Tag: 1980s

The Hut (피막, Lee Doo-yong, 1981)

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We’re told that the titular hut in Lee Doo-yong’s 1981 shamanism drama (피막, Pimak) is a like a stopping place between this world and the other. Babies are born there, but more usually it’s a place where the dying are sent to expire. Located in a more literal liminal space on the outskirts of the village, it presents a borderline that keeps the villagers safe from the taboo of death. They say the souls of those who die there cannot return to haunt the village, which is to say the village is a place free of death and also of the grudges of the past.

That is, however, not quite true. During the colonial era, the heir to noble house, Seongmin, has fallen ill and is likely to die but is being cared for at home by his desperate family who have invited shamans from all over the county in an attempt to cure him. This has obviously annoyed the village’s resident shamaness who is forever telling them they’ve made things much worse for themselves by sidelining her and shunning the local goddess, but the cause of the boy’s illness is quickly rooted out by Okhwa (Yu Ji-in), a powerful shamaness who leads the family to a buried vase in the woods which has been broken allowing the trapped should of Samdol (Nam Koong-won), the former keeper of the hut, to escape.

The Old Madam (Hwang Jung-seun) immediately admits that she was the one who put him in there, though she did not know where the vase was buried. The Gang family has a curse on it which results in many of their sons dying young before they could father sons of their own and leaving behind young widows which are perennial problem in the rigidly Confucianist, patriarchal society that some may argue continues into the present day but is certainly in the ascendent in the 1920s and 30s. As in many films of this kind, managing the sexual desires of young women, which are acknowledged as normal and natural, under such an oppressive system presents a key challenge to the social order. Given the taboo against second marriages, the family’s large collection of widowed daughters are seen resort to acts of self-harm in order to quell their desires in the absence of men. When the second daughter-in-law falls ill after stabbing herself in the thigh with a silver dagger, the Old Madam is sympathetic but believing she cannot be saved sends her to the hut to die. But before she does, the Old Madam also orders Samdol to sleep with her on pain of death so that she won’t pass into the afterlife with her needs unmet. The Old Madam is after all a widow herself, if an older one, and understands the frustration and desperation the younger woman feels. 

But the decision she makes breaks another taboo for as he points out himself, Samdol is the lowest of the low, a commoner who deals with the dead. Not only is the sex itself non-consensual, but threatens the social order in its transgressive qualities, crossing a class divide while also occurring outside of a marriage. Of course, it takes place in the liminal space of the hut where such borders meet. Described as quiet, honest, and reliable, Samdol is a kind man who also patiently nurtures the daughter-in-law back to health with medical herbs from his garden and eventually reveals to her what he was forced to do by the Old Madam but the two later fall in love and conceive a child which of course means they must both die in order to preserve the social order. 

Okhwa arrives as a kind of inspector exposing the poisonous past of Gang family which after all probably did do something untoward in order to become prosperous which is why there’s a curse on it. We get the impression that she may have ulterior motives and almost certainly knows more than she’s letting on while otherwise looking for information. She is not in fact a shaman, though her mother was and a fairly legendary figure at that, but later becomes one and with it a kind of avenger mainly for women who suffer under this system but also for men like Samdol abused by the feudal class order and forever at its mercy. The shamaness is also of course a liminal figure who lives outside of conventional society which views her with suspicion as a woman with both power and independence.

But even Okwha is subject to the unwanted attentions of men who despite their insistence on a woman’s chastity believe themselves entitled to her body, not only the head of the Gang family (who is actually elderly and presumably survived the curse), but men in Western dress who snatch and rape her. Thus the hut also exists at the nexus of tradition and a seemingly destructive modernity ushered in by Japanese imperialism. After recovering from his illness following Okhwa’s guk exorcism, Seongmin insists he just got better on his own and there’s no such thing as ghosts. We’re told he studied abroad in Tokyo and in fact dresses in a Japanese-style student’s uniform complete with cape. He tells his mother that they’re making scientific advances in Japan and that it’s ridiculous to think a ghost could have killed the Old Madam and the head of the family who died in odd circumstances during the guk along with his uncle in Western dress who had raped Okhwa. He proves to her scientifically that someone could have merely set traps for each of them and points the finger at Okhwa as a likely murderess rather than a gifted spirit medium.

