The Angry Street (怒りの街, Mikio Naruse, 1950)

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As its opening text explains, Mikio Naruse’s The Angry Street (怒りの街, Ikari no Machi) takes place in a world in which a love of justice and faith in others has been crushed under foot. That might equally apply to any other of Naruse’s films and well enough reflects his generalised philosophy that the world in which we live betrays us, but in this case it’s more than usually true as he adopts the trappings of film noir to consider the series of reversals that have taken place amid post-war chaos chief among them class and gender. 

Sociopathic student Shigetaka’s (Yasumi Hara) primary motivation is to earn money for his family, once upper middle-class but now fallen on hard times, but he’s also engaged in an act of class warfare taking revenge on the “nouveau riche” who he feels have usurped his class privilege. His chief weapon is his good looks along with his seductive charm which he puts to full use on the dance floor flirting with naive young women to whom he sells sob stories of his poverty to extort money out of them. He and his friend Mori (Jukichi Uno) have an “agreement” that what they’re doing’s alright as long as they only take advantage of the women financially rather than sexually though at this point Shigetaka seems to have little interest in that anyway insisting that women are just business to him so he little cares for their feelings. 

Their sense of class resentment is rammed home by their mocking of their classmates who have to do “humiliating” jobs to support themselves such as selling lottery tickets in the streets. Trying to get them to attend a meeting about student employment, their classmates describe them as “privileged” suggesting they may feel it’s not their problem because they don’t need to work little knowing that each of them is impoverished and dependent on exploiting women for their income.

There is however also a gender reversal in play as Shigetaka misogynistically takes on a feminised role, playing the gold digger in attempting to manipulate women, who are now in a position of power, into supporting him financially. He even tells some of them that he’s being forced into a financial marriage by his “old-fashioned” family, playing the damsel in distress and hoping that his target will swoop in to rescue him. When one of the women writes to his home after he abandons her, his grandmother is scandalised by the idea that he might have formed an attachment to a woman to whom he had not been formally introduced but equally that he might have been frequenting “effeminate” places such as dance halls. Unmanliness is something he’s accused of several times but also the tool which he uses to seduce women who are taken in by his feminine features and graceful dancing. Closely echoing Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, it’s near impossible not to read both Shigetaka and Mori as queer coded and the relationship between them filled with homoerotic tension as Mori looks on in jealously while Shigetaka goes about his business seducing naive young women they’ll swindle together. 

A point of crisis arrives when the pair bite off more than they can chew in getting involved with a woman who is slightly older and sophisticated in her dealings with men. An independent woman, Tagami (Yuriko Hamada) claims to be a dentist but actually makes her money through smuggling and the black market if drawing her line at drugs. Shigetaka thinks he’s using her, but Mori warns him she’s really the one in charge and playing him at his own game planning to drop him once she’s got what she wanted which in this case is his youthful flesh (realistically the only thing he could possibly offer her). Tagami draws him into a wider and more dangerous world of crime than he’s equipped to deal with just as Mori receives twin blows that break the spell and encourage him to want out of Shigetaka’s schemes firstly in discovering that one of their targets, Kimiko (Mayuri Mokusho), is the sweetheart of an old war buddy, and then into running into Shigetaka’s earnest sister Masako (Setsuko Wakayama) who is the film’s de facto moral authority pulling him away from Shigetaka’s dark machinations back towards a more conventional morality. 

In a series of flashbacks, he remembers more innocent times before the war when he too sold tickets on the street and worked in a shop washing windows while going on innocent dates with Masako. The implication is that it’s his wartime service along with the world he came back to that have filled him with nihilistic cynicism while he later says that he indulges in Shigetaka’s schemes as a means of staying close to him and earning his favour. But Shigetaka is already far too corrupt, filled with class resentment over his lost privilege along with a deep-seated misogyny as a reflection of his sense of emasculation in this new world in which young women wield significant economic power. Kimiko in particular is brash and insensitive even aside from her naivety remarking on the piles of money that turn up at her home every day before virtually throwing cash at Shigetaka with seemingly no thought as to how that might make him feel even if he weren’t conning her in offending his pride and masculinity. 

Mori wonders how he can save himself if Shigetaka remains so irredeemable and is instructed by Masako that they must work together and live honestly though even she hangs on to her ideas of social class scandalised by the revelation that her mother too has begun selling things in the street, in her case knitted socks which is a fairly labour intensive activity for an incredibly small profit margin. Echoing film noir, Naruse opens and closes with scenes of the present day city teeming with life yet in a way that seems more ominous than exuberant even in the myriad dance halls where youngsters come to look for love but soon find themselves lost amid the contradictions and confusions of a rapidly changing city.

