Undercurrent (アンダーカレント, Rikiya Imaizumi, 2023)

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Part way through Rikiya Imaizumi’s adaptation of the Testuyua Toyoda manga Undercurrent (アンダーカレント) a detective asks his client what she thinks it means to “understand” someone. Of course, she doesn’t really have an answer, and the film seems to suggest there isn’t one because we are forever strangers to ourselves let alone anyone else. We do things without knowing why or that somehow surprise us, while the actions of others can an also be be worryingly opaque. But then perhaps you don’t really need to “know” someone in order to “understand” them and as someone else later says perhaps it’s true enough that most people don’t really want the truth but a comforting illusion. 

But then Kanae’s (Yoko Maki) illusions aren’t exactly comforting. Her husband of four years Satoru (Eita Nagayama) suddenly disappeared during a work trip a year previously and has not been heard from since. She turns the television off when the news announces details of a decomposing body discovered near a set of electrical pylons, but on another level she’s sure that Satoru is alive and chose to leave her for reasons she can’t understand. Kanae tells a friend that what pains her most is thinking that in the end she wasn’t a person Satoru felt he could share his worries with so she was powerless to help him. Then again, there’s something in Kanae that is equally closed off, a little distant and otherworldly as if she were also putting up a front to keep her true self submerged.

The detective (Lily Franky), whose name is “Yamasaki” yet allows people call him “Yamazaki” because it’s easier for them, says of Satoru that his “cheerful,” ever smiling nature may also have been a kind of masking designed to dissuade people from looking any deeper. Someone else admits that they lied mostly to fit in, be what others wanted them to be, only to be caught out by the gulf between their genuine feelings and and the ever expanding web of their lies. Caught in a kind of suspended animation uncertain if Satoru will ever return and if and how she should continue with her life, Kanae ends up taking in a new assistant at her family bathhouse. Hori (Arata Iura) is the polar opposite of the way her husband is described, silent, soulful and somehow sad. We might be suspicious of him, his arrival seems too coincidental and the way he looks at some children running past in the town perhaps worrying. Yet how can we judge based only on his silence knowing nothing else of his history? Nevertheless, he may understand Kanae much better than anyone would suspect and may be the comforting presence from her recurring nightmares.

In her dreams, she’s plunged into water with a pair of hands around her neck. Unknowingly, Hori asks her if she’s ever really wanted to die and she can’t answer him even if it seems to us that the dreams reflect her desire for death, to be submerged in a sea of forgetfulness. Yet we later learn they come to have another meaning reflecting her long buried trauma and the reason for her own listlessness. These are the undercurrents that run silently through her, waves of guilt and grief that obscure all else. Disappearances have happened around her all life and seem only to increase, another bath house owner seemingly disappearing after a fire having promised to sell her his boiler. Yet through her experiences, she comes to fear them less reflecting that anyone could leave at any moment and that’s alright, as Hori had said nothing’s really forever. 

Even so, she regrets that there couldn’t have been more emotional honesty from the beginning then perhaps no one would need to disappear without a word. Confessions are made and the air is cleared. Someone had said that no one wanted the truth, but it seems Kanae has chosen it as perhaps symbolised in her decision to call Yamasaki by his actual name rather than the one he allows people to use because it’s too much trouble to correct them. Aside from his multiple names, Yamasaki is a strange man who holds meetings in karaoke boxes and theme parks though perhaps because he simply thinks Kanae could use a little cheering up. In more ways than one, it’s the ones left behind who are left in the dark, but they may be able to find their way out of it with a little more light and reflection.

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

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Home Sweet Home (我が家は樂し, Noboru Nakamura, 1951)

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There must have been a lot of families like the Uemuras in the Japan of 1951. As film’s title implies, their home is a happy one and though they may not have much they make the most what they have and are cheerful and loving towards each other. Still, the world stores up trouble for them perhaps because they are so very defiant of their circumstances. In many ways a classic shomingeki, Home Sweet Home (我が家は樂し, Waga Ya wa Tanoshi) was the film that put Noboru Nakamura on the map and finds Japan at a kind of crossroads edging past post-war privation towards a broadly consumerist society.

We can get a sense of that in the constant needs of four children in the Uemura family, patriarch Kosaku (Chishu Ryu) picking up his young son Kazuo (Katsumasa Okamoto) after baseball on his way home and noticing that his mitt is almost worn through only to get there and spot his daughter’s boots are getting pretty thin too. It’s clear they struggle for money despite Kosaku’s steady job for which he is about to receive a 25-year good service commendation as wife Namiko (Isuzu Yamada) supplements the family income by taking in sewing at home while we later find out that she’s already sold most of her kimono to help make ends meet and is considering selling her wedding ring to pay for middle daughter Nobuko’s (Keiko Kishi) school trip to Kyoto.

