Tag: 1980s

Peking Opera Blues (刀馬旦, Tsui Hark, 1986)

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“There aren’t enough heroes,” the leader of an opera troupe shouts, “quick, those of you who were villains change your clothes.” Only the names change in Tsui Hark’s Peking Opera Blues (刀馬旦). Politics and history are mere performance in the revolving doors of power. Set in 1913 at the beginning of the warlord era that followed the end of the Qing dynasty, the film is also speaking to a nascent sense of Handover anxiety. As one warlord falls, another rises to take his place. When he too is defeated, the first warlord returns. Meanwhile, our heroes stand still as history happens around them without their consent, longing for an age of democracy which even now has not yet arrived.

As the film opens, warlord Tun (Huang Ha) is carousing with courtesans and boasting about his 28 wives when his soldiers begin to revolt because they’ve not been paid. Tun has lost all his money gambling and decides to flee while the soldiers loot the palace. His downfall both satirises the innate corruption of power and its anonymous nature as he is soon replaced by the governor who can’t believe his luck. The governor is accompanied by his androgynous daughter, Tsao (Brigitte Lin), who has short hair and dresses in military uniforms, and has recently returned after studying abroad. 

Unbeknownst to her father, Tsao is secretly working for the democratic resistance. President Yuan Shi Kai has been borrowing money from foreign banks to finance a bid to restore the monarchy. Tsao knows her father is the broker and plans to steal secret documents to expose Yuan’s corruption and thereby usher in a democratic revolution. Yet she also finds herself conflicted in the necessity of betraying her father knowing that she is the only person in whom she has absolute trust. In the absence of a son, he plans to hand his empire to her, only she doesn’t really want it. To find her new democratic future, she will have to let the old world die and that means letting men like Tun and her father go with it.

Her mission is contrasted with that of Bai Niu (Sally Yeh), the daughter of a Peking Opera troupe manager. Bai Niu’s greatest desire is to be on stage, but women are barred from performing. All female roles are played by men who are also sexuality exploited, essentially pimped out to important people and supporters to ensure the troupe’s survival. Though Tun and Tsao may openly vie for power, the real source of power lies with corrupt police chief, Liu (Ku Feng), who insists on sleeping with the troupe’s biggest star. When he flees, he gives Bai Niu his spot and permission to perform despite her father’s objections, but what she perhaps doesn’t realise is that this “freedom” also traps her with the threat of sexual exploitation, something she is later subject to while assisting with Tsao’s plan to knock her father out so she can steal the key to his safe.

Wandering musician Sheung Hung (Cherie Chung), meanwhile, is much more accustomed to using her sexuality to get by and seeks freedom through riches. She wants the money so that she can flee abroad, which is both an expression of a desire for broader horizons and that to escape the chaos of the warlord era. It also, of course, speaks to the present day and those planning to get rich quick and leave Hong Kong before the Mainland takes over. The three women in ways reflect different reactions to the looming anxieties of the Handover, Tsao the revolutionary staying to fight for democracy, Bai-niu holding fast to her family and culture and trying to live through it as best she can, and Sheung Hung who is planning to leave.

They are all, however, at the mercy of circumstance and there’s an essential irony in the film’s conclusion which leaves them all scattered, vowing to reunite when the chaos is over and democracy has been restored, given that this likely means they will never meet again as the promised age of democratic freedom has not yet come to pass. Yuan is exposed, but it makes no difference. As if signalling the absurdity, Tsui flashes back to the laughing face of the Peking Opera performer with which the film opened. Rocketing between farcical humour, the subversive homoeroticism between the women, the grim reality of authoritarianism as Tsao finds herself tortured by the resurgent Tun, and the kinetic energy of the finely crafted action scenes, Tsui finds a genuine sense of poignancy in the futility of of the heroes’ quest. Finally, the best weapon they have is friendship and solidarity in which they protect and save each other while otherwise at the mercy of history being made all around them that they are otherwise powerless to influence.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Star Virgin (スターヴァージン, Ichiro Omomo, 1988)

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A young woman sets off to travel the universe and discovers that a lot of it’s full of inappropriate men, which is why is her father thoughtfully gave her a chastity bracelet that can detect “evil intent” and allow her to transform into the superhero Star Virgin to protect her virginity. We first see her do this in a weird reptile planet where, for some reason she’s being crucified as a giant Jabba the Hut-like frog extends his gruesome tongue towards her. 

Produced with the involvement of props team Ogawa Modelling who wad worked on Bye-Bye Jupiter, director Ichiro Omomo intended Star Virgin (スターヴァージン) to be a tokusatsu take on the Supergirl movie from 1984. A pilot version made in 1986 was apparently more serious in tone, though the completed film released two years later is deliberately silly and includes a series of references to contemporary Hollywood cinema such as Eiko and her Earth friend Ko running away from a ball of dung spun by a giant dung beetle like in Indiana Jones, while the robots have a heads up interface that’s clearly inspired by The Terminator, and the inside of the villain’s lair resembles the inside of the ships in Star Wars.

