Mother Land (엄마의 땅: 그리샤와 숲의 주인, Park Jae-beom, 2022) [Fantasia 2023]

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A little girl becomes the spiritual defender of her traditional culture in her quest to cure her mother’s mysterious illness in Park Jae-beom’s stop motion fairytale, Mother Land (엄마의 땅: 그리샤와 숲의 주인, Eommaui Ttang: Geulisyawa Sup-ui Ju-in). Taking place seemingly in mid-20th century Siberia, the film focusses on the Yates people, nomads who live on the tundra raising reindeer in much the say way they have for centuries even as their existence is threatened by the militant modernity of Soviet Russia.

Krisha is a young woman who has begun having strange dreams believing she can see a huge red bear with shining eyes. Distracted, she is almost hurt when wind threatens to blow their half-built yurt down during a move but is saved by her mother, Shura. Shortly after they are visited by Captain Vladimir and Bazak, a member of the Yates who has betrayed his people to team up with the government in an effort to kill the “Master of the Forest” in order to claim the tundra and bring it into a fully modern society. When Krisha’s father Tokcha tells him it’s not a good idea and he’ll be punished for desecrating their sacred land, Vladimir counters that they too should join the collective farm threatening the very survival of their traditional culture. After insisting that the tundra is their home and they won’t leave it, Shura is taken ill with a mystery condition a shamaness says she has only seen in a Western village which no longer exists. 

It could be said that Shura’s sickness is born of the threat that modernity poses though her family is faced with a choice over what to do about it. The shamaness says she knows no cure and their only hope lies in visiting The Master of Forest to ask for his help but Tokcha balks that no one’s ever seen him and he’s not convinced that he exists let alone that he could help. While Krisha wants to follows the Shamaness’ advice, her father instead decides to ride into the city in search of modern Western medicine. Once he’s gone she secretly steals away with her little brother Kolya and their trusty reindeer steed Serodeto to look for the Master of the Forest whom she thinks may be the big red bear that’s been haunting her dreams. 

When she eventually finds him, the bear tells her that it is not his place to save her mother though he has been waiting for her for he believes she has come to save him. Bazak, who is in search of vengeance for his wife and daughter, asks what the point is of a god who only watches while others suffer but Krisha comes to see him as a manifestation of the healing power of the land he tells her is being lost because of its mistreatment by those like Captain Vladimir who describes Tokcha as an “arrogant barbarian” and has no respect for his culture or even for nature itself. 

Vladimir isn’t wrong when he calls the tundra the hope of the country though obviously not in the way that he means it. Krisha’s quest to save her mother is also a quest to save her land, the bear and her mother becoming symbolically linked while Krisha develops a maternal sense of herself as a guardian of her culture insisting that she will remain on the tundra practicing what she’s learnt as a link between heaven and earth. 

Even so, Park captures a sense of nature red in tooth and claw in the opening scenes in which a deer is butchered and some of its blood returned to the land in a ritual of gratitude to mark its sacrifice. The icy emptiness of the tundra is broken only by the appearance of Vladimir’s military van spewing black smoke into the otherwise pure landscape, while Park’s designs have a kind of warmth in their tactile quality from the powdery snow to the fabric covering the yurt and the tunic made for Krisha by her mother out of deer pelt and fur. Impressive scenes of wolves running are tempered by quiet moments of self-reflection as Krisha goes about her quest and begins to accept her destiny as a guardian of her culture. A quietly powerful fable, the film mediates on gods and nature along with the costs of modernity but ends on a note of comfort and relief in a longed for reunion and a restoration of normality.

Mother Land screened as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Yellow Crow (黄色いからす, Heinosuke Gosho, 1957)

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A small family struggles to repair itself after eight years of wartime separation in Heinosuke Gosho’s post-war melodrama, The Yellow Crow (黄色いからす, Kiiroi Karasu). Rather than focus directly on the legacy of the traumatic past, Gosho takes aim at war itself in making plain that the family’s problem is the time that was stolen from them each in a way forced to address the gulf between the idealised family life they may otherwise have had and the post-war reality. 

As the film opens, nine-year-old Kiyoshi (Koji Shitara) is sketching with his class at a temple. His teacher Miss Ashiwara (Yoshiko Kuga) is a little worried about the strange picture he’s drawing, noting that where once he had been a happy child painting cheerful pictures in vibrant colours now he only uses black and yellow and there’s unsettling quality in his composition. Still, trying to comfort him she tells Kiyoshi not to worry and that he’s free to draw whatever he likes, only later showing the paintings to a child psychologist who advises that these colours are often used by children who are anxious and lonely usually because they’ve lost a parent in the war. Only, Kiyoshi is lucky because he has both a mother and a father, his dad having been recently repatriated from China after being interned as a prisoner of war. 