Polan (ポラン, Kota Nakamura, 2022)

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The closure of a second-hand bookshop leaves a gaping hole at the centre of a community in Kota Nakamura’s warmhearted documentary, Polan (ポラン). Driven to close their physical shop because of the ongoing economic effects of the pandemic, an elderly couple contemplate changing times but still hope to save something of paper culture and the organic pleasures of offline browsing from unexpected discoveries to serendipitous friendship and the comfort to be found in having a familiar place you can be certain of returning to. 

As he explains, Kyosuke Ishida found himself disillusioned when most of his fellow student protestors ended up getting regular salaryman jobs. He wanted to prove he was different, so he dropped out and started working as a tutor at cram schools before eventually deciding to open a small second-hand bookshop. The shop was so successful that they later moved to larger premises, but footfall began to fall during the pandemic while online sales remained constant. With his wife Chiseko who runs the bookshop with him already feeling the physical strain of their work and the landlord upping the cost of their lease, the pair eventually decide to close up though Kyosuke has mixed feelings and would have liked to continue a little longer. 

More than the books, what the shop offers is a sense of community. Some customers tearfully remark that they’ve grown up with the store and feel themselves bereft while others share happy memories of browsing the shelves. The store itself is like a place out of time, decorated in a whimsical, antique style from the fretted front window to the antique clock on the wall and old-fashioned dolls sitting on the cases. As they’re fond of pointing out, everyone is welcome at the store and they pride themselves on providing a diverse selection of books rather than just the things they particularly like or know will sell well. Kyosuke devotes whole shelves to each genre and keeps them all well stocked rather than prioritise sure sellers ensuring that rare books are always available. 

As he says, part of what he’s trying to save is paper culture. If you know what you’re looking for, then of course you can find it online right away and have it delivered quickly and cheaply. But perhaps something’s been lost in the drive towards convenience. Kyosuke remembers taking a lengthy train journey as a child during which they had to temporarily disembark in an unfamiliar place but that doesn’t happen with the Shinkansen where you can’t even open a widow or see much of the world around you as you rocket through it. As he sees it, you might have a happier life taking a more difficult path, much as he has opening a bookshop, discovering small things along the way rather than opting for easy convenience. He wants people to experience the thrill of the inconvenience of turning a page, along with “the joy of searching and pleasure of encountering” that can only be found with a physical experience in a real world bookshop. 

Nevertheless as he admits times have changed and we’re entering a new and unknown post-pandemic world. He regrets that the bookshop can’t go too but consoles himself with the knowledge it’ll exist online. There is however continuity as their employee, Minami, decides to open a bookshop of her own taking some of the same sentiments with her in providing another community hub open to a diverse collection of book lovers in pleasant surroundings. Revisiting the location a year later, Nakamura discovers the shop space still vacant. Its bare industrial walls are somehow devoid of life. It’s difficult to believe the bookshop with its whimsical old world charm once existed there. It takes just 20 days to demolish it with the shelving and other furnishings taken by other store owners such as Minami and a distant relative in another town suggesting that the shop itself lives on, moving in a cycle much the books though some of those are unfortunately pulped as last resort. A gentle tribute to a disappeared local institution, the film ponders on what we’re losing in the post-pandemic world along with what our love of convenience may be costing us in a warmth and sensation otherwise unavailable in our rapidly digitising world.

Polan screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

The Boys (소년들, Chung Ji-young, 2022)

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A “mad dog” policeman uncovers a miscarriage of justice but finds that his faith in his institution may have been misplaced in Chung Ji-young’s pressing judicial drama, The Boys (소년들, Sonyeondeul). Like much of Chung’s previous work critiquing the power imbalances of the contemporary society, the film is one of several recent dramas taking aim at the justice system and the utter contempt of those in power for those without most notably for the titular boys exploited by a failure of the system.

In 1999, a trio of teenagers is picked up and arrested for the robbery of a convenience store in which an old woman died. Newly transferred to the district, “mad dog” policeman Joon-cheol (Sol Kyung-gu) receives a tip off that actually someone else did it. The informant says he’d previously told the investigating officer, Choi (Yoo Jun-sang), but was ignored. Joon-cheol might assume that’s because he didn’t think there was anything in it and didn’t find the informant credible, but something nags at him and he begins to look at the case only to realise too much of it doesn’t make sense. He soon discovers that Choi and his underlings beat the suspects, who were terrified and naive due to their youth, into a false confession in order to get a promotion by solving a prominent case.

Chung switches back and fore between 1999 and 2016 when the boys’ retrial finally takes place and discovers Joon-cheol a somewhat broken, defeated man who has served out the past few years on a peaceful rural island never receiving any further promotions. With his retirement looming, he’s been offered a return to the mainland, but apparently only thanks to Choi which leaves a sour taste in Joon-cheol’s mouth. Like pretty much everyone else, he is haunted by a sense of guilt that in the end despite his promises he was powerless to help these innocent young men escape their false imprisonment. 