Perhaps we more “rational”, modern people might agree with him but the film seems certain that there are indeed vengeful spirits haunting the landscape, those who fell victim to the hut mentality and were deliberately cast out and left to die by their society who effectively exiled them in their death. Okhwa can’t exorcise the evil ghosts of patriarchy, classism, feudalism, or sexual repression but she can perhaps in part symbolically end their tyranny by dissolving the border and burning the whole thing down. 

The Eighth Happiness (八星報喜, Johnnie To, 1988)

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A literal series of crossed wires provoke romantic intrigue for three eccentric brothers in Johnnie To’s smash hit Cinema City Lunar New Year comedy, The Eighth Happiness (八星報喜). As so often in To’s subsequent films, a random instance of fatalistic chance changes each of brothers’ lives though not perhaps permanently as the surprisingly ironic coda makes plain. Even so, their parallel quests for love of one kind or another perhaps tell us something about the changing Hong Kong society in the midst of rising economic prosperity and looming Handover anxiety. 

Seemingly without parents, the three Fong brothers live together in a well-appointed multi-level home owned by oldest sibling Fai (Raymond Wong Pak-ming) who hosts a daytime television program titled Mainly Housewives which includes a cookery/agony aunt segment in which he attempts to solve someone’s relationship problems through food. As in many of Raymond Wong’s other roles in Cinema City comedies, Fai is feminised throughout not only in acting as the “mother” of the family preparing all the meals at home but also in his single status and the focus of his television show which nevertheless intros him with the James Bond theme. 

Second brother Long (Chow Yun-fat), meanwhile, actively camps it up claiming that he pretends to be gay in order to get girls after lulling them into a false sense of security. Despite being engaged to air hostess Piu Hung (Carol Cheng Yu Ling), he has a side mission going to sleep with a woman from each of Hong Kong’s 19 districts and is a relentless Casanova striking up an affair with unexpectedly chaotic department store assistant “Beautiful” (Cherie Chung Chor-hung). Youngest brother Sang (Jacky Cheung Hok-yau), meanwhile, is a painfully shy aspiring cartoonist who becomes an accidental white knight to a young woman caught up in a bizarre flashing incident in the local park only to be mistaken for the culprit himself. 

Each of the brothers is offered a new romantic possibility because of a telephone malfunction caused by an elderly lady driver forgetting her glasses and ploughing through local works mangling the lines. Sang is reunited with Ying Ying (and her martial arts champion swordsman mother) after overhearing a suicide attempt but ending up at her apartment by mistake, thereafter finding himself facing a challenge of masculinity on discovering that she already has a very buff and macho boyfriend who in his own way also seems jealous and insecure. Meanwhile, Long overhears a conversation between Beautiful and a colleague at the store about their ideal men, entering into passive aggressive courtship while discovering that her boyfriend is fabulously wealthy (or, at least, his father is) leading to a standoff in which he ends up proving his masculinity by burning money he doesn’t really have, smashing his own cheapo watch to intimidate the other guy into destroying his diamond Rolex, and then trashing the car he borrowed from Fai to expose the fact the other guy isn’t really wealthy or man enough to do the same because at the end of the day it’s his father’s money and he’s not so rich that these very expensive status symbols mean little to him. 