But while Eiko seems to be an intergalactic princess, she only speaks Japanese and the design of her fish-like spacecraft, which doesn’t look that big but has room for a giant bubble bath, is inspired more by Japanese sci-fi manga. She’s apparently come to Earth after the bad experience on the reptile planet because she thought there was a chance of it becoming civilised in the future, but is immediately drawn into a bizarre conspiracy run by a man who’s been perfecting various gadgets for the last 84 years in order to reverse Japan’s defeat in the Second World War. Eiko’s new bug-obsessive friend Ko (Fujio Takumi) annoys him by first guessing the First World War and then suggesting perhaps his siphoning off of the imperial navy’s resources is one reason they lost.

Nevertheless, Ko’s indifference lays bare a generational divide in which wartime defeat has become a kind of joke and something that only old people go on about rather than a serious wound on the national psyche. Colonel Arashiyama (Isao Sasaki), however, is intent on turning the cold war hot so Russia will nuke America, while Japan will be safe because of the protective barrier he’s placed around it. He’s also enabled his secret island to float in the sky for protection and has kidnapped Ko because he thinks he’s stolen a precious gem that stems back to the gods of Japan’s creation myth which he needs to win the war as if he’s essentially weaponising Japaneseness. Predictably, he wants Eiko to be his new princess and dresses her in white gown while taking some kind of elixir to make himself young and virile. Of course, she only needs to string him along until he finally goes too far and activates the chastity belt.

Not being able to activate it at will seems like a serious design fault, while it’s not altogether clear if it would still activate if Eiko herself were to pursue a romance. Not that that’s all that likely given the frankly inappropriate treatment she receives from men other than Ko. In fact, she’s a bit confused why he doesn’t try anything, but it’s mainly because he’s too busy thinking about bugs. In any case, they have to team up together to escape Colonel Arashiyama’s lair and stop all of his dastardly plans. Though it was clearly made on a shoestring, the special effects and production design are incredibly impressive and have a real sense of charm and invention. Never taking itself too seriously, the film nevertheless completely commits itself to its bizarre world of alien princesses and conspiracy, before finally returning to what it presented itself as in the beginning, a teenage girl’s travel diary. Even the evil robot’s programming is broken as he’s taken in by some local children and becomes their friend, just as Eiko and Ko enjoy a fun time at beach in a classic idol movie-style ending.

The Outsiders (孽子, Yu Kan-Ping, 1986)

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Released at the tail end of martial law, Yu Kan-Ping’s adaptation of Pai Hsien-Yung’s seminal novel Crystal Boys seems to anticipate a coming liberation, but also perhaps that even then not all will be free. The film’s Chinese title, Unfilial Sons (孽子, nièzǐ), hints at the way it, in a certain sense, circles back to a kind of conservatism in which the hero must reconcile with his abusive father for cultural rather than personal or psychological reasons. But at the same time, perhaps this reconciliation will be necessary at the time the present regime falls and speaks more of a need for peace as the authoritarian father must learn to accept that he has a gay son and will end his life alone if hex chooses not to do so.

Li Qing’s (Shao Hsin) father is, in many ways, a symbol of the authoritarian regime in that he is a former KMT soldier who came to Taiwan with Chang Kai-Shek after the Chinese civil war. Filled with notions of toxic masculinity, he kicks Qing out when he is expelled from high school after being caught having sex with a male lab assistant. Screaming at him in the street, he calls him a “degenerate” and tells him never to come home. Yet it seems obvious that Qing’s father has no real power and all his abuses stem from just this fact. His son’s homosexuality calls his own manhood into question, while his violence towards his wife also stems from his insecurity that she will leave him for a better man. She eventually does leave him for a trumpet player, abandoning her two sons the youngest of which dies as a direct result of his father’s neglect. 

Though Qing was a wounded, lonely little boy who felt himself rejected by both parents due to his mother’s obvious preference for his brother, he adopts a maternal position that comparable to that shown to him by “Mama Yang” who takes in “homeless birds” or young gay men who’ve been rejected by their birth families and have nowhere else to go. Qing was kicked out not only of his home but the school too, leaving him educationally disadvantaged. He can only earning a living as a sex worker in the Peace Memorial Park which has become a cruising spot for gay men. Pushed out of the mainstream society and left with nowhere to go, they have repurposed this public space as their own but are not safe even in here given the frequency of police raids. Auntie Mann, the former actress who lives with Yang, asks him where these young men are supposed to go if they can no longer go to the park with the consequence that they decide to formalise their situation by selling Yang’s photo studio and the building Mann owns to open a gay nightclub called The Blue Angel.

The club speaks of a need to carve out one’s own space in a hostile society, but also the commodification of gay life that accompanies greater acceptance. The park was free and money could also be earned there, but here the guests will need to pay because this is, after all, a business in addition to being a community hub. It also seems that for whatever reason, policemen are also drinking here, so it is not completely liberated and its existence depends on not offending the authorities. Nevertheless, it otherwise extends the family forged by Yang and Mann to a wider community of queer people by offering them a safer space in which they can be their authentic selves if only for a short time.