But her hard-nosed sister Kayo (Mutsuko Sakura) tells her that secondhand kimono have lost their value with so many new ones now available. In the immediate post-war era, rice and kimono were the only things that had held their value and so selling one could bring in a lot of money quickly. Conversely, after receiving a sizeable bonus along with his commendation, Kosaku and Namiko visit a department store which has a large range of affordable clothing for sale though the kimono fabric Kosaku picks out for Namiko is still fairly expensive so she instinctively puts it back insisting that they buy the presents they promised the children first. 

That was probably a good move, seeing as the rest of the money is stolen from them on their way home to a congratulations party the children are busy setting up. Kosaku asks why someone would rob people like them, honest, hardworking types who don’t have much to begin with but as Namiko sensibly points out pickpockets don’t really think like that and how would they know anyway. The subtext is that times are still hard for a lot of people even if there are now more exciting, definitely non-essential things appearing on shelves for people with disposable income to buy and a new kimono, though out of fashion, is no longer so out of reach for the ordinary housewife. 

The loss of the money might seem as if it should place a wedge between husband and wife, but bar a moment of disappointment cured by the realisation that oldest daughter Tomoko (Hideko Takamine) has been considerate enough to place hot water bottles in their futons, they resolve to muddle through together and in any case they’re no worse off than they were before. Tomoko herself is conflicted, feeling as if as a young woman in her early 20s she should give up her dreams of becoming a painter and get a job to support the family but Namiko always tells her not to. She encourages each of her children to follow their dreams, perhaps a sign of a new post-war liberation, telling her sister that she’d happily sell all her kimono so that Tomoko could go on painting. Later we discover that she also dreamed of becoming an artist and that though Kosaku had encouraged her to keep it up, a housewife’s day is never done and there was simply no time left for herself. Painting is just another thing she sacrificed for her family and Namiko seems to be determined that Tomoko won’t have to do the same not that she particularly regrets her decision.

Tomoko only really comes to understand her mother’s sacrifices on noticing that the cupboards really are bare, she’s sold everything that could be sold and pawned her ring though the colleague that owned the house they were renting has encountered some financial difficulties of his own and going to to sell to the grumpy old man who bought the house across the way. The Uemuras are such obviously good people that it feels so unfair that so much bad luck has come their way all at once though it is their goodness that eventually saves them when the old man is touched by seeing youngest daughter Mitsuko (Kazuko Fukui) playing with his dog. He later comes to admire Tomoko’s painting of his garden though he’d put a fence up to stop her peering in. The scars of the post-war era are visible in the damage to Uemura’s front wall which would have blocked the way but now perhaps enables them to become good neighbours after all. Though the film may lack some of the visual flair present in Nakamura’s later work, it more than makes up for it with genuine sentiment and the implication that in the end the world is basically good and rewards those who are the same even if it sometimes tests their resilience.

Table for Six 2 (飯戲攻心2, Sunny Chan Wing-Sun, 2024)

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“It’s okay to be screwed, we’ll unscrew you later,” youngest brother Lung (Peter Chan Charm Man) comforts his dejected brother in an accidental advocation of what means to be a family in Sunny Chan’s followup to the phenomenally successful comedy  Table for Six. Like the previous film and in true Lunar New Year fashion, Table For Six 2 (飯戲攻心2) explores the concept of family in a wider sense along with contemporary attitudes to marriage and traditional gender roles.

Even so, it has to be said this table is now uneven as oldest brother Steve has literally run away from his romantic dilemmas taking off for Africa leaving new girlfriend Miaow (Lin Min-Chen) behind claiming she’s too far out of his league and it’s not fair of him to waste her youth. Ironically enough, Bernard (Louis Cheung) has now started a wedding business helping people pull off extravagant public proposals such as the sort of fake one he prepares for Monica (Stephy Tang Lai-yan) as a publicity stunt featuring him dancing in a 90s-style music video. As part of the campaign, they’ve set up Lung and Miaow as a fake couple hoping to build a following for their romance online much to unexpected chagrin of Josephine (Ivana Wong) who has begun to embrace her dreams by becoming a well-known quirky chef who makes food disguised as other food. Though they had agreed to separate so the could both follow three dreams at the end of the previous film, Josephine suddenly proposes leading Bernard to put on an extravagant wedding as promotion for his business. 

In a way, Bernard’s company symbolises the performative qualities of marriage as couples put themselves through a stressful and expensive ritual more out of obligation than real desire. When Lung is prevented from reaching the ceremony on time, Bernard ends up impersonating him in a full body costume making plain that the spectacle is more for show than sentiment and it could really be anyone up there simply fulfilling a role. In fact, no one even checks the certificates were properly signed. Then again, just as in Josephine’s cooking sometimes the “fake” and can actually contain the “real” just in a different way than expected. She may say that once a relationship has cooled the spark can’t be regained, but that doesn’t necessarily mean a new, different, spark couldn’t be found. 