Fai meanwhile has a much more normal romance which is disrupted, mostly, by his brothers’ chaos and then near destroyed rather than forged through a misdirected phone call. After Long trashes his car, he asks Sang for the number for a repair guy but instead gets through to Fong (Fung Bo Bo) whose musician husband has just walked out on her seconds before which is why she’s quite rude to him on the phone, slamming the receiver down the second time he rings. Annoyed on a personal level Fai asks Long to troll her by ringing up at 3am every night causing her to injure her ankle and later fall on stage during a Cantonese opera performance. Then he ends up meeting her by chance in real life when she ends up buying the last of his favourite biscuits at a local cafe, only to discover she’s his interview for that day’s show where she’s supposed to talk about her art but finds his face so funny she can’t stop laughing. Had it not been for business with the telephone harassment they might have had a conventional romance, but the further machinations of the chaotic brothers soon convince her that Fai is not a reliable life partner. 

To convince her he’s really a good guy, Fai undertakes a grand gesture making himself the focus of his culinary/agony item by cooking up the spiciest soup imaginable and drinking it on live TV to atone but such a meaningless feat does nothing for Fong who doubtless is over romantic stunts and looking for something more concrete. Long’s grand gesture, by contrast, fares much better as he chases Piu Hung to a fancy hotel and makes a scene from the other side of the glass before falling in the pool while trying desperately to save an engagement ring while suddenly on the back foot after she learns about his philandering. Fai is only able to redeem himself through artifice, he and Fong signing through their romantic drama while performing Cantonese opera surrounded by the brothers and their girls trying at least to support him in his own romantic endeavour which their chaos has largely undermined. 

It’s another cosmic irony therefore that whereas the chaos of the misdirected telephone calls earns both Sang and Long everything they wanted in both career and romantic success, Fai who generally does the right thing ultimately loses out through another chaotic development while even Beautiful apparently achieves her dreams. Despite his earlier protestations during get phone call that Hong Kong was beautiful and there was no need to leave, Song and Ying Ying decide to travel the world perhaps expressing a degree of anxiety in pre-Handover Hong Kong, while Long is left with internalised anxiety over his new role as husband and father, and Fai is back pretty much where he started. A typical Lunar New Year nonsense comedy, there’s no disputing that much of the humour in The Eighth Happiness is of its time, but there is something of To’s later obsessions with comic fate and romantic farce that transcends Raymond Wong & Philip Cheng’s Cinema City silliness. 

Trailer (no subtitles)

The Living Koheiji (怪異談 生きてゐる小平次, Nobuo Nakagawa, 1982)

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“This play will never end,” says one of a pair of actors, in love with the same woman near the conclusion of Nobuo Nakagawa’s haunting final feature, The Living Koheiji (怪異談 生きてゐる小平次, Kaiidan: Ikiteiru Koheiji). Based on a 1924 play by Senzaburo Suzuki which had not originally been a kaidan or ghost story, what originally seems seems to be a conventional love triangle drama develops into something darker and stranger as its trio of protagonists find themselves trapped in an escapable loop of obsession, violence, love and misogyny.

At heart, this is a story of a woman trapped between two men, an abusive husband she cannot leave and a childhood friend who says he loves her she may want not want either. We’re told that Ochika (Junko Miyashita) was once the daughter of a wealthy landlord and entered into an arranged marriage with wealthy man but was eventually sent back and married Taku (Shoji Ishibashi), the son of a teacher the landlord may otherwise have regarded as beneath them. A childhood friend of each of them, Koheiji (Fumihiko Fujima) was the son of an itinerant actor and loved Ochika too but bit his tongue. However, he can do so no longer. At breaking point, he must make his feelings known. Ochika does not accept them, but neither does she fully reject him. At an impasse, Koheiji states that he will kill Taku so that Ochika will then be free to marry him. On a fishing trip with Taku he directly asks him to surrender Ochika, but he refuses and becomes angry. Knocking him into the water and hitting him with an oar, Taku believes he has killed Koheiji, dissolves the acting troupe to which they all belong, and returns home. Koheiji soon turns up there but relief turns to rage when he repeats his request for Ochika’s hand and Taku kills him again.