This seems to be true for Mann’s former director who seems to make a point of going everywhere with two very young and attractive women hanging on his arms, but abandons them to flirt with men at the club. Closted movie Hua Kuo-Pao similarly seems to have taken a liking to Qing, but must presumably keep his sexuality secret in order to go on working. Dangers are spoken of regarding the potential violence of obsessive love in a repressed community as Yang cautions Qing about entering an affair with Dragon, a man he meets in the park, who killed his lover Phoenix in a crime of passion and has been a wandering soul ever since having convinced himself never to love again because it would only end in death.

Yu frames murder as a moment of gothic madness as fog rises behind the bridge in the park, which was already a space of darkness and depression symbolising the degree to which these men are already isolated within their society. Another of the young men Yang takes in ties to take his own life after his lover kicks him out. Though the others tell him his boyfriend was not worth dying for, the problem seems to be more that being thrown out again convinced him he had nowhere else to go. If it were not for Yang and Auntie Mann, he would be totally alone. There does seem to be, however, a degree of tension in the relationship between Yang and Auntie Mann in which there exists a deep platonic love that cannot be resolved sexually. Just as he saves the boys, Yang also once saved Mann from an addiction to drugs, though he could not save her film career or hope for feminine fulfilment through marriage. The Blue Angel club finally only possible because of Mann’s acceptance that she will never be an actress again nor marry for love. Yang has been a kind of beard for her, helping her save face and avoid the stigma of being an unattached woman by making it look like there was a man in her life, just as she perhaps provided security for him in ways other than allowing him to rent his shop from her cheaply and have a place to live.

So tying into the film’s title, these new support networks play into a heteronormative vision of the family in which Yang becomes a father figure to Qing and teaches him how to live a more fulfilling, safer life as a gay man in contrast to his birth father’s authoritarian attempts at dominance. Another of the boys eventually leaves with a lover to look for their father in Japan, but seemingly struggles to find him reflecting the way in which each of them search for a more positive parental input having been failed or abandoned by their birth families. What they discover is a sense of brotherhood and solidarity that gives them a place to call home within the community. Nevertheless, the film ends with the symbolic gesture of Qing following Yang’s advice and attempting to reconcile with his father though an “unfilial son”, while his father too seems to have pulled himself together and is readier to accept Qing for who he is. This sense of homecoming for the homeless bird may then play into a code of familial obligation which could itself by oppressive, but also signals a new beginning and the opening up of a more liberated era.

The Outsiders screened as part of this year’s Queer East.

Angel Guts: Red Vertigo (天使のはらわた 赤い眩暈, Takashi Ishii, 1988)

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Throughout the Angel Guts series, a woman named Nami and a man called Muraki somehow come together and explore the complex interplay between men and women. In his first directorial effort adapting his own source material Takashi Ishii takes the series in a dreamlike and melancholic direction, shaving off some of its harsh edges but also fully indulging in a nourish sense of fatalistic nihilism. They may not know it, but these are of course two people dancing on the edge of an abyss with no place to go back to.

In fact, the very nature of sleeping and waking has become blurred for exhausted nurse Nami (Mayako Katsuragi) despite the heart monitors bleeping all around her. She thinks of her boyfriend, Kenji (Hirofumi Kobayashi), who takes erotic photographs he claims are all of her, but doesn’t seem altogether sincere under the red lights of his darkroom as he repeatedly asks Nami to pose for him. Her patients, meanwhile, often call her for reasons that aren’t strictly medical. Trying to stay awake on her rounds, she’s violently accosted by two men only for her supervisor to insist that the room is currently vacant. Perhaps Nami dreamed it, though the experience is traumatic enough for her to go home early and inadvertently catch Kenji with one of his models in their apartment. He tells the model that he’s not interested in marriage, though she asks about his “wife”, adding to Nami’s pain and confusion on hearing him describe their relationship so casually.

Meanwhile, Muraki is dreaming more literally. He imagines himself fondling a woman who runs a bar before being coaxed towards an ominous-looking bath that presages his visit to the love hotel with Nami. We hear that his wife has left him, and that he’s being hounded by debt collectors while on the run after embezzling a large amount of money from his company believing it was “easy” and that no one would really notice or care. This is, after all, an age of excess that would only later become known as the Bubble era, though the bubble has certainly burst for Muraki. Ironically enough, he’ll meet a sticky end after getting on the wrong side of a man driving a Mercedes (Akira Emoto) as if he were literally gunned down by a rampant status-driven consumerism. The man looks and behaves like a yakuza, but is unusually reckless even if hotheaded in believing he’s been treated with an insufficient amount of respect for a man with a fancy ride.

Nami too is hit by a car, literally colliding with Muraki who first thinks he’s killed her and somehow made his situation even worse. On realising she’s still alive, though having measured her pulse with his thumb which proves nothing other than his own heart is still beating, he decides to assault her instead later explaining that he just wanted warmth which only makes him seem even more pathetic. Nami, however, fights back wielding a plank like a phallic object and taking back control only for Muraki to keep her prisoner in an abandoned building. There is, however, something that develops between the pair with the rain beating down and isolating them from the outside world. Stuck in this liminal place, they each accept that they have no place to go back to and therefore have only each other. 