Perhaps that’s what happened for Bernard and Monica who’ve now overcome the awkwardness of Monica having been in a longterm relationship with oldest brother Steve. Ironically enough, they’d more or less decided not to get married only to be blindsided by their reactions to the “fake” proposal but as it turns out more because of the emotional baggage from their parents’ failed relationships that have left them too afraid to get married. Monica is still traumatised by her father’s extra marital affair which resulted in a half-brother she’s never met but has since become a Cantopop star, while Bernard still has bad memories of being treated as a “red-headed” child and like Steve is preoccupied with a desire to keep the family together while worried that he isn’t really up to it. 

The lesson Bernard learns is that family is a burden that’s carried together so he didn’t need to save it on his own and that it’s alright to mess things up because his family will be there to take care of him. Miaow meanwhile is left in the same place as Steve had been in the first film, wondering how long she should wait for love or if Steve is ever coming back, trying to decide whether to accept a promising job offer in Japan or stay in Hong Kong. Part of her reluctance to move on is that she’s become wedded to the family and fears losing her place within it but as Monica says her status wasn’t dependent on blood or relationships and that she’s already been accepted into the family just for being herself. 

Then again, families can also be annoying as Bernard remembers after inviting his gangsterish uncles to one of the weddings only for them to muscle in as a major sponsor for another own insisting on designs the dress themselves complete with a par of shark fin wings to promote their business none of which meshes well with Monica’s passion for conservation. In any case, as Monica reflects family means you can embarrass yourselves together so maybe wearing a stupid dress for a few minutes isn’t such a big deal. Heartfelt and zany, Chan’s farcical drama shifts past the performative aspects of marriage and family to what lies beneath which, like Josephine’s cooking, may not always be what it first appears.

Table for Six 2 is in UK cinemas from 9th February courtesy of CineAsia.

UK trailer (English subtitles)

Twilight Cinema Blues (銀平町シネマブルース, Hideo Jojo, 2023)

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Japan’s mini theatres have been in a status of crisis since the pandemic. Already struggling under the weight of changing times the immediate restrictions pushed many over the edge unable to entice older regulars back into screens or find a new audience among the young. This is doubly bad news for the industry as a whole as it’s mini theatres that allow indie films the platform they need to succeed and without them there is little avenue for films produced outside of the mainstream. Like Lim Kah-Wai’s Your Lovely Smile, Hideo Jojo’s Twilight Cinema Blues (銀平町シネマブルース, Ginpeicho Cinema Blues) similarly extols the virtues of the mini theatre which is not just somewhere to watch films but a place to belong that has room for anyone and everyone that wants to be there.

That’s more than true for Takeshi (Keisuke Koide), a struggling man approaching middle age who’s become near destitute and is almost sucked into a welfare scam targeting the homeless by a pair of shady yakuza claiming they run an NPO. At the orientation he runs into Kajiwara (Mitsuru Fukikoshi ), the owner of a mini theatre who declines to join the gangsters’ scheme but offers Takeshi the opportunity to bunk in his storeroom while working part-time little knowing that to Takeshi this particular mini cinema is like a return to source allowing him to rediscover his love of film.

But the mini cinema itself is also struggling. They simply don’t get bums on seats and Kajiawa is behind on paying his staff. Though they have a small collection of regulars, they aren’t enough to keep the lights on on their own. Even the projectionist is thinking he’ll probably retire along with the machine. Unable to afford new films, Kajiawara relies on cheap and easily licensable classics such as old favourite Casablanca but is largely unable to see away out of his situation while feeling guilty over ending what was effectively a family business and local landmark. The building’s 60th anniversary, 60 being a symbolic number in Japanese culture as it represents a full turn of the Chinese zodiac and literal new start, presents an opportunity to both Kajiawara and Takeshi to begin to move forward by renewing their faith in cinema.

The faith of Takeshi’s homeless friend Sato (Shohei Uno) needed no renewing. Though he had nothing, the ability to see a film twice a month made him feel human while the community at the cinema is perhaps the only one that still accepts him. He offers a small prayer after every film, and instructs Takeshi that he should the same. But his openhearted faith is also his undoing, allowing him to fall for the yakuza scam little realising they’ll force him to work for them taking half of the social security payments they helped him sign up for in the process. In the outside world, men like Sato find only exploitation and prejudice with cinema their only refuge.

Then again, filmmaking isn’t easy. A young woman who desperately wanted her debut film to play in her hometown cinema has based her first feature on the life of her father, a failed film director who drank himself to death (in a neat allusion to Oshima’s Cruel Story of Youth, her film’s title literally translates as “cruel story of a director”). Similarly, the suicide of a much loved assistant director has prevented those around him from moving on, preoccupied with the shock his death caused them in its suddenness and lack of obvious cause. They blame themselves sending their lives into a downward spiral that results in crushing financial debts and the end of a marriage. In some ways, the film is an ode to the ADs who keep everything running, including on occasions the director, and are in a sense the custodians of filmmaking.