Then again, Joon-cheol is also a product of the system. The “mad dog” beat suspects too, and there’s something chilling in his justification that he only beat the “guilty” and never the “innocent”. He got his promotion after being stabbed on the job, a strange sacrifice that seems the inversion of Choi’s greedy venality. Choi really thought nothing of these boys, one whom had learning difficulties and was illiterate so could not have written his statement on his own, because they were poor and defenceless and is unrepentant even when confronted with the truth. He himself could have caught the real culprits but simply chose not to because it was easier and more convenient to him to destroy the lives of three innocent boys instead. 

Choi’s reach seems to be eerily extensive though the police force’s reluctance to correct a miscarriage of justice because it would make them look bad is obviously an institutional flaw along with the use of violence to elicit confessions. The older version of Choi with slick backed hair and an arrogant manner behaves as if he’s untouchable, giving an answer for everything and leaving no room to be challenged while others are only too keen to support his version of events with equally smug manipulations of the law. 

The boys find themselves powerless. They cannot challenge Choi and though they’ve served their sentences and paid a debt to society that was never theirs to begin with cannot move on with their lives because they are still branded murderers meaning no one will hire them. Meanwhile, at least one of the real killers has had to opportunity to start again and is reluctant to help because they do not want their new family to find out about their past. Everyone is harbouring some kind of guilt or desire to bury the truth for a quiet life, Joon-cheol too not wanting to get involved and cautioning the boys against applying for a retrial because it will only cause them further pain. 

Though the truth is eventually revealed and the boys’ names cleared, the overwhelming implication is that you cannot really win against men like Choi. The sentiment is rammed home by a final title card explaining that nothing happened to any of the policemen involved in framing the boys while Joon-cheol only has the satisfaction of having helped to free them neither vindicated as a police officer or successful in undercutting the corruption inherent in the police force and embedded in the society itself. Nevertheless, Joon-cheol’s righteousness and the the unexpected support he receives from those around him for doing the right thing add an inspirational quality that simultaneously suggests justice is a distant dream but also that it can be achieved if enough people can be persuaded to chase it even while against their own interests.

The Boys screened as part of this year’s London East Asia Film Festival.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

White Badge (하얀 전쟁, Chung Ji-young, 1992)

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Change was in the air in the Korea of 1979. Park Chung-hee, who had seized power in 1962 by means of military coup and thereafter ruled as a repressive dictator, was assassinated by the head of the KCIA for reasons which remain unclear. A brief window of possible democratic reform presented itself but was quickly shutdown by a second military coup by general Chun Doo-hwan who doubled down on Park’s repression until finally forced out of office in the late ‘80s. It’s into brief moment that Chung Ji-young’s White Badge (하얀 전쟁, Hayan Jeonjaeng) drops us as a traumatised reporter finds he is being given permission revisit the painful past now that they are finally “free” to speak their minds, but remains personally reluctant to open old wounds. 

Han Gi-ju (Ahn Sung-ki) is a functioning alcoholic whose wife has left him and remarried though he still spends time with his small son who appears to adore his dad. In the wake of Park’s assassination, his boss wants him to write the true story of his experiences as a soldier in Vietnam, but Gi-ju is not convinced. He’s still haunted by nightmares of his time in the army and has no desire to go delving into his own painful memories even if it is perhaps the right time to let the people know how it really was. A little while later, however, he starts getting nuisance phone calls which turn out to be from an old war buddy, Byeon Jin-su (Lee Geung-young), who remains too shy to get in touch but later sends him a collection of photos and, somewhat worryingly, a pistol taken as a war trophy from the Viet Cong. 

We only come to realise the significance of the pistol’s passing at the film’s conclusion, but the fact remains that both men have been permanently changed, perhaps damaged, by their experiences in Vietnam only in different ways. Displaying obvious symptoms of PTSD, Jin-su has reverted to a childlike state, somewhat unsteady in his mind, and quickly flying into a panic on hearing loud noises such as helicopters or fireworks which return him to the battlefields and the terrible things he saw there. Gi-ju, meanwhile, is brooding and introverted. He drinks himself to sleep but is woken by nightmares. His marriage has failed and his only friendship seems to be with his editor who drags him to a karaoke box to schmooze a wealthy friend from school who, somewhat ironically, made most of his money manufacturing weapons used in Vietnam while never having to serve himself. “What’s wrong with that?” he asks, “We made money thanks to President Park. When President Park died, my dad cried.” unwittingly outlining the entire problem and in fact embodying it as he continues throwing his money about with the excuse that the only thing to do with dirty money is spend it dirtily. 