In a sense it’s Miss Ashiwara’s misconception that the family must be happy because they’ve been so fortunate that lies at the centre of the conflict. Mother Machiko (Chikage Awashima) and father Ichiro (Yunosuke Ito) are so keen to get back to “normal” that no one really tries to address the obvious problems of their situation merely to reassume the lives they led before the war. For little Kiyoshi who wasn’t even born when his father left that sense of normality is very different and necessarily disrupted by his father’s return in what can only seem like an intrusion into closeness he had previously shared with his mother. 

Where another director or screenwriter may have told the entirety of the story from Kiyoshi’s point of view, Gosho pulls back to show us the way the adults struggle and suffer in their confusion and disappointment. On the surface, it does not seem that Ichiro has been particularly affected by his wartime service, rather the problem is in his frustrated attempts to reintegrate into a society which is entirely different from the one he left. He himself is older, and is perhaps acutely aware that he is a stranger to his son at first hurt by his shyness and reluctance to acknowledge him but then consumed by a sense of failure in a working life that leaves him little time to bond with his son leaving Kiyoshi with yet another sense of rejection. Meanwhile though his job was kept open for him, the nature of the business has changed. His boss is much younger than he is and has no interest in training an old timer he thinks is only really there as a goodwill gesture. As his friend points out, had it not been for the war he’d be a manager by now but as the boss puts it he’s returned to Japan “too late”. 

All of this adds to his sense of displacement and contributes to his increasingly harsh treatment of Kiyoshi, constantly discouraging all of his interests such as his fascination with animals and talent for drawing telling him only that he should be studying useful things like maths and science. His parenting style is evidently much more authoritarian than Machiko’s had been, often taking the view that Kiyoshi has been spoiled and needs some discipline instilling in him. But Kiyoshi reads his father’s treatment of him only as rejection, that must think he’s a bad boy and not want him. The resentment he feels only grows when the parents have another child, Mitsuko. It’s obviously much easier for Ichiro to bond with her than the already grown Kiyoshi while Machiko is both weak from the birth and mindful of a new responsibility all of which leaves Kiyoshi feeling pushed out and unwanted. He often takes refuge at the home of the kindly woman next-door, Yukiko (Kinuyo Tanaka), and her adopted daughter Haruko with whom he rescues animals, including a wounded crow, much to his father’s consternation. 

Always the wise observer, it’s Yukiko who finally tries to coax Machiko towards a resolution to challenge her husband’s authoritarianism. After his father accuses him of being a threat to Mitsuko and tries to shut him in the shed overnight, finally releasing his pet crow, Kiyoshi tries to run away and later returns to Yukiko’s house where he asks her to adopt him. Listening in secret, Machiko is heartbroken realising that they’ve been going about this all wrong, too busy trying blindly reassume the lives they had before when they should have met each other with more compassion and understanding trying to listen to Kiyoshi, who can admittedly at times be difficult and unreasonable unwilling to recognise when he is in the wrong, rather than instantly scolding him. Machiko’s story perhaps fades into the background, but she too is struggling having realised that her hopes that everything would finally be alright now that Ichiro has returned were misplaced while caught between her husband and her son with a baby daughter to care for trying to keep the peace if nothing else.   

Gosho apparently chose yellow after consulting with child psychologists* and filmed in full colour to make the most of Kiyoshi’s attempts at artistic expression while capturing his youthful sense of loneliness and displacement, but equally treats his parents with a degree of sympathy for their own confusion and disappointment. Ichiro is not a bad man and often trying his best but frustrated, admitting that he would have liked to simply forgive Kiyoshi and get closer to him as his father but for whatever reason found himself lashing out in misplaced anger. The message for the post-war society is then one of generalised compassion, that there’s no point blindly trying to reassume one’s life as if nothing had happened and patience and mutual understanding will be necessary to repair the bonds that war has corrupted. Thus it is Ichiro who has to change, dropping his authoritarian distance in deciding to be kinder to his son finally going out to look for him when he tries to run away in the middle of a storm returning the colours to Kiyoshi’s world as he begins to feel more secure in his familial connections in the knowledge that he is loved and wanted as a child of the new post-war generation. 