Still, it’s clear that not everything can seamlessly repaired. Times have moved on even if some have been left behind and you can’t always simply reclaim what you’ve lost, but you can always start again with another spin of the wheel and make the most of what you’ve got. It won’t be the same, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be good. Jojo’s heartwarming tale of cinema has an undercurrent of darkness and despair running beneath, but also suggests that the silver screen can be a beacon hope when the world is at its bleakest and not least for those whose existence largely lies behind it.

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

Original trailer (English subtitles)

If You Are the One 3 (非诚勿扰3, Feng Xiaogang, 2023)

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It’s been 15 years since the release of Feng Xiaogang’s If You Are the One, a phenomenally popular romantic dramedy in which a seemingly mismatched pair of lovelorn souls attempt to build on the spark of connection. A sequel was released in 2010 that turned a little more wistful in meditating on the brevity of life and its circular qualities, but returning all these years later Feng ventures in a surreal direction setting the film, as the sequel promised, in 2030 as Qin Fen (Ge Yu) approaches his 70th birthday in a colourful vision of an AI future.

Qin Fen still lives in the same house as he did in If You Are the One 2 only it’s had a complete redesign. Before it was cluttered and traditional, a comforting cabin overlooking the beautiful Chinese countryside but now it’s fairly minimalist and heavily stylised in a bold colour scheme that echoes the fashions of the mid-20th century. We learn that he has not seen Xiaoxaio (Shu Qi) for 10 years since she abruptly took off with a bunch on cult-like international rubbish collectors but has been patiently waiting for her return. His old friend Lao Fan (Fan Wei) who has launched a successful company selling uncannily real AI robots gifts him one that looks just like Xiaoxaio though it of course lacks her sarcastic character and is programmed to obey him totally which is how he thought he wanted but of course is nothing like the real Xiaoxiao.

At this point, the film seems to open a dialogue about the nature of love and the realities of marriage. Can the lonely Qin Fen be satisfied by this ersatz recreation of the woman he loved, or will it only cause him more pain? The answer seems to be a little of both, especially as she cannot eat or drink with him let alone sleep in the same bed. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to him the real Xiaxiao has returned but is too nervous to approach him having been out of contact for a decade, only now getting bored with rubbish collecting which is being taken over by AI robots anyway. Disguising herself as a upgraded version of the robot, she attempts to figure out how he really feels about her in a strange echo of the trial marriage from the previous film wondering if he’ll be able to figure out which version of her is “real” and which a fantasy of his own projections.

Then again, set largely within this futuristic cabin, now a little more surrounded by other similar dwellings, we might start to wonder if something else of going on and this place doesn’t quite exist in the way we think it does as if Qin Fen were literally living inside a memory. Having jumped on an additional eight years, the timelines and details do not always mesh exactly with a reappearance of Xiangshan’s daughter who should be around 30 but appears more like a sullen college student in the company of Xiangshan’s second wife, Mango (Yao Chen), who was not her mother nor raising her but apparently continued caring for her mother-in-law after her ex-husband’s death. Small splinters in the reality encourage us to doubt it, as if they corrupted files in Qin Fen’s ageing memory.

Feng presumably doubts our memory too, inserting frequent flashbacks to footage from the other movies whenever one of the returning cast allude to them in addition to providing a lengthy recap at the beginning of the film. Playing out a bit like a greatest hits compilation, the flashbacks prove unnecessarily clumsy and largely disrupt the flow of the ongoing drama while perhaps helping to fill in the blanks for those jumping in to part three without having seen one or two given that it has been fifteen years since the first film’s release. A little surprisingly given the tightening censorship regulations, Feng was able to continue the sympathetically presented running gag of Qi Fen’s male admirer, now having undergone a K-pop makeover and looking even younger, who also finds himself contemplating the nature of love after commissioning a Qin Fen robot to cure his own lovelorn desires.

A nod to the present day is given in a Lunar New Year movie-style epilogue (though the film was released around Western New Year) in which Shu Qi and Ge Yu play themselves dressed in matching outfits and nostalgically look back reflecting that young couples who came to see If You Are the One in 2008 might have teenage kids of their own or at least fond memories of an old love that wasn’t to be. Just at the end at they drop in the words that marriage is a commitment worth its weight in gold which feels like an approved message tackling the historically low rates of young people getting married. Nevertheless, it’s a cute and quirky way to bring the series to a close following the surreal absurdity of the two hours which preceded it.

International trailer (Simplified Chinese / English subtitles)

The Insatiable (現代ポルノ伝 先天性淫婦, Norifumi Suzuki, 1971)

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History repeats itself in Norifumi Suzuki’s erotic drama The Insatiable (現代ポルノ伝 先天性淫婦, Gendai Porno Den: Sentensei Inpu). The film’s Japanese title, Modern Porno Tale: Inherited Sex Mania, better hints at its true intentions in essentially repurposing a sense of class anxiety and moral conservatism as familiar from classic melodrama to fit Toei’s line of erotically charged movies but eventually offers little judgement of the heroine’s surrender to her fate (after gaining her revenge) in putting on her mother’s kimono to follow the path set down for her.