But there is really no salvation in this harsh world and nowhere to go which is why Muraki is stopped in his tracks and Nami condemned to a perpetual waiting even if she’s found a kind of freedom dancing alone in her limbo state and under the colourful neon lights of the abandoned warehouse. Asked what he most feared in this world, a character in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks replied “the possibility that love is not enough,” an idea which seems to echo through Ishii’s melancholy urban landscapes, all garish neon offering the semblance of warmth but always drenched in rain. Even interior spaces seem misty and uncertain, leading us into a kind of dream space otherwise indistinguishable from waking life. Muraki and Nami are, however, evidently on different paths and unlikely to find their way back to each other even if either of them manage to break free of their respective dead ends.

Angel Guts: Red Vertigo is available as part of The Angel Guts Collection released on blu-ray 23rd February courtesy of Third Window Films.

Angel Guts: Red Porno (天使のはらわた 赤い淫画, Toshiharu Ikeda, 1981)

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“Lots of perverts around these days”, Nami (Jun Izumi) sighs to herself on becoming convinced that someone’s stalking her. She isn’t wrong, but her increasing paranoia bears out the sense of threat in the contemporary city. Perhaps something has happened to her before, or maybe it’s because she’s a young woman living alone who has been receiving dirty calls from anonymous heavy breather, but she can’t escape the sense of being watched even when she’s at home on her own.

Nami isn’t a well-known person, but it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that some strange man has followed her home from the department store where she works after taking a liking to her. She sees herself clearly as not that kind of woman, and ostensibly leads a very proper life with a decent job and her own apartment. The fact that she masturbates under her kotatsu might be both an expression of her loneliness and an attempt to own her sexuality, but also hints at its illicitness in the fact that it is hidden and out of view. When her friend asks her to fill in at her part-time gig, Nami agrees out of politeness but far from the simple modelling job she was expecting, she’s forced into a shoot for a bondage magazine and becomes an unexpected pinup star.

The reason she’s so popular may indeed be because of the real shock and confusion obvious in her almost comical expression. Though the team from the magazine want her to come back promising a sizeable paycheque, Nami refuses and is unable to accept the image of herself as a pornographic model. When a man, Muraki (Masahiko Abe), chases her into a ladies’ bathroom at the train station, she keeps telling him that she’s not that sort of woman, but there’s uncertainty in her voice and what she most seems to want is vindication. Meanwhile, she’s basically harassed into an affair with her married floor manager who gets her drunk and takes her to a hotel room explaining that she was regarded as the “hardest girl to get” among the department store staff. He becomes increasingly forceful as Nami resists before finally giving in and thereafter continuing an affair with him. 

Even before she became an accidental magazine star, Nami was indeed the focus of unwanted attention and felt herself threatened by simply by existing in a male society. Muraki peeps on the teenage girl who lives in the posh house next to his rundown apartment building as she, ironically, masturbates by shoving an egg into her vagina and cracking it open with a set of pencils. Later it seems as if the girl knew Muraki was watching her, but evidently continued to do it anyway. In any case, Muraki’s peeping is also a kind of class transgression as is his fantasy of raping his landlady after she enters his apartment without permission in the belief that he’s been stealing women’s underwear. Unable to get a job, his existence is fairly dismal and he’s viewed with suspicion by his neighbours due to his slovenly appearance and uncouth manner. He too becomes fixated on Nami’s photo, fantasising about her as a possible source of salvation based only on her image in the magazine.

When he eventually encounters Nami, he too like her boss first seems as if he means to force himself on her, but then pulls back, explains that his feelings are genuine, and he’d rather meet her in a more normal way in a public place to go on a conventional date, making clear that he’s interested in Nami, not just the image of her from the magazine onto which he’s projected his own fantasies. But conversely, as much as it might inspire a sense of hope in the readers, the photo is also a liability and when her floor manager discovers it, he attempts to blackmail her into shifting the dynamics of their relationship so that he’d no longer have to pay for hotel rooms or expend any extra funds on Nami. Despite the fact her friend has been a nude model for ages, Nami is dismissed from the department store. The boss describes her as “just a slut”, though lamenting it’s a shame seeing as she was so pretty as he instructs her floor manager to fire her, bearing out the double standard that men are free to view these images but scorn the women who are in them.

Nevertheless, the encounter with Muraki and being let go from the department store provoke a kind of liberation in which Nami flips the kotatsu over and masturbates with the chair leg bathed in the red glow of the heater. She has perhaps fully embraced her sexuality, indulging in rope play and no longer hidden beneath the curtain of the blanket but orgiastically pleasuring herself out in the open. Muraki, meanwhile, pays another sort of price in being the prime suspect in a rape and murder just because the neighbours think he’s a bit weird and assume it must be him. He continues to cling to the idea of Nami as a kind of salvation, while she too seems drawn to him and is about to throw away the magazine and say goodbye to this sorry episode in her life until a potential happy ending is abruptly cut short. Filled with urban melancholy, the film paints both Muraki and Nami as prisoners of their society, unable to find self-acceptance or security save in the frustrated bond they unexpectedly discover in their shared desire for escape.