*Arthur Nolletti Jr., The Cinema of Heinosuke Gosho: Laughter Through Tears, pg. 185

Miss Shampoo (請問，還有哪裡需要加強, Giddens Ko, 2023)

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A ruthless gangster’s quest for vengeance is put on hold when he falls for a cutesy hairdresser who hides him from the bad guys who knifed his treacherous boss in Giddens Ko’s adaptation of his own short story Miss Shampoo (請問，還有哪裡需要加強, qǐngwèn, háiyǒu nǎlǐ xūyào jiāqiáng). Part gangland drama part zany Taiwanese rom-com, the film nevertheless hints at institutionalised corruption in local politics while simultaneously mocking the awkward positioning of the “gangster” in the contemporary imagination as both a romanticised outlaw and despised member of society. 

Bruiser Tai becomes the head of his gang when his boss, Hsing, is murdered by Thai assassins presumably hired by one of the other local bosses in a dispute over urban development contracts that may also threaten an upcoming election. Tai doesn’t seem to know a lot about that or how seriously he should take advice from one of the other bosses that he should look inside his own organisation when considering who might have wanted Hsing dead. In any case, at the present time all he can think about is innocent hairdresser, Fen (Vivian Sung), who hid him in the back of the salon when he was trying to escape the assassins. It’s not long before he’s deciding that he needs a haircut, as do several of his men who more or less take the salon over as the gangsters’ coiffeur of choice. 

Fen is not actually a fully trained hairdresser and had been mainly handling the shampoo which might explain some of her more avantgarde efforts even if she later seems to find a groove in giving the gangsters the kind of hairstyles they wanted but didn’t know how to ask for. The effect may be short lived leaving Tai with ridiculous blond dreadlocks for the rest of the film but perhaps nothing says love more than being willing to look like a complete idiot to avoid hurting your crush’s feelings. A baseball obsessive, Fen is herself somewhat on the margins and currently dating a graduate student who looks down on her and doesn’t take the relationship seriously. Even her mother tells her he’s too good for her, suggesting they should continue placating him because he’s “better” than they are while she remains unable to stand up for herself. 

Perhaps surprisingly, the family are later family acceptive of Tai’s attempts at courtship despite knowing that he’s a “gangster” with only the worry that he may turn into a “scary ex” if Fen eventually decides to break up with him. But the relationship does however place a strain on the gang with some members frustrated by Tai’s lovelorn indifference to the gangster code as he continues to neglect avenging the boss’ death in favour of pursuing a romance with Fen. While his friend flirts (almost literally) with betrayal in chasing a new cryptocurrency future with a similarly fed up underling from a rival gang, Tai starts to wonder if he’ll have to make a choice between his life an underworld high roller and his love for the civilian Fen while slowly coming to the conclusion that being the boss might not be all it’s cracked up to be. 

A recurrent baseball subplot hints at another kind of justice built on teamwork and mutual feeling that eventually comes to the rescue both romantically and physically as Tai deals with his gangster drama and Fen with her romantic doubt after realising that Tai is a gangster after all and underworld betting is destroying the game she loves so much, while otherwise playing into the message of new beginnings as Fen continues to support her longtime baseball idol as he prepares to transfer to a Japanese team at the comparatively late age of 30. Ko plays with meta humour in the final assurances that this is a New Year Movie (though it wasn’t) so must have a happy ending while otherwise indulging in zany gags like invisible guns as a repeated gimmick to get names out of people who didn’t want to give them, aside from all the ridiculous hairstyles Fen accidentally gives her customers while trying to capture their true essence. Nevertheless, the sleazy atmosphere and vulgarity often sit uncomfortably with the sweetness of the central love story in what is otherwise an ironic take on the quirky rom-com.

Miss Shampoo screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Saga Saga (緑のざわめき-Saga Saga-, Aimi Natsuto, 2023)

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Three women contending with a legacy of patriarchal failure and male violence circle around each other in the picturesque hot springs resort of Ureshino in Aimi Natsuto’s etherial drama, Saga Saga (緑のざわめき, Midori no Zawameki – Saga Saga –). Less playful than Natsuto’s previous film Jeux de plage, the oscillating action takes on a poetic, mystical direction as the forces which bind the three women together eventually become clear while each in their own way tries to overcome a lingering sense of displacement and loneliness. 