That was not, however, what Yuki’s (Reiko Ike) mother (Yoko Mihara) originally wanted. Hoping to save her from the life of a bar hostess with terrible taste in men, she sent her to a religious boarding school in Tokyo which has given her a toxic sense of shame in her sexuality. Sharing a bed with a classmate, she relates her fear and horror of sleeping with men which she assumes she is expected to do in time, though goes on to explore herself sexually with the other girl who feels much the same despite the warning from their lesson books that looking at another woman with desire is no different from adultery. 

Nevertheless, on returning to her mother’s home in Kyoto Yuki is later raped by her mother’s latest boyfriend who is for some reason a bowling enthusiast. His sensibility is emblematic of that of most men in the film who see Yuki merely as an object to be conquered. Following this violation, Yuki quits school and spends all her time in clubs in Shibuya unable to reconcile herself with her sexuality and living as good time girl if resenting herself when others see her as a sex worker. Sucked into the world of sleazy clubs, she becomes a kind of pass around for wealthy men while also cared for by a besotted yakuza who has been quite literally emasculated by his love for her, leaving Yuki unable to fully return his affections because he can no longer satisfy her sexually.

Eventually she meets handsome architect Yoichiro (Hiroshi Miyauchi) with whom she falls in a more wholesome love, but continues to believe that she cannot really be with him because of her sordid past. She then realises that not only does he have unfinished business with a French woman he met while studying abroad (Sandra Julien), but that his father, Matsumura (Tatsuo Endo), is the seedy loanshark who’s been trying to get his hands on her through middleman Akihito (Fumio Watanabe) who is connected with her mother’s new partner Tomoguchi, and also Yoichiro’s brother-in-law.

Akihito is really the villain of the piece, though mostly for his attempt to wage class warfare by taking over Matsumura’s business. His wife, Ayano (Miwako Onaya), has turned away from him knowing that her father brought him into the family for his ruthlessness while exclaiming that she hates self-made men. In much the same way that Yuki was attempting to escape her mother’s legacy, Akihito is also trying to overcome his impoverished background to catapult himself into the upper classes though Matsumura himself appears to have earned his wealth in dubious ways. In any case, he rejects Yoichiro’s decision to marry Yuki not only because he wants her himself but because he claims he wants to find a more appropriate wife for his son presumably as he found Ayano a husband who would benefit himself. 

In any case, Yuki is drugged and abused much like her mother turned into a plaything for men. Yuki resents her only momentarily for her role in her rape and sickening attempt to placate her boyfriend after having stood up for Yuki and confronted him about his betrayal. The two women later reconcile and find solidarity in their maternal relationship even if her mother can never escape the pattern of behaviour that keeps her dependent on bad men which is something Yuki may have overcome in the film’s closing moments as she in turn, wearing her mother’s kimono, opens a bar under her own name living as an independent woman. 

To get her revenge, she manipulated the men around her by using her sexuality against them only to be backed into a corner by Akihito’s chilling claim that she was now his slave. Her salvation at the hands of another man who damns himself in her defence and the defence of their love as something pure despite having cruelly rejected Yuki as a “whore” perhaps undercuts the message but also in the film’s eyes redeems her from her wandering life as an insatiable sex addict now free of her sense of shame and the lingering trauma of her rape. In this patriarchal and classist society, all men are animals driven only by destructive influences, while Yuki is even able to bond with Yoichiro’s French former lover with whom she also shares a sexual encounter. Suzuki films with characteristically romantic imagery and a wry sense of humour but nevertheless allows his heroine to find her way out of a world of beasts while refusing to shame her even as she embraces her mother’s legacy. 

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

In Our Prime (이상한 나라의 수학자, Park Dong-hun, 2022)

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Education is supposed to be the great leveller, a true meritocracy in which a combination of hard work and innate ability can enable anyone to follow their chosen path as far as it will go. The reality is however far less idealistic. Park Dong-hun’s In Our Prime (이상한 나라의 수학자, Isanghan Naraeui Suhakja) is the latest in a series of Korean films taking aim at corruption within the educational system along with a persistent classism that ensures only the “right” kind of people are allowed to prosper. 

Han Ji-woo (Kim Dong-hwi) knows he’s not the “right” kind of person and feels out of place at the elite boarding school where he is bullied by teachers and students alike for being a scholarship boy amid the children of mostly wealthy families. Though he won the place though being a top student at his previous school, now his grades are merely average and he’s bottom of the class in maths. Ji-woo’s odious, elitist teacher coldly tells him that his case is hopeless and he’ll never get into a top league university with these kinds of grades at this kind of school. He pressures Ji-woo into applying to transfer out which he is reluctant to do because he knows how much his attending such a prestigious school means to his widowed single mother. In any case as we later discover, the teacher merely has it in for him openly complaining with other members of staff about having to fuss with paperwork for kids on scholarships and bursaries who in his opinion don’t really belong in a place like this which is clearly geared towards perpetuating the privilege of the children of the elite at the expense of those like Ji-woo. 

