmare, The Call may not always be internally consistent but charts a dark tale of trauma and response as a haunted young woman finds herself stalked by the psychopathic embodiment of her buried guilt only to discover that a call from the past is always hard to ignore. 

Original trailer (English subtitles)