We can never really be sure if “the living Koheiji” as he takes to calling himself is alive or dead, an actual ghost or a man with a talent for surviving living only for his obsessive love. He continues to haunt the couple, or more directly Taku whose guilt he may be manifesting. From what we can tell of Taku, he is a monstrously insecure figure who attempts to assert dominance through violence. Of the three, he is the only one outwardly frustrated by his lowly socio-economic position as an itinerant actor and only the troupe’s drum player at that. He has been writing his own play, a love suicide drama, in an attempt to bump himself up to the intellectual position of playwright but the manager rejects his work or else Taku lacks the economic power to bribe him. 

It’s possible in one sense that what we’re watching is the love suicide drama that Taku is writing. He does indeed later invite Chika to die with him while haunted by the living Koheiji. The dialogue between the three is ostensibly theatrical and delivered in the rhythms of kabuki theatre as if they were constantly rehearsing a play, yet Koheiji in particular often slips into a rhythm that mimics that of the Akita Ondo, a bawdy folk chant that is part nonsense song and part improvised diatribe against the state of the nation. Koheiji may also have been professionally frustrated in his desires to become another Danjuro, his lack of success another barrier to romantic fulfilment, but ultimately feels that Ochika should be his and Taku should consent to give her up. 

He points out that Taku is violent towards her. When Ochika asks him about his play, she says that women shouldn’t pry into men’s work and beats her. She asks him for a divorce which he refuses to grant, but later tells Koheiji that his violence is only a sign of his love for her though it’s clearly an expression of his wounded masculinity. In many ways, Ochika is a woman haunted by two men neither of whom she can fully escape. We can’t even be sure she isn’t dead too, or else a figment of Taku’s fevered imagination furiously writing out this love tragedy in real time. In any case, she continues to follow him and is continually disillusioned. On discovering that she engineered a miscarriage, he questions the parentage of the child and is resentful that she chose not to tell him about the pregnancy because it trapped her in an abusive relationship from which she wanted escape. She may have been willing to use Koheiji to help her, but does not appear to return his feelings and is in any case denied any agency. Just as she was traded away by her father, Koheiji simply demands her of Taku as if she had no right to refuse.

The living Koheiji becomes more grotesque each time he resurrects himself, eventually disguised as a leper and as pale as a ghost whether or not he actually is one. Wracked with guilt, Taku begins to experience ghostly nightmares featuring scenes from classic tales of horror such as Koheiji tied to a board and floating in a lake much as Oiwa and the servant in Nakagawa’s own Yotsuya Kaidan. A master of the genre, the eeriness that Nakagawa conjures here is of a different order. An ancient, unending haunting that as Koheiji says will never end destined to be repeated by the trio in an eternal and irresolvable cycle of suffering. The final scene takes place at Sai-no-kawara, the shore of the river of life and death to which the souls of deceased children go to be watched over by the crowds of jizo at the cave, echoing the faces of the dolls that once watched Taku and Ochika. What happens there may represent escape or merely damnation, Ochika perhaps freed or only to repeat this cycle for all eternity. 

Trailer (English subtitles)

Circus Boys (二十世紀少年読本, Kaizo Hayashi, 1989)

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“There’s bad cheating and good cheating,” according to a little boy who will later become “a magician of words and juggler of lies,” in Kaizo Hayashi’s ethereal fable, Circus Boys (二十世紀少年読本, Nijisseiki shonen Dokuhon). Set in early showa, though the early showa of memory in which many other times intertwine, the film positions the transient site of a circus tent as a roving home for all who need it or are seeking escape from the increasingly heightened atmosphere of the early 1930s. Yet where one of the titular boys chooses to stay and earnestly protect this embattled utopia, his brother chooses to leave and seek his fortune in the outside world.