When Ji-woo is caught smuggling in pork and soju at the behest of his exploitative roommates he refuses to dob them in, making the unlikely claim that he intended to consume all four meals himself. The teacher first praises his idealistic stance but then calls him an idiot because the other boys wouldn’t do the same for him nor are they coming forward themselves to take responsibility. Perfectly happy to let the scholarship boy take the blame one of them even crassly slips Ji-woo some money afterwards, genuinely confused when Ji-woo tries to turn it down claiming such things are unnecessary between friends. Nevertheless, the incident brings him the attention of the “commie officer”, a North Korean defector (Choi Min-sik) working as the nightwatchman who easily solves Ji-woo’s impossible maths problems. The officer eventually agrees to teach him maths but only on the premise that he doesn’t care about tests or grades but solely on the art of learning. 

What he teaches Ji-woo is a valuable lesson that cuts straight to the quick of the issues within the educational system in which children are being taught to blindly answer standardised questions without developing critical thinking skills. The first problem he shows him has a deliberate error in it, but Ji-woo is so focussed on giving the correct answer he doesn’t stop to consider the question itself may be wrong and as the officer is fond of saying there can be no correct answer to an incorrect question. Yet this new philosophy of maths in particular being a purely rational science in which there is only one true answer brings Ji-woo back into conflict with his teacher who complacently teaches to test and humiliates him when he points out one of the test questions is badly formulated. The teacher tells them the correctness of their answer is irrelevant for they must answer in accordance with the textbook and willingly say that black is white if the textbook says it’s so. Meanwhile it also becomes apparent that he has been taking kickbacks from parents getting wealthy students into an elite tutoring group where he leaks the questions on upcoming exams.

This discovery prompts a minor rebellion by rich kid Bo-ram (Jo Yun-seo) who becomes disgusted with her elitist mother after being unwittingly enrolled in the cheating cabal while already resenting her for having made her give up playing the piano. For the officer, music is a mathematical language and merely an expression of the beauty of numbers which can used to explain everything there is in the world, yet as we discover he left North Korea after finding out that his research was used in weapons production only to become disillusioned with the South on realising that here people merely use it as a tool for advancement towards dull and conventional lives in the service of capitalism. When Ji-woo admits that he supposes he wants good grades to get into a good uni and then get a good job to be set for life, the officer decides to broaden his horizons encouraging the better instincts the elites at the school had rejected and showing him how to think for himself rather than blindly follow what he’s being taught. 

All that might seem quite ironic for a man from North Korea pointing out the unhelpful brainwashing of a rote learning system along with the unpleasant complacency of Ji-woo’s teacher not to mention his unethical hypocrisy. Nevertheless, the officer has his own tragic past which suddenly rears its head just as the two begin to form a paternal bond and Ji-woo finds himself at a moment of crisis once again pushed towards a transfer. Though the system is stacked against them, Ji-woo and Bo-ram eventually find their way through it in their shared resistance bolstered by the officer’s teaching as they gain the strength to fight back with honesty and integrity. It may be a slightly rosy conclusion implying the system has been corrected as if Ji-woo’s teacher were the only problem rather than the product of its corruption but does at least make the case that integrity is the one thing that pays but can’t be bought.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Johnny Keep Walking! (年会不能停！, Dong Runnian, 2024)

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A satirical morality tale, Dong Runnian’s incredibly witty comedy Johnny Keep Walking! (niánhuì bùnéng tíng) sees a bumpkinish middle-aged factory worker still filled with an idealism that seems outdated even in the late 90s transferred into a lion’s den of corporate greed and dubious morality while ultimately expressing the younger generation’s increasing dissatisfaction with the inherent unfairness of corporate life in modern China. Ironically turning Tom Chang’s 1988 hit My Future is Not A Dream into a rallying cry from disillusioned youth, the film nevertheless places its faith in the moral generosity of a fat cat factory owner who struck gold in the nation’s 90s reforms but has largely forgotten those who helped him get there.

Key among them would be Jianlin (Da Peng) whom we first see trying to fix the disco ball at the factory’s 1998 gala and being asked to sing a song instead. 20 years pass with Jianlin still living the life of a model factory worker stuck on the same old salary while applying to perform in the company’s annual gala has become his only joy in life. Meanwhile, the factory owner has gone on to head an increasingly powerful multi-national company leaving Jianlin and those like him far behind deprived of the successes that the modern China has to offer. 