The first of them, Kyoko (Rena Matsui), left Ureshino to become an actress in Tokyo but has given up performing and resettled in nearby Fukuoka where she runs into an old hometown boyfriend, Sotaro, who is currently sort of dating Eri, a woman he met on a dating app. Despite telling Kyoko he can’t stay long after reconnecting because he has a date with someone who is “not quite” his girlfriend, Sotaro ends up going to a love hotel with another woman, Naoko (Sae Okazaki), who frequents the bookstore where he works. Though it originally appears that Naoko is jealous of Kyoko and fears she’s missed her chance with Sotaro, we soon realise that she is in fact semi-stalking her for unclear reasons but actually wants to get in touch with someone else and eventually forms a telephone connection with Anna (Sara Kurashima), a high school girl currently living in Ureshino with her aunt, Fumiko (Asuka Kurosawa). 

In a way, they are all looking for something that seems to be missing in their lives. For Kyoko it seems to be something like the concept of home as she struggles with a series of sudden changes from the death of her mother two years previously to a brush with cancer in the form of an ovarian tumour she has recently had removed. Fumiko, who was a friend of her mother’s, tells her that she’s on a journey of self-reconciliation and there is indeed something in that as she works over the mysteries of her past while looking for new directions in her future. 

Meanwhile, she is plagued by strange dreams of being lost in a forest later telling a friend that she was once sexually assaulted in the woods when she was in high school and has the feeling the person who is chasing in her in her dream may be her father who left the family when she was a child. When she was receiving treatment for the tumour on her ovary, she began to ask herself why she had been born a woman forever subject to threat and patriarchal oppression. On her return to Fukuoka, she undergoes a very strange job interview in which she’s repeatedly assured that “being a woman” she won’t be asked to do anything “difficult” while it seems that being “attractive” is enough to get by in the beginning. Also they warn her that they don’t offer “great maternity leave or anything like that”. 

The lives of each of the women have been in one way or another overshadowed by male violence, but it’s Anna’s would-be-boyfriend Toru who is eventually victimised when he’s assaulted by a woman who wanted to bring back a problematic local festival cancelled because of a sexual assault. Toru had been in the forest to consult with some kind of mystic man trying to get him to conduct a ritual to get Anna to like him only to be told it doesn’t really work like that and you wouldn’t want it to anyway. After the assault it’s Toru’s life which spirals out of control when he’s blackmailed into acts of petty crime by the witch-like woman who forced herself on him, while Fumiko too is later forced to pay the price for having kept her secrets and for compassionate reasons attempted to hide the truth from those who most wanted to know.

Finally brought together on solving their individual mysteries, the three women settle on creating a home they can each return to, anchoring themselves as a family as a means of finding stability in a world which is so often in flux in defiance of the destructive forces which connect them. Even Eri admits that in reality she may have been looking for self-affirmation in her desire to find a dating app soulmate as her friends reflect on their terrible romantic experiences which, ironically, include being stalked. In the depths of its mysticism and eeriness, the film nevertheless ends on a note of serenity and the promise of moving forward if paradoxically by making a return. 

Saga Saga screened as part of this year’s JAPAN CUTS.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

River (リバー、流れないでよ, Junta Yamaguchi, 2023) [Fantasia 2023]

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Some might say time stands still in the “peaceful” hot springs town of Kibune, but on this particular day it’s more than usually true in Junta Yamaguchi’s followup to the cult hit Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes, River (リバー、流れないでよ, River, Nagarenai de yo). This time around, the staff of a hotel along with its guests find themselves trapped in an infinite two minute loop in which they retain all their memories but are constantly returned to where they were two minutes previously no matter what they do. 

Depending on the situation, two minutes can be an eternity or an instant (or perhaps it’s always both) and in this case there isn’t much you can do in such a short time. The hotel staff find themselves constantly running up stairs and through corridors trying to coordinate their actions while accepting that nothing is permanent and any changes they try to make to their situation will be wiped out in the next loop. A chef who is also apparently a science enthusiast cautions them against taking any rash actions seeing as they can’t know when time will start flowing normally again, though for some the opportunity to embrace guilty pleasures such as poking a hole in the shoji is too good to pass up. 

As for what’s causing it, no one really knows but as it turns out everyone has a reason they might want to stop time. For maid Mikoto (Riko Fujitani) it’s that she fears her boyfriend plans to move abroad to study French cooking while another pair of guests secretly wanted to ask each other favours but are having trouble plucking up the courage and a blocked writer consumed with guilt for having killed off a key character is glad he can finally take some time out only to be slowly bored out of his mind when faced with an eternity of nothingness. The irony is that people come to places like these precisely because they’re “boring”, free from the chaos and stress of their ordinary lives. Mikoto says as much while wondering if that’s why her boyfriend wants to leave, that he feels as if he’s stagnating in a place where nothing changes and time doesn’t flow and that while he could be “happy” here with her living an ordinary life there’d always be a part of him wanting more.