Prior to that, he’d criticised Gi-ju’s manhood by betting that he’d never actually killed a Viet Cong soldier. Gi-ju laments that all anyone ever wanted to know about Vietnam was how much money he made and whether he bedded any Viet Cong women. They never wanted to know the reality of it, that he found himself increasingly disillusioned not just with his country and the war but with “human values and history”. While in Vietnam he witnesses street children chasing soldiers for candy and flashes back to his own days as a street orphan after the Korean War tugging on the sleeves on American GIs who crudely threw him only empty packets of cigarettes. The colonised is now a coloniser and it’s an uncomfortable feeling. On a long march, Gi-ju and another soldier pass an old man along the wayside who keeps shouting “pointless” and explains to them that in his 70 years he’s seen many people walk along this road. First it was the Chinese, and then the French, the Japanese, the Americans, and now the Koreans. If you truly want to help, he says, go home and leave us in peace. “We don’t care who wins, we just want to farm and nothing else. So please leave us alone”. 

The utter senselessness of their presence is further brought home to Gi-ju when his unit panics and fires on what it thinks is a huge unit of Viet Cong soldiers, but actually turns out to be a field full of cows. The locals are obviously upset, demanding compensation, but his Staff Sergeant is unrepentant, little caring that they’ve just destroyed the local economy and the ability of these ordinary people to feed themselves in their panic and incompetence. Yet in his first few pieces for the paper, Gi-jun recounts that the first six months were ones of ambivalent tedium in which they mostly dug ditches and bonded over beer. They were torn, hoping it might stay this way but also embarrassed by the thought of going home with no combat experience. 

As time goes on, however, they find themselves on ever more dangerous missions only to discover that they have been used as decoys, their heavy casualties dismissed as “small sacrifices of war”. Betrayed by their country, these men were also forced to betray themselves. After firing on civilians in panic, the Staff Sargeant orders his men to kill the survivors to cover up his mistake, threatening them at gun point. One is never quite the same again, and the other finally kills his superior to avenge his transgression. Gi-ju is not witness to these events, only to their effects, but is obviously aware of the cruelty that his service entails. 

Dissatisfied with his first manuscript recounting a humorous episode from the early days, Gi-ju’s boss tries to curate his memories, asking him for a cliched anti-war tract about how combat turns intellectuals into cowards while the ignorant are reborn as heroes. Something much the same happens with a documentary crew on the ground who actively ask the soldiers to re-stage the action for the camera. Everyone has their Vietnam narrative, and no one is quite interested in the full horror or the present pain of these wounded men. Reuniting with Jin-su whose mental state is rapidly declining, the pair are caught up in a democracy protest by students who actively resist the draft and the militarisation of education, ironically on the other side, targeted by men like they once were. Abandoned by a country which essentially sold them as mercenaries to curry favour with the Americans, Jin-su and Gi-ju struggle to gain a foothold in this strange moment of hope in which martial law, the force which dictated the course of their lives, may be about to fall. That was not to be, but for the two men at least, something has perhaps been put to rest if only with the terrible inevitability of a bullet finally hitting its target.

White Badge screens 22nd October as part of this year’s London East Asia Film Festival

If Only I Could Hibernate (Баавгай болохсон, Zoljargal Purevdash, 2023)

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A teenage boy finds himself torn between his dreams for the future and the responsibility he bears towards his family in Zoljargal Purevdash’s gentle coming of age drama, If Only I could Hibernate (Баавгай болохсон). Spoken by the hero’s younger brother, the title lays bare the children’s sense of despair as they gaze up at the giant hole around the chimney in their yurt longing for an escape from the cold while Ulzii (Battsooj Uurtsaikh) longs for an escape from this life by winning himself a place to study overseas. 

After his father’s death two year’s previously, Ulzii and his family moved to the city but still live in a yurt on its outskirts. Ulzii’s mother is recovering from a period of alcohol abuse and struggles to hold down a job while Ulzii has become responsible for his younger siblings. A new teacher (Batzorig Sukhbaatar) at his school notices that he is bright and has an aptitude for science, advising him to take special classes and enter local competitions with the aim of winning the national one which comes with a scholarship to an elite private school.

The sense of possibility begins to bring new light and focus into Ulzii’s life, but his hopes are quickly shot down by his mother who has decided to move back to the country. He wins the right to stay behind with two of his siblings but soon finds himself alone and desperate, unable to buy coal or food while his mother fails to send money. Earlier his mother had berated him for buying an expensive pair of trainers only for him to counter that he saved up for ages and bought them with his money from a part time job the rest of which he’d given to her. Ulzii spends anything he gets on coal for the family, taking very little for himself while trying to protect his siblings.

Some might find his dream naive, that his conviction that he can study his way out of poverty is unrealistic while his resentment also has a degree of of pettiness in his refusal to become what he describes as a “weak beggar”. In the yurt district people are always keen to help each other, but Ulzii is proud and finds help difficult to accept while he also feels belittled by his wealthy, apartment-dwelling aunt who soon turns nasty when he refuses to surrender a keepsake from his father. He is also at times cruel to his mother, insensitively revealing her illiteracy to his younger brother in an attempt to get him to stay in the city and go to school so he doesn’t end up like her. 