In fact, it’s Jinta (Hiroshi Mikami) who first becomes preoccupied with their precarious position realising that they’ve been hired to look cute riding the elephant, Hanako, but will soon age out of their allotted role and if they can’t master some other kind of circus trick there may no be a place for them in the big tent. For this reason he’s been training in secret with the idea that he can pass off the skills he’s perfected as innate “talent” so the circus will want to keep him on. Wataru (Jian Xiu), his brother, doesn’t quite approve of his plan. After all, aren’t they essentially tricking the people at the circus into thinking they’re something they’re not? But Jinta assures him it’s like “magic,” the kind that will allow them to stay in their circus home which later comes to seem a place of mysticism or perhaps make-believe on its own.

Thus Wataru walks a fine line. His name means “to cross over,” but he never does. He tries to walk the tightrope before he’s ready and is unbalanced by a storm. Jinta breaks his fall, but also in the process his own ankle. Along with it go his dreams. His foot never heals, and he’ll never fly the trapeze with Wataru like he planned though he keeps his injury a secret from his brother. While Wataru flies with new girl Maria (Michiru Akiyoshi), Jinta becomes a clown, a position he’d previously looked down on and later leaves the circus altogether using his talent for magic and performance to become a snake oil salesman tricking what appear largely to be poor farming communities into buying things like miracle soap and coal that burns for a whole month. This is clearly bad cheating, though he tries to convince himself it’s not while essentially remaking the world around him through his lies. 

But he retains his integrity in other ways. After being press-ganged into a yakuza-like guild of street pedlars, he gently excuses himself when invited to dine with a boss and confronted by an odd situation in which his wife has purchased another young woman to be his “plaything.” In a comment on contemporary patriarchal norms, the young woman is referred to as “Omocha,” which literally means “toy,” but also sounds a like a woman’s name because it begins with the character “O” which was used as a polite prefix for female names until the practice faded out after the war. The boss of course treats her like a doll, and even the wife refers to her as an “erotic instrument” she got as a way of managing her husband’s sexual appetites fearing he’d otherwise be seeing sex workers and bring a sexually transmitted disease into their home (and also possibly because she simply doesn’t want to sleep with herself any more than she has to). Referred to only as Omocha the woman has almost no agency and finds a kindred spirit in Jinta (whose name contains the character for “humanity”) because like him she also escapes the hardships of the world through lies and fantasy. “Can two lies make one big truth?” Jinta muses, breaking the codes of Guild as he prepares to rescue another man’s plaything, only it may be more like she rescues him. 

Meanwhile, Wataru tries to save the circus even after their ringmaster dies with visions of Jinta on his mind. They plan a wall of death to bring back the crowds, but Wataru’s plan backfires with tragic consequences and it becomes clear he can’t protect their circus family even if it brings back veteran trapeze artists Koji (Yukio Yamato) and Yoshiko (Maki Ishikawa) who agree there’s no other place for them out in the big wide world. The sense of the circus as a safe space was echoed on Maria’s arrival when Jinta had cruelly said she looked a little foreign with the ringmaster assuring her that in here they’re all artists and do not classify people in terms of their race, appearance or nationality. Its unreality, however, is reinforced by the constant backing of Wataru’s shadowplay which sometimes shows things the way people wish they were rather than the way they are. Omocha is later seen holding one of these puppets just as she and Jinta decide to die to free themselves of this hellish existence before Jinta’s surrogate brother figure Hiroshi (Shiro Sano) is forced to kill them for breaking the rules of the guild.

In the ambiguities of the final sequence, we might ask ourselves if they are actually dead and the glowing circus tent they see on the horizon is a path to the afterlife or a kind of heaven represented by the utopia to be found inside it. Then again, perhaps Jinta is merely rediscovering the way home, a prodigal son who now understands he already had a place to belong and there is a place to which he can return. The Great Crescent Circus is now the Sun & Crescent Circus, reflecting the way the two boys inhabit the world like and dark, idealism and cynicism, but comprise two parts of one complete whole. Hayashi waxes self-referential, playfully including a reference to his first film in that the movie playing at the cinema Jinta passes is The Eternal Mystery with Black Mask on his way to rescue Bellflower while indulging in an intense nostalgia for a lost world of travelling shows and hidden magic. Shooting in a beautifully balanced monochrome, he lights on scenes of heart-stopping beauty that are somehow poignant and filled with melancholy but ends with a moment of resolution in which, one way or another, Jinta reaches the promised land as he said with magic.