Still, having this additional time helps each of them find clarity and begin to resolve some of their worries and anxieties. Even if they had “more time” in the more conventional sense, they may never have been able to speak plainly but given the enforced constraints of the time loop in which they quickly run out of other things to do and are more or less forced to talk to each other, they are all able to come to some kind of accommodation with what’s been bothering them. The two male guests are able to clear the air after an argument, the writer comes to a new appreciation of his characters thanks to his own sense of despair being trapped in the loop, and Mikoto realises she’ll have to let her boyfriend go in the hope that he’ll circle back around to her in time. 

The complexities involved are unlike those in Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes given that time constantly resets so the only point of consistency is the initial position of each person though the infinite quality of the looping provokes an additional layer of existential questioning as each of the various protagonists is forced to ask if they’re really moving on with their lives or even notice that time is indeed flowing. The clue that something is continuing to move lies in the differing levels of snowfall in each of the loops hinting at the increasing depths of their despair as they realise that not even death might free them from the maddening cycle of repetition while accepting they’ll have to work together to figure out what’s going on and how to escape the loop. The farcical humour soon gives way to a more poignant sense of reflection but also to a renewed joy and excitement that the future might actually be fun too and maybe it’s less scary to go there than be quite literally stuck in the present for all of eternity.

River screened as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Greenhouse (비닐하우스, Lee Sol-hui, 2022)

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A middle-aged woman makes a series of questionable choices while pursuing her dream of a stable home with her teenage son in Lee Sol-hui’s downbeat tale of life on the margins of contemporary Korea, Greenhouse (비닐하우스). The Korean title of “Vinyl House” might be a little more accurate, in that the heroine lives in a disused polytunnel on an allotment her son later says the family used to go to every weekend before his parents’ divorce while eagerly waiting for his return after which she hopes to start again.

The son, however, first says that he has no desire to live with her and intends to stay with an uncle after leaving juvenile detention. The film never directly states what led him there, but he later mentions he and some friends all seemingly released at the same time used to break into houses owing to having “nowhere to drink.” One of his chief objections seems to be his mother’s lack of a more traditional home and the embarrassment it causes him with his delinquent friends which is one reason why Moon-jung (Kim Seo-hyung) is desperately saving her money for a deposit on a modern flat and a life of comfort she can otherwise only dream of. She has a job as a housekeeper for a wealthy older couple, the wife has dementia and is paranoid Moon-jung is trying to kill her, and the husband has all but completely lost his sight, but faces the implosion of her dreams with the announcement that they are considering moving into a nursing home.

In a repeated motif, Moon-jung often violently slaps herself on the side of the head in an apparent act of self-harm. Explaining that she used to see a psychiatrist but can no longer afford it, she joins a support group for people in a similar position and encounters a vulnerable young woman, Soo-nam (Ahn Ji-hye), with whom she later develops a sisterly connection after realising that she may be trapped in an abusive relationship she is unable to escape because of her learning difficulties. 

They are each in their way pushed out of mainstream society by virtue of their age, poverty, or disability and largely reliant on the kindness of strangers that rarely comes their way. The film only ever hints at the hard life Moon-jung may have lived but suggests that her past trauma may help to explain some of her otherwise incomprehensible decisions after the old lady hits her head and presumably dies in a domestic accident. While she cares for a wealthy older couple who remain independent in their own home, Moon-jung’s mother lives a miserable life in an inexpensive nursing home. A woman visiting her roommate soothes and strokes her mother encouraging her to keep on living as long as possible even if it’s “like this” while Moon-jung seems to have mixed emotions, on one level guilty not to be able to care for her mother herself and perhaps wanting to be relieved of any responsibility towards her. 

In some ways, Moon-jung’s tragedy may be that she is at heart just an ordinary, decent person and is torn between a genuine desire to help and care for others and a cynicism that tells her she is foolish for doing so. She wants to help Soon-nam perhaps identifying with her suffering, but is also resentful of her sudden attempt to latch on to her and fearful her presence may disrupt the new life she dreams of with her son which is the only ray of hope in an otherwise miserable existence. When that dream is threatened she decides to anything she can to save it even if it seems obvious that her series of bad decisions will not pay off because her subterfuge will quickly be exposed. 