Angel Guts: Red Porno is available as part of The Angel Guts Collection released on blu-ray 23rd February courtesy of Third Window Films.

Crime Hunter: Bullets of Rage (クライムハンター 怒りの銃弾, Toshimichi Ohkawa, 1989)

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Home video may still have been in a nascent and chaotic stage of development when Toei video executive Tatsu Yoshida began conducting customer research in video rental stores, but what he discovered shocked him. Customers were maxing out their five video allowance and watching them all the same evening. How did they have time for that, he wondered. The answer was that they were watching them all on fast forward to cut out the boring bits, like the story and exposition. It was this that gave him the idea to create “movies that will not be fast forwarded,” chiefly because they had already been excised of anything “inessential”.

Only an hour in length, 1989’s Crime Hunter: Bullets of Rage (クライムハンター 怒りの銃弾, Crime Hunter: Ikari no Judan) was the first in Toei’s new V-Cinema range and was indeed made to conform to these aims. Consequently, it focuses mainly on action with minimal narrative and relies on genre archetypes to help the plot move along. In that, it owes something to Nikkatsu’s borderless action films in taking place in Little Tokyo (largely filmed in Okinawa) though otherwise in a world that’s recognisably Japanese despite the English-language police radio and Japanese-American names like that of fugitive criminal Bruce Sawamura (Seiji Matano) and Joe “Joker” Kawamura (Masanori Sera), the cop who’s trying to track him down but only as a means to an end in his quest to avenge the death of his partner, Ahiru (Riki Takeuchi). We can tell that Ahiru’s not going to last long in this film because we’re told quite quickly that he’s been invited to the chief’s daughter’s birthday party and is seen as a potential suitor, while after apprehending Bruce he complains that his mother bought him the shirt that’s now been stained. 

Joker’s attachment to Ahiru goes a little beyond that of a mere partner as he hands back his badge to pursue revenge while picking up the empty packet of pop-corn Ahiru had been eating and placing it over his heart. The film seems to owe a lot to contemporary Hong Kong action films and Heroic Bloodshed such as A Better Tomorrow, and it’s apparent that this almost homoerotic relationship between the men has taken the place of heteronormative romance. The female star, Lily (Minako Tanaka), is (nominally at least) at nun which makes her romantically unavailable to Joker or indeed to Bruce while in some senses she represents opposition because her cause is at odds with Joker’s. While they temporarily align in wanting to find Bruce, Joker wants information that will lead him to the identity of his partner’s killer, while for Lily he’s the endgame because she wants to get back the money he stole from the donation box at her church. 

This whole narrative strand doesn’t make a lot of sense in that Lily says she accidentally told Bruce about the donations after having too much to drink at a party with her non-nun girlfriends, which is strange behaviour for a bride of Christ. Now she feels like retrieving the money is her responsibility, though Joker isn’t really interested in that. What he discovers is further kinship with the fugitive Bruce on realising that they’ve both become victims of a corrupt police force. The opening police radio broadcast implies that Little Tokyo has become an oppressive police state in which the threat of drugs and gangs is being used to control people while cops like Joker have been given blanket permission to aim at the head of suspected criminals as they do while arresting Bruce. Joker had thought that the guys who attacked them were Bruce’s men breaking him out or otherwise trying to steal the money off him, only to later realise they were actually corrupt police. 

But really not much of that matters in comparison to the increasing outlandishness as Lily transitions from wimple-wearing bad ass sister to a nightclub dancer femme fatale in fishnets infiltrating the Cathay Tiger gang with expertly crafted dance routines. Former mercenary Bruce similarly boasts and improbably impressive arsenal of grenade launchers and machine guns before arriving at the depressing environment of a disused industrial complex for the nihilistic showdown in which Joker realises there is no way to right this world of corruption and that he and Bruce weren’t so different in each being controlled and defined by an oppressive society in which there are no happy endings even for heroes.

Evil Dead Trap (死霊の罠, Toshiharu Ikeda, 1988)

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The embattled host of a late-night TV show is confronted by the image of corrupted maternity after receiving a snuff film in the mail that seems to feature herself in Toshiharu Ikeda’s body horror slasher, Evil Dead Trap (死霊の罠, Shiryo no Wana). A giallo-esque slasher echoing alternately by Argento and Cronenberg, the film is in part an exploration of changing gender norms at the height of the Bubble era in which the career woman hero is essentially stalked by a monster baby because she reminds him of a mother he for some reason hates.

Nami’s (Miyuki Ono) late night TV show “for those who can’t sleep” relies on viewers for its content, making use of newfangled VHS technology to play videos sent in to the studio. Her bosses are thinking of canning it for being too “fluffy” which might be one reason Nami does not immediately call the police after receiving a disturbing video of a woman being tortured and killed who is later revealed to have her own face. Instead, she gets the all female (plus one “bodyguard” who is the boyfriend of one of the team) crew together and heads out to the abandoned US military base which appears to feature in the video. 