Ulzii’s mother is not someone suited to city life, though as it turns out the country doesn’t suit her so well either. Ulzii finds himself having to skip classes and take part in illegal logging to help support the family while his friends ask him to join them in committing a burglary on the home of rich friend of their father’s. Driving into the city to help an old man sell the last of his lamb, Ulzii is surrounded by protestors complaining about the air quality and suggesting perhaps that this kind of urbanity is literally wounding the land in contrast with the symbiotic lifestyles of the nomads like Ulzii and his family. Ulzii’s younger brother eventually becomes ill because of their inability to heat the yurt along with the poor air quality in the village while Ulzii cannot afford the money for his medicine. 

The kids just want an end to the winter and for their mother to come back so everything can go back to normal, but instead find themselves embracing a new family while trying to find signs of positivity for the future. Ulzii ends up rediscovering aspects of his culture in opening himself to the community and learning that it isn’t “weak” to accept help when you need it or to give it in return. There are no easy answers, and learning to forgive his mother for what he sees as her fecklessness may take a little longer but the siblings have at least begun to discover new ways to survive the winter that are filled with laugher and warmth rather than the coldness of resentment and futility.

If Only I Could Hibernate screened as part of this year’s BFI London Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Cinema at Sea Announces Lineup for Inaugural Edition

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Cinema at Sea – Okinawa Pan-Pacific International Film Festival has announced the programme for its very first edition which takes place at cinemas across the islands 23rd to 29th November. With nearly 40 films from all over the world, the festival will open with documentary From Okinawa with Love and close with We Are Still Here which features eight stories of indigenous communities in Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific. The festival will also host a retrospective dedicated to Hawaiian filmmaker Christopher Makoto Yogi as well as screening three classic films from Go Takamine who will receive the Mabui Special Award.

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

Hong Kong

  • Lonely Eighteen – cinematic meta drama following two young women who enter the entertainment industry to try and escape their poverty in ’80s Hong Kong.

Indonesia

  • ORPA – drama in which a young woman has to battle her way through the jungle to escape her home village and pursue her dream of education.

Japan

  • From Okinawa with Love – documentary following photographer Mao Ishikawa who spent her youth working in bars catering to American GIs in Okinawa.
  • Intimate Space – indie drama in which a man is drawn to the seashore beneath the bridge between Shikoku and the mainland where he discovers a moribund hostess bar.
  • Okinawa Philadelphia – companion piece to From Okinawa with Love in which Mao Ishikawa travels to Philadelphia to document the life of a former Marine she met during his time in Okinawa.
  • One Second Ahead, One Second Behind – Japanese remake of My Missing Valentine directed by Nobuhiro Yamashita and scripted by Kankuro Kudo following a boy who is always too early for everything and a girl who is always late.
  • Your Lovely Smile – Hirobumi Watanabe stars as a version of himself but this time for Lim Kah-Wai as the pair come together in shared sensibly and frustration with the indie way of life. Review.

Malaysia

  • Abang Adik – displaced brothers find themselves trapped on the margins of a prosperous city in Jin Ong’s gritty drama. Review.

Taiwan

  • The Mimicry – adaptation of the short story by Kao Yi-feng directed by Chung Yu-Lin in which a green sea turtle is transformed into a human.

MABUI Special Award

  • Tsuru-Henry – surreal drama from Go Takamine in which an old woman collects singing and dancing DNA samples and embarks on staging a script abandoned by a writer who fled to Taiwan in search of a woman.
  • Paradise View – a listless young man finds himself spirited away in the liminal space of Okinawa on the brink of transition in Go Takamine’s lyrical drama. Review.
  • Dear Photograph – experimental short.

Cinema at Sea – Okinawa Pan-Pacific International Film Festival takes place at cinemas across the islands 23rd to 29th November, 2023. The full programme can be on the official website while you can also follow Cinema at Sea on Facebook, Instagram, and X (fomerly known as Twitter).

Baian the Assassin, M.D. (Part 1) (仕掛人・藤枝梅安, Shunsaku Kawake, 2023)

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A traumatised assassin takes it upon himself to get rid of a few villains on realising there’s something not quite right with his latest contract in Shunsaku Kawake’s classic jidaigeki homage, Baian the Assassin, MD: (Part 1) (仕掛人・藤枝梅安, Shikakenin Fujieda Baian). The titular hero is the protagonist of a series of novels by Shotaro Ikenami which have spawned several previous adaptations on the big and small screens. Produced in celebration of Ikenami’s centenary the film, one of two, harks back to the golden age of period drama if with a more contemporary sensibility. 

Baian (Etsushi Toyokawa) is ostensibly an acupuncturist though by night he uses his needles to kill rather than to heal. Hired to take out the second wife an inn owner, Omino (Yuki Amami), his suspicions are raised on realising that he had also been the assassin who killed the man’s first wife two years earlier. He blames himself in part for having agreed to assassinate a woman in the first place, and remains conflicted even after accepting the job wondering if Omino is next in the firing line or if she was actually the one who had the other woman killed in order to usurp her place. 