What she doesn’t bank on is the sheer magnitude of cosmic ironies the film throws at her in which every avenue of her life is somehow undermined by another from her relationship with the elderly couple to her friendship with Soon-nam, and a romance with a man who may have been in someway abusive. Exploring the hopelessness experienced by an abandoned generation whose children have mostly moved abroad and outsourced their care, the plight of women like Moon-jung trying to do their best but frustrated by extreme bad luck, and vulnerable young people like Soon-nam who has no one to defend her as an orphan with learning difficulties, the film may suggest that they are each trapped in the hothouse of the modern society baked alive by hopelessness and indifference while struggling to find a place for themselves in an increasingly unforgiving city. 

Greenhouse screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (Korean subtitles only)

The Cold-Blooded Trap (冷血の罠, Takahisa Zeze, 1998)

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“This place is full of people like me” a violent criminal jeers, admitting that he’s killed “plenty” of women but not necessarily the one he’s being questioned about. There is indeed something eerie that seems to have taken over this small corner of Shibuya in Takahisa Zeze’s dark millennial thriller The Cold-Blooded Trap (冷血の罠, Reiketsu no Wana). “Strange things are happening here” another investigator notes, “someone’s malice has infected this whole place.” Yet the sense of haunting may be closer to home than it first seems as two men attempt to come to terms with a traumatic past by solving present mystery. 

Even the police seem to concede that the strange goings on are a “continuation” of something else. As we first meet him private detective Fujiwara (Sho Aikawa) appears to be following a young woman home from the station only as we later discover she hired him herself to watch over her because she had the feeling she was being watched. Fujiwara watches her enter her apartment building and then calls her to say everything looks clear on the ground, but a short time later a body wrapped in sheets is dropped from the roof onto the street below. The weird thing is that it’s the same building Fujiwara’s sister Noriko used to live in, only she took her own life and that of her child by jumping off the roof five years previously. 

Not only does Fujiwara feel as if he failed in his duty to protect his client, but he’s forced into a similar contemplation in his latent guilt surrounding his sister’s death. The most obvious reason for Noriko to have considered suicide was that her salaryman husband Hanazono (Hidetoshi Nishijima) had been having an affair with a work colleague, Yoko (Asuka Kurosawa), yet Hanazono refuses to accept responsibility and is convinced that Noriko was murdered by a mysterious serial killer stalking the streets of Shibuya. 

The irony is that we first think Hanazono is the faceless killer after watching him enter the woman’s apartment building, only to learn that he may have been investigating Noriko’s death. Later these assumptions are overturned again, but even he concedes that he seems suspicious. Wandering around the city at night, he runs into women alone who immediately see him as a threat and assume he may be a dangerous criminal who means them harm. The realisation first shocks him, but then gives way to a physical high in the adrenaline rush of fleeing the scene. He comes to the conclusion that he must get into the killer’s mindset in order to catch him and begins actively stalking people around the city, following them home and checking mailboxes to find out names. 

Fujiwara doesn’t trust Hanazono for obvious and understandable reasons, but even so he begins following him as Hanazono continues to follow the killer. Zeze opens the film with fuzzy 90s camcorder footage trained on the forecourt of a station from a balcony opposite. The camera follows a woman as she leaves, and Fujiwara behind her with eerie intent evoking the mild paranoia of millennial surveillance. Later Hanazono films his own POV walking through the midnight city, once again lending the streets a sense of lurking malevolence and dread-fuelled fatalism even before he arrives at his shocking destination. 

Yet we wonder if Hanazono is just a paranoid obsessive with his giant map of crime insisting that seemingly isolated incidents of violence are somehow linked. Before Fujiwara hears about the woman’s death on the news they were reporting on insolvent banks hinting at a financial anxiety in the contemporary society, and as the suspect Fujiwara later tracks down suggests there are lot of distressed or perhaps disturbed people around. The crimes may really be random, but they are also connected by virtue of being provoked by an anxious society even if as Hanazono admits there are several criminals behind them. Whether or not he gets the answer he seeks, Fujiwara will have to accept that he too bears some responsibility as Hanazono has perhaps already done even if desperate to deny it. “I’ve always been responsible” he admits while taking control over his life, only the elliptical structure of the film may imply otherwise. Dark and eerie, Zeze captures a sense of millennial dread in the streets of the capital filled as they are with “random” crimes and lurking killers in the haunting anxiety of constant threat.