Circus Boys screens 12th October at Japan Society New York.

Target (薔薇の標的, Toru Murakawa, 1980)

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By 1980 Toru Murakawa was an in-demand director thanks largely to his extremely successful collaborations with late ‘70s icon Yusaku Matsuda. Fresh off the back of the Game series, Toei Central Film hired him to do for their aspiring star Hiroshi Tachi what he’d done for Matsuda with grimy noir Target (薔薇の標的, Bara no Hyoteki). Interestingly enough Target shares its Japanese title with the 1972 drama The Target of Roses, a truly bizarre thriller in which a hitman stumbles on an international nazi conspiracy that was penned by the same screenwriters but is otherwise entirely unconnected with the earlier film and shares no common plot elements whatsoever. 

Set firmly within the contemporary era, the action takes place in Yokohama and is essentially a tale of proto-heroic bloodshed as the hero, Hiroshi (Hiroshi Tachi), seeks vengeance for the death of his best friend, Akira, during a drug deal which is ambushed by a third party who make off with both the drugs and the money killing Akira in the process. Hiroshi goes to prison for four years and then sets about getting some payback on his release by chasing down the Idogaki gang through gunman Yagi who he believes was directly responsible for Akira’s death. 

The plot is perhaps straight out of the Nikkatsu playbook, a little less honour than you’d find in the usual Toei picture though also cynical and nihilistic in keeping with the late ‘70s taste for generalised paranoia. Hiroshi is soon targeted by the Idogaki gang, but is saved by an old prison buddy, Kadota (Ryohei Uchida), who is a little older than he is and to an extent has a noble reason for his life of crime in that he has a son who became disabled after contracting polio and wants to get enough money together to make sure he’ll be alright when he can no longer look after him. Kadota then adds a third a man, Nakao, a former narcotics cop who jokes that he was kicked off the force for rape but according to Kadota was forced out for noble reasons after his attempt to help a friend backfired. The three men team up to turn the tables on Idogaki by ambushing his own drug deal with, in a throwback to ‘60s Sinophobia, gangsters from Shanghai. 

Meanwhile Hiroshi is caught between the life he had before and the contemporary reality in reuniting with his former girlfriend Kyoko (Yutaka Nakajima) who has evidently become the mistress of a wealthy man and is presumably the mysterious benefactor who paid all his legal fees. After a meet cute at a florist he also strikes up a tentative relationship with a wealthy young woman, the daughter of a CEO who plans to move to Mexico. Despite the rising prosperity of Japan in the early ‘80s, pretty much everyone has their sights set on going abroad, Kadota planning to head to Canada after making sure his son is well provided for. Yet Hiroshi is trapped in the Japan of the past, obsessed with vengeance for his friend while torn by his relationship with Kyoko who similarly wants to exit her comfortable yet compromised life to return to a more innocent time at Hiroshi’s side while unbeknownst to him the mistress of high ranking Idogaki boss Hamada. 

What becomes clear is that there is no prospect of escape from contemporary Japan, not even perhaps in death, Hiroshi left alive but dead inside at the film’s conclusion having committed a kind of spiritual suicide born of the dark side of what remained of his honour in seeking vengeance for the death of his friend who had seemingly only participated in the drug deal at Hiroshi’s command in an effort to improve the fortunes of their gang. Once again produced by Toei’s subsidiary Toei Central Film, Target has lower production values than the films Murakawa was making with Matsuda (who has a small yet memorable cameo as a rockstar whose life has been ruined by drugs) with non-synchronised dialogue and a grimy aesthetic which only adds to its sense of fatalistic nihilism otherwise enlivened by Murakawa’s artful composition and atmosphere of moral ruin in which there is no more humanity nor justice. 