The film makes clear from the outset what a difficult place Edo could be for a woman as Baian carries out an assassination on a boatman who had raped a samurai’s wife and then blackmailed her into further sexual favours only for her to hire an assassin and then kill herself confessing all. Omino had apparently been the stepdaughter of a gang leader who sexually abused her and then died leaving her with no support and nowhere to turn except to sex work. Maybe no one could blame her for taking advantage of a besotted client to escape her terrible circumstances though getting rid of his wife would obviously be a different matter. Omon (Miho Kanno), a maid Baian takes a liking to while investigating, admits something similar that as a widow with a young son realistically speaking there is nowhere else that could she work to support him except on the fringes of the sex trade. Then again, as she says the previous mistress was strict but it was because she cared, whereas Omino is just mean and self-interested. She’s fired all the old staff and brought in pretty young women who are quite obviously being expected to entertain their male customers in more direct ways. 

In any case, Baian soon finds himself drawn into a wider series of plots when his friend Hiko (Ainosuke Kataoka), a skewer maker who assassinates people with poison darts, is tasked with taking out first a lascivious carpenter and then a rogue samurai who has supposedly raped and kidnapped the daughter of his lord which obviously turns out not quite to be the case. Rape and kidnap are depressingly common in Edo-era society where it is largely women who suffer under a patriarchal society with intensely oppressive social codes that demand female purity. In a post-credits sequence, we come to understand that Hiko too is seeking vengeance for the death of a woman who killed herself and her child after being raped by bandits. Meanwhile, Baian reveals that he had a mild hatred of women himself born of pain in having been abandoned by his mother who left with another man and took only his sister with her after his father’s death. He had to overcome that resentment in order to fulfil himself as a doctor treating women’s bodies but struggles when he realises that someone involved in the case is closely linked with his own traumatic past and death may be the only way to save them. 

Both he and Hiko end up breaking the assassin’s code but only in defence of justice, which might sound odd considering the nature of their work. Nevertheless, they each have their scruples and don’t like to think of themselves as having been used or inadvertently killed someone who didn’t really deserve it. As Baian puts it, the greatest villains may really be “well-meaning weak cowards” though perhaps corrupt lords can’t really complain about falling victim to their own tactics. With noticeably polished production values and atmospheric cinematography, Kawake pays tribute to classic jidaigeki and eventually sets his heroes back on the road awaiting the next battle for justice in the distinctly unjust feudal era. 

Baian the Assassin, M.D. (Part 1) screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Three Days of a Blind Girl (盲女72小時, Chan Wing-Chiu, 1993)

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An oblivious housewife undergoes a kind of awakening while confronted with her husband’s transgressions by a vengeful intruder in Chan Wing-Chiu’s home invasion horror, Three Days of a Blind Girl (盲女72小時). Rendered temporarily sightless after an operation designed to save her sight, the implication is that the heroine, referred to only as Mrs Ng (Veronica Yip Yuk Hing), has been living in a fantasy of aspirational domestic success largely dependent on her heart surgeon husband Jack (Anthony Chan Yau) and devoid of her own identity while blind to the patriarchal forces which oppress her. 

Having returned from surgery in the US, Mrs Ng is assured her sight will gradually return in around 72 hours though until then she will be entirely blind. The doctors give her no special instructions, and she and her husband return to their country home where they are cared for by a maid, May (Chan Yuet-Yue). Somewhat insensitively, Jack has to leave for an important heart attack conference in Macao leaving Mrs Ng solely in the custody of May only May has other plans. Her policeman boyfriend has got them concert tickets while she also needs to go out to refill her asthma medication meaning that Ms Ng will be entirely alone at home while attempting to adjust to her sightless existence. 

Mrs Ng is rendered vulnerable in what should be a safe space. The sanctity of the domestic is disrupted firstly by Jack’s absence and then by an uncanny lack of familiarity introduced by her blindness. Though she has a stick, she soon finds herself bumping into things or encountering unexpected obstacles while the design of the home’s staircase appears dangerous even to the sighted and a definite health hazard to anyone else. In a moment of foreshadowing, Jack warns the maid that there’s a problem with the phone while the mobile he left is also low on battery meaning that Mrs Ng could not even call for help if she needed it. 

Unsolicited help is however something she’s offered by an unexpected visitor, Sam (Anthony Wong Chau-sang), who claims to be an old school friend of Jack’s who also treated his wife for her heart condition. Mrs Ng can’t see it, but Sam is dressed in a rather unique outfit of lederhosen and a check shirt appearing something like malicious garden gnome. In an odd moment of comedy, Sam, who soon begins stalking Mrs Ng around the house, pretends to chase off an intruder by running up and down the stairs swapping characters as he goes but otherwise skews increasingly sinister while discussing his relationship with his wife who he claims has rejected him on the grounds of the printer’s ink that stains his hands. 