This is in part a paean for those left behind by the economic reforms of the 1990s which saw the end of the old factory system with mass unemployment and displacement amid frequent plant closures. Jianlin’s is still open, but devoid of the sense of comaradie that mark the opening scenes. His scheming floor manager, Zhangzi is trying to engineer a transfer to head office so that his son could attend a better school in the city and has been helping a series of corporate lackeys defraud the company, in addition to paying a direct bribe, in return for a job offer. A drunken mix up by office party boy Peter (Sun Yizhou) results in Jianlin being hired instead in a shock move that proves inexplicable to all. 

Jianlin is such an innocent that he thinks the reason he’s been given a huge promotion is because he was employee of the year for 12 years straight and the company probably want to send a message to the youngsters that hard work really will be rewarded. Of course, the opposite is true. HR manager Magic (Bai-Ke) quickly spots the mistake but is prevented from fixing it because it would get them all into trouble, and while it’s obvious to most people that Jianlin has no idea what he’s doing they choose to say nothing because they assume he must be a nepotism hire and they want to stay in the boss’ good books. Everyone at the company uses an English name with Jianlin rechristened “Johnny” though he understands no English and struggles with Chinese business jargon having no idea what people mean when they go on about “aligning the details”. Charged with firing someone under the company’s radical new “optimisation” programme, he takes the word at face value and gives them a promotion and a raise instead.

In fact, much of the film is him muddling along like typical middle-manager promoted beyond his abilities. He’s advised that good management is all about setting employees against each other so they forget about resenting you while basically delegating all your tasks to your subordinates who will be only too happy to help in order to curry favour. Slowly corrupted, Jianlin beings to play along, taking all the perks of corporate success while signing documents he couldn’t understand even if he actually read them.

Nevertheless, he develops a kind of team spirit with Magic, a man stuck in a mid-career rut because of his lack of skill at office politics, and Penny temp whose perpetually kept on the hook rather than being given full employee status so that the company can exploit her more. Penny also suffers sexual harassment at the hands of the party happy Peter with Jianlin getting her out of a sticky situation by telling her to finish a report and drinking with Peter himself. Together, and with the assistance of the workers at the factory and others about to be unceremoniously fired as part of the cost cutting enterprise, they attempt to expose corporate corruption and stage a protest against unfair working practices but the only saviour they have to turn to is the company president strongly suggesting a return to the old factory days which, it is implied, were much more wholesome and innocent. In any case, justice eventually wins out with the good rewarded and the bad getting their just desserts though it doesn’t do too much to tackle the inherent and quite ironic rottenness of the system in which the worker has been reduced to a mere tool to be used and discarded by a faceless and uncaring corporate entity. 

International trailer (English subtitles)

My Future is not a Dream (Tom Chang)

Endless Desire (果しなき欲望, Shohei Imamura, 1958)

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In the noir films of the immediate post-war era, the protagonists are often haunted by an inescapable past that prevents them from moving on into the new democratic Japan. But in Shohei Imamura’s Endless Desire (果しなき欲望, Hateshinaki Yokubo) the situation is ironically reversed as a group of former soldiers who on the surface of things at least seem to have made moderately successful lives for themselves reunite to dig up buried treasure from the dying days of the war greedy for a little more glamour than the world has seen fit to show them.

Their venal amorality is directly contrasted with the bumbling earnestness of Satoru (Hiroyuki Nagato), a young man who fears his childhood sweetheart, butcher’s daughter Ryuko (Sanae Nakahara), is going to marry another man because he is unemployed and cannot find a job in the still difficult if steadily improving post-war economy. As such, he’s incredibly excited by the opportunity to get into the real estate business, wandering around town dressed in a suit and carrying a briefcase to scout properties or otherwise doing odd jobs for the gang, which is a shame because unbeknownst to him the business is a sham set up as a front by the crooks who’ve rented a vacant shop from Satoru’s land shark dad so they can tunnel their way to the treasure which they think is buried under Ryuko’s butcher’s shop. 

The changing nature of the times is rammed home by the fact that the shopping district, which stands atop the site of the former military hospital where the gang buried a barrel full of stolen morphine at the end of the war ten years previously, is itself about to be torn down. Effectively a post-war shantytown, the area is now ripe for redevelopment with the economy beginning to bounce back thanks to the stimulus of the Korea War. The post-war era is not quite “over”, but it’s definitely on its way out which makes the gang’s determination to recover the stolen morphine all the more ironic especially as the market for hard drugs may not be as a lucrative as it once was not to mention to the logistical difficulties of turning it into cash. 

Nevertheless, the desire for it immediately sets the gang against each other. The problem is that the lieutenant, Hashimoto, who set the whole thing up has apparently died and extra person has turned up to claim some of the loot despite the gang members having been told there should only be three of them. They were not particularly close in the war and cannot exactly remember each other while Hashimoto had them all work separately without knowing who else was on board so they don’t even know which one of them is the potentially uninvited guest. Meanwhile, the presence of a woman, Shima (Misako Watanabe), who claims to be Hashimoto’s sister sets them all on edge with masculine jealously as she sometimes gleefully plays the femme fatale later even trying to seduce the innocent Satoru, convincing him she’s a victim of domestic violence in need of rescue in an attempt to quiet his concerns over what might be going on at the shop. 