At several points, the women remark on how difficult it is for them working in the TV industry where they need a big story just to earn their place in their room. Nami even jokes that if she were to die investigating the tape it would only boost the ratings while simultaneously putting her life on the line for the sake of her career. Meanwhile, we later realise that Nami is being targeted in part because the killer, who has a child’s voice, thinks she looks like his mother whose voice is frequently heard playing on a loop via reel to reel tape. He later attempts to kill Nami by wrapping what appears to be an umbilical cord around her neck, while she is finally subjected to a forced birth as maternity is visited on her almost as an act of rape even as she resists it. It could even be said that she is a kind of mother to the group, and one who ultimately fails to take care of family as each of her team falls victim to one of the traps set by the killer.

Meanwhile, the film adopts a slasher-esque morality in which the first victim is killed shortly after having sex with her “bodyguard” boyfriend, assistant director Kondo (Masahiko Abe), who had up until that point been suffering with erectile dysfunction only to be sexually revived thanks to the violent and eerie space of the abandoned military base. Another of the women attempts to leave the compound, but is caught by a random man claiming to be working for the killer who violently rapes her but also strangely answers some of her questions about what’s really going on as he does he does so. Nami is also less than shocked by the video after putting it in the machine, giving a response which suggests it’s not unusual to receive this kind of material or to witness such brutal treatment of women. 

The killer does indeed make good and ironic use of new technology, at one point putting one of the victims on TV begging for their life to taunt Nami and having a giant set up featuring several screens plus the reel to reel tape. A mysterious man also lurking around the military base suggests to Nami that the sender of the video is likely a crazed stalker, a pervert who wanted to see her naked who lured her to this remote location and then murdered all her friends when actually it’s almost the reverse that’s true and Nami is being targeted both for and not being a mother. Often switching to a Testuo-style shuttling camera and blue-tinted filter, Ikeda enlivens his genre adventure with interesting composition and a fantastic use of lighting right down to the oscillating blue police light in the killer’s lair as Nami attempts to retake control of her image and escape the penetrating gaze of her audience along with the patriarchal cage of an oppressive society.

Trailer (dialogue free)

Hong Kong 1941 (等待黎明, Leong Po-Chih, 1984)

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“Britain has reassured the people that it will not give up Hong Kong,” according to a radio broadcast at the beginning of Leong Po-Chih’s Hong Kong 1941 (等待黎明). The words have a kind of irony to them and not only because Britain did abandon the people following the Japanese invasion, but because the film was released on the eve of the Sino-British Joint Declaration in which it said something quite similar. 

But then again, the opening scenes are themselves quite critical of British rule as they, on the one hand, insist they aren’t going anywhere and, on the other, start evacuating women and children to “safer” areas of the commonwealth such as Australia. Out of work actor Fei (Chow Yun-fat) fled the Japanese incursion on the Mainland and came to Hong Kong, but now tries to stowaway abroad a boat going to Australia. He’s caught by a little British girl who speaks fluent Cantonese yet refers to him as her “slave” and insists that he “kowtow to me, now.” But then the girl suddenly adopts the persona of the Empress Dowager Cixi and demands the same. Fei makes the first of his many jumps into the water around Hong Kong, as if only in this liminal space can he be free. Anticipating the wave of migration occurring before and after the Handover, and also that of the present day, he and his friends Keung (Alexander Man Chi-leung) and Nam (Cecilia Yip Tung) set their sights on leaving to find Gold Mountain in Australia or America.

But they’re one day too late because the date of their departure is that the Japanese arrive in Hong Kong. Their haste to leave was in part caused by the fact that Nam’s father, Ha Chung-sun (Shih Kien), was trying to force her to go through with an arranged marriage her prospective groom didn’t want either. Nam is never really free as, as she points out, even after her father relents and allows Keung to marry her after she is raped by a police officer emboldened by the chaos and therefore worthless to him as currency, Keung never actually asked her and she’s in effect forced into a marriage with him instead. In fact, she returns to the shrine Keung lives in two find the two men constructing her marital bed for her with the double helix symbol of happiness already placed above it in an ironic expression of patriarchal oppression.

Indeed, her position is more precarious than either of the men and we see other families roughly cutting their daughters’ long hair to make them look like boys in fear of a rapacious Japanese army. But it largely turns out that it wasn’t so much the Japanese they needed to be worried about as the local population, experiencing a temporary limbo in which the social order has been suspended. Police officer Fa Wing (Paul Chun) who had acted as a lackey for Ha Chung-sun while constantly eying up Nam leads a gang of looters to Ha’s house to take their own revenge against his capitalistic oppression of them. Ha had largely made his money through rice profiteering and exploiting the local workforce. Recent layoffs at the warehouse had led to a labour riot, while Keung and his friends had been running a sideline skimming sacks of rice to sell on the black market. 