Sam is Jack’s inversion, an overly solicitous husband now hellbent on avenging his masculinity by raping Mrs Ng to get back at Jack whom he blames for his wife’s death claiming he treated her heart condition with vitamins while abusing his position to take advantage of her sexually. At first, Mrs Ng doesn’t believe him and trusts her husband but her literal awakening occurs in line with the return of her sight. She begins to see the light and the reality of her life with Jack, ironically thanking him for this experience because it’s taught her how to fight back and protect herself in the face of his male failure. “Don’t think women are easily bullied” she claps back after finally taking charge of her life and knocking the forces of patriarchy firmly on the head.

Nevertheless, she begins to resist with regular household items such as using the serrated edge on a box of clingfilm to try and saw through the ropes binding her hands. Despite her blindness, she uses her knowledge of the domestic space against the intruder Sam and tries to frustrate his plans for her through strategy and forward thinking even while beginning to discern the danger which has always surrounded her as evidenced by the unexpected appearance of an entirely different assailant wandering in by chance in the temporary absence of Sam. “Never fight with women,” a much more confident, fully sighted, Mrs Ng later exclaims finally awakened to the realities of the world around her and unafraid to confront its ever present dangers now armed with the stylish briefcase of an independent woman. Surprisingly feminist in its overtones, Chan turns the home invasion thriller inside out as Mrs Ng mounts a successful jailbreak from the confines of a stereotypical housewife life.

Three Days of a Blind Girl screens at the Prince Charles Cinema, London on 19th October as part of Silk and Bullets: The Sisterhoods of Revenge where it will feature a video introduction by producer Alfred Cheung and pre-recorded Q&A with Director Chan Wing-Chiu.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

All Under the Moon (月はどっちに出ている, Yoichi Sai, 1993)

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Throughout Yoichi Sai’s All Under the Moon (月はどっちに出ている, Tsuki wa Dotchi ni Dete iru), an earnest taxi driver, Anbo (Akio Kaneda), repeatedly calls in to despatch to inform them that he’s become lost and has no idea where he is despite rocking up next to such prominent landmarks as Tokyo Tower and Mount Fuji. His confusion reflects that of the changing post-Bubble society in which those like him struggle to reorient themselves and find new direction just as the nation appears slow to recognise itself and adjust to a new reality. 

It does seem that many of the drivers at Kaneda Taxi have themselves lost direction in their lives and are living very much on their margins while their rather deluded boss Sell is behaving like it’s still the Bubble dreaming of building a golf course and then a hotel to accommodate 2000 people. The Korean loan shark working with him alternately tells fellow Zainichi taxi driver Chun (Goro Kishitani) that he’s acquiring wealth to use for the reunification of Korea, and Sell that they are all children of capitalism, “Damn Reunification!”. At the wedding Chun attends, the guests take phone calls to deal with business and each remark on the precarious economic situation while one suggests that the North Korean association he represents is probably on the brink of failure joking that he fears they may sell their school and pocket the money. 

Yet despite the economic turbulence, the country has been slow to accept the presence of workers from outside Japan and many, including those at the taxi firm, still face discrimination as does Chun himself by virtue of his Korean heritage. One Japanese employee also seems to face a good deal of stigmatisation simply because he has a speech impediment, while an older mechanic with a limp insists on calling an Iranian colleague by a similar sounding Japanese name while baselessly accusing him of theft. Hoso (Yoshiki Arizono), a man with mental health issues provoked by his previous career as a professional boxer in which he accidentally killed an opponent during a bout, is fond of saying “I hate Koreans, but I like you” while otherwise fixating on Chun as a dependable big brother figure and resentful enough when he starts dating a Filipina hostess, Connie (Ruby Moreno), who works at his mother’s bar to pound down the door of her flat and demand to be let in. 

Chun himself is at least problematic and especially by the standards of today as he tries a series of crass pickup lines on Korean women at the wedding and then eventually forces a kiss on Connie not to mention physically striking her during a heated argument. He also insensitively tells her about his family’s tragic history in the war emphasising that citizens of Korea were abused for slave labour while seemingly unaware of the history of the Japanese occupation of the Philippines. Meanwhile, he also lies that his father was killed by the Japanese and that all his brothers died of malnutrition whereas they are (presumably) alive if possibly not so well in North Korea. His hard as nails mother (Moeko Ezawa) points out that she came to Japan at 10, while Connie counters that she came at 15, though their experiences have perhaps been very different leaving them somewhat at odds rather than sharing a kind of solidarity as otherwise echoed in the marginal status of each of the migrants who are similarly othered as merely not Japanese yet largely left to fend for themselves while facing possible exploitation and deportation. 