The fact is that none of the gang members can really claim to be desperate, all are simply greedy and selfish silently plotting to keep all the money for themselves rather than share it. One of them is eventually crushed under the barrel, an embodiment of their insatiable desire, but with their dying breath insists it’s theirs and no one else can have any. As old man later says, this kind of greed only leads to a bad end unlike the greed he’s patiently practiced over decades which seems to be taking a little here and there where you find it such as asking Shima for some extra money for “helping” her before asking the police about a reward and turning her in anyway.

Even Satoru’s dad is “greedy”, renting the crooks a shop he new would soon be knocked down and then complaining when his tenants try to take the tatami mats and shoji doors they’d paid for themselves out of his property. Greed maybe the way of the world, at least for those who unlike the diffident Satoru do not lack for self-confidence, but endless desire has only one reward. Darkly comic and often deeply ironic, Imamura plays with a noirish sense of fatalistic retribution but finally returns to a sense of childish innocence in the bumbling courtship of Satoru and Ryuko who may be her own kind of femme fatale playing two suitors against each other while refusing to be dominated by any man but nevertheless riding off into the sunset on her bicycle with a diffident Satoru chasing along behind her.

Blue Giant (Yuzuru Tachikawa, 2023)

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There’s something quite poignant in the central themes of Yuzuru Tachikawa’s impassioned jazz anime Blue Giant that these very young men have decided to dedicate themselves to art that even they describe as dying. At their earliest meeting, saxophone player Dai (Yuki Yamada) and pianist Yukinori (Shotaro Mamiya) have a minor disagreement with Yukinori critical of the musicians he was previously playing with describing them as old and their lack of innovation as the reason that the art is decline but according Dai they are also the bearers of its legacy and the ensures of its survival.

It’s an ironic moment at least in that Yukihiro will also later be criticised for a “boring” performance style that plays it safe by concentrating on technical proficiency as opposed to the unbridled anarchy embodied by Dai whose determination to become the world’s greatest jazz player comes off as earnest more than arrogant and a mark of his intense self-belief which also generous and kind rather than jealous or petty. Like many anime heroes, Dai is a young man making the journey to the city and struggling to fulfil his dreams amid its various pressures. On arrival in Tokyo he struggles to find somewhere to practice that is both free of city noise and unlikely to disturb those around him but eventually discovers a small oasis not so different from the riverbank he played by in Sendai. 

We’re often reminded that music can be a lonely profession with the implication that Dai has had to sacrifice other areas of his life to dedicate himself to perfecting his art but has achieved surprising skill for only three years experience. Yukinori began playing at four and is envious of an innate talent he doesn’t believe he has or at least to the same extent as Dai. Then again, it may just be that his talent lies elsewhere and he has not yet quite discovered it. Rather than a musical rivalry the pair fall into a mutually beneficial rhythm in which they encourage each other to improve even if as Yukinori said jazz bands aren’t intended to stay together for long and are only ever more like stepping stones to somewhere else.

Their brotherhood is further tested by Dai’s decision to bring in his equally dejected friend Tamada (Amane Okayama) as their drummer despite his never having played the drums before insisting that it would be wrong to frustrate his newfound interest in music. Like the others, Tamada is struggling to rediscover himself after working hard to get into a university in Tokyo but bored by his lectures and disappointed in his fellow students who already seem to be playing the salaryman game. He’s drawn to music in part because of Dai’s love for it and it does seem to be his passion rather than jazz itself that wins over new converts to the supposedly dying art.

Dai claims to have fallen for jazz because it’s “hot” and “intense” and allows him a means to express himself in freely in a way that becomes almost infectious in its dynamism. Adapted from Shinichi Ishizuka’s manga, the animation emphasises the physicality of performance and the strength and stamina required to become a successful musician though the use of rotoscoping for additional authenticity sometimes seems oddly static and uncanny while largely at odds with the more expressive aesthetics with which the background drama is imbued. Even so Tachikawa echoes the freewheeling nature of the medium through drifting off into abstract, psychedelic sequences that attempt to visualise the transcendent and liberating quality of jazz.

Much of that featured in the film is composed by international jazz pianist Hiromi Uehara which lends a kind of irony to Yukinori’s growing realisation that his piano is the weak link as long he remains unable to unlock his potential and express himself freely through music rather than fallback on the safety and security of tried and tested techniques. In any case, it’s the relationships between them that propel the boys forward towards their respective destinies which may or may not coincide but are as much founded on friendship and solidarity as they are on a love of music.

Blue Giant opens in UK cinemas on 31st January courtesy of Anime Limited.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Images: © Blue Giant Partners