Ha and his henchmen anxiously await the arrival of the Japanese hoping that they will protect them from retribution, but the Japanese do not arrive fast enough. When they do, Ha collaborates and attempts to ingratiate himself with the Japanese officer in charge of the colony who once again takes a liking to Nam. General Kanezawa (Stuart Ong) also uses their poverty to starve them into submission, promising rice to anyone who will come and sing with him. The song he chooses is “Shina no Yoru” by Li Hsiang-lan, whom he describes as “their very own”, yet was actually a Japanese woman, Yoshiko Yamaguchi, groomed for stardom in Manchuria and marketed a Chinese star in propaganda films. Another song of hers, Ieraishan, can be heard earlier on the soundtrack as if heralding Japanese arrival. 

Though Nam tries to resist, Fei raises the trio’s arms in a cry of “banzai” in a moment of ostensible collaboration designed to buy them temporary safety. His philosophy and that of many others is to take the rice and deal with the rest later, which Fei does by becoming an enforcement officer with the Japanese to get papers that will allow all of them leave. He uses his position to help a gang of Mainlanders who are resisting the Japanese, and are, in fact, the last ones to stay behind and defend the colony, as well as well as save Keung when his attempt to rescue two friends who have been sold out for forced labour on another Japanese-controlled island by a local gangster backfires and he’s captured himself. 

Ironically enough, Fei had been the first one to try to leave and described himself as “selfish” after jumping back into the water to return to Nam and Keung who didn’t make the boat on time because they were trying to save a local eccentric everyone calls “emperor” played by the director himself. Fei is quite obviously in love with Nam, and she gradually falls for him in return though symbolically wedded to Keung, if not in the legal sense. Again, she has no say over her romantic future which is sorted out between the two men with Fei abiding to a code of honour in continuing to protect the relationship between Keung and Nam. Perhaps this echoes the way in which the Hong Kong people of 1941 or 1984 have little say in their future either as their fate is decided by two distant powers. Nevertheless, it leaves Keung feeling awkward and inadequate, realising that Nam likely prefers the smart and dynamic Fei over his constant failures and inability to protect her, though he is never jealous or resentful towards him only knowing that he is continually indebted. Yet it’s Nam who eventually strikes back for Hong Kong and for her own freedom while Fei looks on as children in the street play at beheadings as if they were Japanese soldiers. She embodies the spirit of Hong and carries it with her, and as the Chinese title of the film suggests, waits for a new dawn while accepting that just like old memories it will be replaced by what is to come. She speaks from a perspective that is both historical and uncertain, mourning the past while fearful of the future, but all the while continuing to live as one new dawn replaces another.

Hong Kong 1941 screened as part of this year’s Focus Hong Kong.

Trailer

Ah Ying (半邊人, Allen Fong, 1983)

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“I want to make a film that reflects our time. If not, no one will ever know we existed,” frustrated filmmaker Cheung explains but finds himself hamstrung by the fact that he is not quite of this place by virtue of the fact that he is a Mandarin-speaking Mainlander who’s been living in the United States for several years. The old university friend who’s offered him this opportunity says as much, suggesting that in the end he doesn’t really understand Hong Kong while simultaneously failing to get a grip on his protagonist, a Hong Kong student in California.

It may be this sense of dislocation that Allen Fong’s Ah Ying is hinting at. Fong himself studied at UN Berkley before returning to Hong Kong and based the character of Cheung on a friend of his who died suddenly in the middle of working on a project. But the film is really about its title character, a young woman who longs to transcend the world she was born into and find a more independent destiny while held back by her needy mother and drunken father who run a fishmongers at the market where Ah Ying is expected to help out. We her clumsily gutting fish, ripping off half the meat while stripping the skin and inelegantly tearing out its viscera, only to leave abruptly in response to a slightly rude customer and the fact she can’t get through to her increasingly distant boyfriend, Hung, on the telephone.

Later we see Ying try to scrub the fish smell off her hands after running off to her part-time job at the Hong Kong Film Centre in which she does menial work in return for free acting classes taught by Cheung. She tells him that she doesn’t really know why she’s there, but she wants to try it out and maybe it will lead to a career. Cheung is a little insensitive in mentioning a girl he knew who wanted to be an actress in California, but she spends 11th months of the year working in a cocktail bar. Nevertheless, acting quite literally gives Ying the opportunity to be someone else and helps her to imagine a different future outside of her family’s lack of aspiration for her. 

Ying’s family are comparatively lucky in that they have two adjacent apartments, but Ying and her four siblings all live in one with her parents too, while her taxi-driver brother and his wife live next-door though Ying likes to hang out there and listen to records. Western music is another means of escape as she demonstrates by singing an a cappella version of Time in Bottle as part of Cheung’s acting class, though he hasn’t heard of any of the musicians she mentions like Brian Eno or David Bowie further marking him as out of touch with “our times”. They do, however, bond over Simon & Garfunkel’s version of Scarborough Fair with Cheung noting that it sounds just like Chinese opera. 