Clip (English subtitles)

Hand (手, Daigo Matsui, 2022)

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A young woman unwittingly meditates on emotional distance and the impossibility of intimacy while fixating on older men in an attempt to overcome her loneliness in feeling rejected by her father in Daigo Matsui’s contemporary Roman Porno, Hand (手, Te). Partly a critique of a misogynistic society, the film is as much interested in why old men like young girls as it is why Sawako (Akari Fukunaga) likes old men along with her general disdain for the various roles she’s expected to play. 

Sawako largely describes these as “life skills”, a brief flashback to the 20-year-old her wondering why weird old men suddenly took an interest in her when she left high school. The old guys make inappropriate banter with the woman behind bar that shocks Sawako in its crassness and leaves her wondering if she’ll be expected to “eco-exist” with men like these for the rest of her life. She decides if that’s the way it is she’ll need to equip herself which at 25 mainly involves adopting an ultra feminine persona, pretending to be stupid laughing at men’s rubbish jokes and giggling sweetly at every opportunity. Co-worker Mori (Daichi Kaneko) has, however, seen through her act especially as she doesn’t bother to put it on for him and is rather frank in her cynicism which gives her an air of authenticity that might in other ways be misleading. 

Meanwhile, she spends her time taking photos of middle-aged men and putting them in her scrapbook while sometimes going on “dates” with older guys. What soon becomes apparent is that she resents her family, with whom she still lives, and feels a little pushed out as if no one really cared about her only her younger sister Rika who in stark contrast to her is cheerful and outgoing. When she offers to make her father dinner, he doesn’t respond but apparently does when her sister asks. Sawako feels like her father thinks of her as “dark and boring” and assumes that he ignores her deliberately because he has no interest in her yet she ironically also ignores him, refusing her mother’s request that she accompany him to a hospital appointment petulantly suggesting he’d probably prefer it if Rika went. The truth is that they simply don’t know how to talk to each other, sitting far apart at the back of a bus like a couple that’s had an argument. 

A more age appropriate relationship with co-worker Mori seems as if it’s breaking down some barriers towards intimacy but finally leaves her additionally vulnerable as he too turns out to be a fairly weak, emotionally dishonest man despite his outward consideration for her. In contrast with the older men, his courtship had been coy, shyly asking to hold her hand and for permission before he kissed her while otherwise leaving her to take the lead though in the end he may not have been much different. One of the older gentlemen ironically describes her as “insecure” yet misreads her insecurity as sexual rather than emotional only for her to let the mask slip and bite back, frankly telling him that it can be “rude” to treat a woman like a girl and that his dismissiveness is offensive. If all he sees in her is “youth” then he should just date a naive teenager instead.

“Youth” may be the answer to her question about why old men like young women, something confirmed by her date’s sighing that he finds dating her “nostalgic” as if he were young again too. But what she was looking for was warmth, the closing of an emotional gap of the kind that Mori proposed when he asked to hold her hand but never really followed through on. Then again, as another said she does indeed have a habit of running away, rolling her eyes at the idea of seriousness in an attempt to mask her fear of intimacy and treating everything as a cynical joke to avoid facing reality. “Whatever you do you have to engage with people” her similarly reticent father tells while beginning to break the ice, slowly closing the gap in extending a hand across it that provokes an emotional breakthrough. Quietly poignant in the slow motion of its heroine’s gradual liberation, Matsui’s otherwise biting take on contemporary patriarchy and follies of old men nevertheless allows her to reclaim herself in opening up to others.

Hand screened as part of this year’s JAPAN CUTS.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Deep Sea (深海, Tian Xiaopeng, 2023) [Fantasia 2023]

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“For you who passed through the darkness” runs a dedicatory title card at the conclusion of Tian Xiaopeng’s stunning animated drama, Deep Sea (深海, Shēn Hǎi). Aimed squarely at younger audiences, the film is an exploration of depression and despair as the young heroine is plunged into a dark sea feeling that her life has no value but there encounters a fantastical world of colour and light while chasing the ghost of the mother who abandoned her.

As if to signify her loneliness, the film opens in a blizzard in which Shenxiu (Wang Tingwen) desperately searches for her mother only for her shadow to turn into a strange, many eyed monster. Back in the “real” world, she’s off on a family holiday with her father, his new wife, and their baby son, the family of three sitting in front while she remains behind on her own wearing the red hoodie that once belonged to her mother. About to get on a boat for a six-day cruise, she drafts a message to her mother about how excited she is to see the ocean but then scrolls back up and remembers all the times her mother didn’t reply and the times she did to tell her she’s busy and wishes Shenxiu wouldn’t contact her if it isn’t urgent. She deletes the message and rejoins her family but they’re so busy fussing over the baby that they don’t have time for her either and in fact seem to have forgotten that today is her birthday.