Divisions exist even within the Korean population with guests at the wedding complaining that there have been too many long and boring speeches along with North Korean propaganda songs, claiming that it is discriminatory against South Koreans and finally being allowed to sing a South Korean folksong instead which is at least a good deal more lively. The gangsters leverage the idea of reuinifaction to carry out their scams while later claiming that they have been scammed by their Japanese backer who turned out to be more racist than they had first assumed. Yet as Chun says during one of his cheesy pickup attempts, what really has reunification got to do with them, the younger post-war generation who know no other homeland than Japan? He too flounders, caught between a series of names from “Tadao Kanda” to “Chun”, to the name which appears on his taxi license “Kang” the Korean pronunciation of character read “ga” Japanese which is only otherwise used in the word for ginger as pointed out by a slightly racist fare who goes on to remark that he doesn’t see the point of the “comfort women issue”. Chun has to grin and bear it while technically powerless despite being in the driver’s seat. Predictably, the prejudiced passenger also attempted to make a run for it rather than actually pay Chun his money. “I was born after the war too” Chun reminds him, “but we say after the liberation.”

Sai introduces us to the world of Kanda Taxis through a roving long shot around the carpark travelling from one employee to another before drifting up to management on the second floor. He returns to a similar scene near the film’s conclusion as the remaining workers playfully hose each other with water while literally watching their world burn. Yet for some at least it may be liberating experience, Chun finally gaining the courage to choose his own destination and go after something that he wants, even if it he does it in a characteristically problematic way, seemingly no longer worrying about where it might be taking him but content to simply drive in the direction of the moon. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Hidden Blade (无名, Cheng Er, 2023)

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In a moment of calm in Chang Er’s Hidden Blade (无名, Wúmíng), a man is served drunken shrimp and watches the poor creatures flail as they’re cooked alive in a bloody soup before placing them in his mouth still kicking, the red liquid dripping from his lips. The heroes are to some extent much the same, plunged into the dangerous waters of the Sino-Japanese war and drowning among its myriad confusions no longer even certain of their own identity let alone that of others. 

It’s at this that the Chinese title, Anonymous, hints for in this world of constant duplicity names are rarely exchanged or on occasion given only posthumously. That is aside from Mr. He (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) who introduces himself promptly after giving a secret knock to enter a hotel room marked with a Japanese character to meet a Mr. Liang who, it seems, intends to betray the Communist cause and instead serve the Wang Jingwei Regime which has sided with Japan in the puppet state of Manchuria, though we can in no way be sure if either of these men are telling the full truth or are who they claim to be. 

Chang replays this scene later with additional content as he will with several scenes throughout the film adding new context as he goes. Like Lou Ye’s Purple Buttlerfly, the fractured narrative hints at the chaos of an age in which nothing is quite as it seems and the truth is always obscured if at times irrelevant. Spanning the second Sino-Japanese war and its immediate aftermath, the film suggests that the motivations underpinning Japanese imperialism are anti-Communist and that Manchuria is a key asset for them as a bulwark against Soviet incursion. Collaborating with the Japanese, the Wang Jingwei Regime is the third point in a triangle lodged between Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists and the Communist Party with the implication that it essentially needs to drop out lowering the barriers for a confrontation between the two and the eventual victory of the Communists which occurs three years after the end of the film in 1949.

Technically the third part in the “China Victory Trilogy” which was conceived as “a gift to the Communist Party for its centenary” the film may make some bold claims as to the role of Communist spies in the 1930s but nevertheless neatly aligns the covert resistance movement with the Party’s eventual triumph if subversively ending on a note of loss and melancholy which leaves the survivors in lonely exile, ideologically victorious but emotionally ruined. Both Liang and the ambivalent Japanese soldier Watanabe (Hiroyuki Mori) talk of wanting a quiet life retiring to ancestral land as ordinary farmers freed from the murky world of politics but are each frustrated while He and Watanabe’s young goon Ye (Wang Yibo) wrestle with the romantic costs of their political choices. Yet the most dignified performance is reserved for an impossibly beautiful KMT assassin caught before she was able to take out a government minister while posing as his mistress “He used to write poems, now he writes execution orders,” Watanabe laments of the Minister (Da Peng) who later it seems pays a heavy price for his ruthless opportunism. At least his would-be-assassin remained true to her ideals and accepted her fate with dignity. Indeed, she may be the only one who is certain of herself and her identity even in her impeccable elegance which is a something of a mixed message given her political affiliation. 

In the end, it may be the self-denial that slowly erodes their souls while forced to conceal their true intentions even to those close to them. Then again, it’s impossible to know what’s for real and what’s for show. An intensely emotional exchange could in fact be intended for someone else’s ears or merely a cruel tragedy of misrepresentation. The real hidden blade is the self-repression living in an atmosphere of oppressive suspicion requires rather than the communist sleeper agents who in this version of the tale beat the Japanese into retreat. Featuring top notch production design and costuming, Chang’s oscillating venture through an abyss of cruelty and betrayal finds its heroes victorious but no so much anonymous as robbed of both name and country, lonely exiles of a war not quite won. 

Hidden Blade is available digitally in the US courtesy of Well Go USA.

US trailer (dialogue free)