In order to further research his screenplay, Cheung talks Ying into arranging an interview with her by then ex-boyfriend Hung who breaks up with her for being too nice to him which he finds clingy and unpleasant even when she tells him she’s fine with him continuing to sleep with other girls. Though she continues to look back on her relationship with Hung, Ying has already signalled her desire to move on by getting rid of her perm as if marking a new transition into adulthood. Her mother is not, however, particularly happy about it as Ying is currently the only one of her several children prepared to help out at the fish stand. Ying’s mother clings to her like life raft as a means of sustaining herself in what is in many ways a dissatisfying of existence filled with constant toil to provide for her ungrateful family who look down on her occupation while her husband sleeps in a chair all day after drinking too much and barely helps at all.

Ying’s mother tells Cheung that she’ll be lost without her when she marries, but otherwise suggests she’d prefer her not to because she’d be left to cope with everything on her own. Cheung asks Ying why she doesn’t move out and she replies that it’s it the rent, her father only pays her pocket money for helping on the stand and she doesn’t earn anything at the film centre, though it’s unlikely a young woman on her own would be able to afford to rent in Hong Kong anyway. Cheung becomes a kind of lifeline to her, a mentor figure guiding her towards another kind of life but equally lost himself and a stranger in the contemporary city. Though she may develop feelings for him, his interest in her remains paternal and like the characters they play on stage any union between them will have to wait until the next life. Nevertheless, through her connection with him, she may have begun to discover her true self and become at last a whole person even if seemingly tethered to the fish stand. In the busy streets and cramped apartments, Fong may have succeeded in recording his times after all but also an unexpected sense of optimism and possibility in discovering new paths even if they ultimately lead to a parting.

Roaring Fire (吼えろ鉄拳, Norifumi Suzuki, 1981)

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If Chiba’s karate films and the Sister Streetfighter series had been influenced by Shaw Brother’s kung fu films, Roaring Fire (吼えろ鉄拳, Hoero Tekken) is an homage to contemporary action and in some senses anticipates Jackie Chan and heroic bloodshed though in other ways harking back to the classic serial with its diamond-themed MacGuffin. A vehicle for rising action star Hiroyuki Sanada, the film reflects a new internationalist Japan but also confronts the toxic legacy of the feudal past in the fall of a once noble house.

Joji (Hiroyuki Sanada) has spent his entire life on a ranch in Texas only to discover from a deathbed confession by the man that he thought was his father that he had been kidnapped as an infant and is actually the son of the wealthy Hinohara family. But on travelling there, he immediately finds himself in the middle of a conspiracy. His twin brother Toru has gone missing after going to London to study ophthalmology in order to cure his sister Chihiro’s (Etsuko Shihomi) eye condition. Though his uncle, Ikki (Mikio Narita), welcomes him with open arms, a weird ventriloquist act by a man called Mr. Magic (Shinichi Chiba) that he’s taken to see suggests that the plane crash his parents died in may not have been an accident and his uncle killed them to take over the family business. 

Ikki is mixed up in the drugs trade with Hong Kong Triads and in keeping with Suzuki’s other films, we once again have a new solution to smuggling in hiding drugs in underripe banana skins. Lured to Ikki’s underground lair which has a large photo of Hitler on the wall and other Nazi memorabilia scattered around, Joji is given the “join us or die” speech, but ultimately manages to escape with some help from Abdullah the Butcher who is working as some kind of bodyguard but apparently takes a liking to Joji and declares they will be the best of friends forever after their initial fight. In any case, we soon realise that Ikki’s purpose in life is feudal revenge in that his mother was a geisha who died young because of her poverty and the nature of her work while staring at the Hinohiras’ giant mansion though his father apparently took no responsibility for him until after his mother died. His only goal in life is to take over the estate and otherwise destroy the rest of the family that never fully accepted him. 

Of course, Joji is in his way, but Joji doesn’t really want this legacy either and only wants to save his sister who turns out to be a kung fu ace despite her blindness but is otherwise unable to escape. In his final confrontation with Ikki, he reclaims the name of the man who raised him, Hibiki, and rejects that of Hinohara as if symbolically refusing his feudal inheritance. Mr Magic, really an Interpol agent, makes an executive decision to let him go which is also a representative authority figure setting him, and the younger generation, free from the feudal legacy to live a more international life. 

Nevertheless, Suzuki fills the film with a series of high-impact action sequences and extreme stunt work such as a crazy bus chase through Hong Kong which predates that in Police Story by a few years. The shuttles back and forth between Hong Kong and Japan, but it’s clear here that Ikki and his weird Nazi cohorts are the villains rather than the Hong Kong gangsters who really just exist and otherwise only factor into the story because of their desire for Queen of Sheba diamond that Joji’s birth father hid before he died so Ikki wouldn’t get his hands on it. A possibly poor taste allusion to the holocaust aside, Suzuki sticks to the plucky teen adventure format in which Joji gets into fights with the local guys and is quickly befriended by Chihiro’s teenage friends who all hang out at the mansion, rather than opt for a gloomy sense of paranoia and conspiracy even as Joji finds himself at the centre of a Hamlet-esque plot in which his uncle has usurped the throne and he must return to set it right. Yet rather than restoring the existing order, Joji effectively resets it by ending the family’s influence and then moving on into a freer existence shorn of filial responsibilities. 

Trailer (no subtitles)