Venturing out on the deck in a storm, Shenxiu is sucked into a tornado in which she sees the outline of her mother and meets a strange sea creature, Hijinx, from a story her mother had told her believing that it has come to guide her to where her mother is living. Before too long she arrives at a bizarre floating restaurant where aquatic creatures go to eat run by “avant-garde” chef Nanhe (Su Xin). In some ways, Nanhe comes to represent her mother in that he first rejects her, insisting that she’s bad luck and kicking her out but later takes her back and tries to make her happy in an effort to stave off the “Red Phantom” that threatens to consume her, taking on the form of her mother’s red hoodie in which she attempts to bury herself as a symbol of her loneliness and despair. 

Beautifully animated, the world of the restaurant is a silkpunk paradise of chaotic action, part pirate ship and part fantastical submarine powered by walruses on stationery bicycles. Tian Xiaopeng makes fantastic use of the projector screen to illuminate Shenxiu’s fantasies, neatly including a cartoon within the cartoon in a more traditional 2D style while otherwise reflecting Nanhe’s broken dreams for a homeland he says he can never return to. Shenxiu too shifts between alternate “realities”, experiencing brief flashbacks to happy memories of her mother and others of less happy times as she’s sent for counselling by a school concerned she seems withdrawn only to be told the solution is to smile more so she’ll fit in better encouraging her to bury herself and her feelings under an affected facade of cheerfulness for the comfort of others.  

Nanhe’s final acceptance of her comes when he tells he that he hopes all her future smiles will be from the heart unlike the clown face he sometimes wears with its eerie, false grin intended to ward off other people’s discomfort but largely masking pain in himself. He also tells her that though the “real” world may seem grey and miserable in comparison to the dazzling colour of her dreams, there will bright moments waiting for her that no matter how small are worth living for. It might seem a heavy message to deliver to small children, but also one that some may sadly need to hear. Tian opts for a more realistic conclusion than many might expect in which Shenxiu but nevertheless allows her to punch through her loneliness and despair into a happier existence bonding with her stepmother and seemingly better integrated into her family no longer feeling excluded or alone. Absolutely breathtaking in its execution, Tian’s incredibly rich fantasy world is a riot of whimsy but also tempered by a deep empathy and compassion for anyone who’s battled their way through a dark sea. 

Deep Sea screened as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Amiko Wins Obayashi Prize at 2023 JAPAN CUTS

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Japan Society New York has announced the winner of this year’s JAPAN CUTS Obayashi Prize which was introduced in 2020 in memory of the late director Nobuhiko Obayashi and is awarded to an independently produced narrative feature from an emerging filmmaker in the festival’s sole competitive category, Next Generation. This year’s jury which included critic and essayist Moeko Fujii, Film at Lincoln Center programmer Dan Sullivan, and distributor Pearl Chan (Good Move Media, Kani Releasing), has selected Yusuke Morii’s Amiko offering the following statement:

“As Amiko peeks into calligraphy class watching other children practice discipline and character building, they play a game of who can spot her first. She is too much, too loud; she cannot be held inside the lines and there is no language to describe her. This is where the vivid auditory and visual world of the film rushes in to sketch the perspective of a child who, in her attempts to grieve, seems to only aggravate and upset those around her. Among a selection of films interested in the non-normative, Amiko stands out in its use of the surreal as a comfort, while not losing sight of the inner-lives of those looking at and after those we don’t really understand. A fantastic performance by young Kana Osawa in Yusuke Morii’s first feature.”

Hiroki Kono’s J005311 also gained a special mention for, as explained in the following comment, “its considerable formal ambition and willingness to challenge us as viewers. Made with a profound sense of economy – both in terms of its restrained yet complex execution, but also its maximisation of clearly limited means – it manages to give us a gripping, intimate and provocative filmic ride.”

Other films screened in this year’s Next Generation strand included: Yurina Kaneko’s People Who Talk to Plushies Are Kind, Aimi Natsuto’s Saga Saga, Ryohei Sasatani’s Sanka: Nomads of the Mountain, and Yuho Ishibashi’s When Morning Comes, I Feel Empty. The winner of the Obayashi prize will receive receive a trophy and monetary award of US$3,000.

Our coverage of JAPAN CUTS 2023 continues here. You can also keep up with all the latest news from Japan Society New York and the year-round film programme by following them on Letterboxd, Instagram,  Facebook, and Twitter.