The Big Heat (城巿特警, Andrew Kam & Johnnie To, 1988)

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A Hong Kong cop struggles with his sense of responsibility when faced with the fatalistic existential threat of the imminent Handover in Johnnie To’s first foray into the genre with which he would later become most closely associated outside of Hong Kong, the action crime drama. After a handful of Cinema City comedies, To is credited as a co-director along with Andrew Kam Yeung Wah though the production of The Big Heat (城巿特警), loosely inspired by the Fritz Lang film of the same name, was notoriously complicated passing through several hands over its unusually long gestation of almost two years, according to an interview with screenwriter Gordon Chan Kar-Seung, with producer Tsui Hark also heavily involved in the shooting. 

Tsui’s involvement is apparently responsible for the unusual level of explicit violence more usually found in horror exploitation rather than gangster noir, though there is perhaps something in the constant bodily destruction that aligns with the pre-Handover setting in which the “big heat” hanging over the city is an increasing existential panic which has created the maddening environment in which this surreal violence can occur as revealed in the opening dream sequence which features a drill piercing a man’s hand with small pieces of flesh speeding off it. The dream will turn out to be a prophecy foreshadowing the final shootout in which Inspector Wong (Waise Lee Chi-Hung) is shot thought the hand though at this point it signals both a psychological and physical fracturing. Owing to a neurological condition, Wong has lost full control over his right hand which leads him to question his ability to protect his city if he is unable to pull the trigger when needed which might also explain why he is frequently seen practicing his marksmanship at the firing range. 

Because of this anxiety, Wong had planned to resign but changes his mind on learning that his former partner who sustained an injury that Wong felt himself responsible for has been brutally murdered by Hong Kong gangsters in Malaysia after coming across a secret folder “by chance” containing photos used to blackmail a shipping magnate over his his homosexuality and an incriminating invoice. To do the right thing, Wong also temporarily breaks up with his forensic scientist girlfriend Maggie (Betty Mak Chui-Han) whom he was due to marry in a fortnight’s time suggesting that they not see each other until he’s solved his friend’s murder and then presumably plans to retire from law enforcement. 

Essentially, he deprioritises his personal, romantic relationships in favour of the homosocial brotherhood of the police both avenging his friend and dedicating himself to protecting Hong Kong from an oncoming threat represented by gangster Han (Paul Chu Kong) who is later revealed to be in cahoots with Russian mafia who ironically have a large portrait of Lenin on their boat and hammer and sickle flags everywhere while vowing to continue “selling drugs and capitalism” in the seemingly lawless environment of pre-Handover Hong Kong where everyone apparently wants to make enough money to be able to leave if the situation declines, “communist” Russians perhaps standing in for looming Mainland authoritarianism. Han even offers to sell “everything including Hong Kong” passing a list of names of “important people in the government” he apparently has access to in vast network of corruption. “Cheers to 1997” they ironically toast for their burgeoning business opportunity. 

It’s this corruption that is the source of Wong’s anxiety, fearing he doesn’t have the strength to stop it while his compromised hand is a symbol of both fate and an impotence that is later exorcised when he receives the corresponding physical injury yet is saved by a crucifix necklace that previously belonged to his girlfriend while in another instance of foreshadowing the corrupt policeman is eventually taken out by his own malfunctioning gun backfiring just like that which ruined an assailant’s hand in the drug bust in which Wong’s partner was injured. Having regained mastery over his hand, Wong is therefore more assured in his ability to protect Hong Kong from whatever it is that’s coming remaining within the police force while those who pay the heaviest price are an idealistic young rookie unable to adapt to the morally compromised world of pre-Handover Hong Kong, and Wong’s fiancée who becomes a symbol of that which he could not protect having prioritised his role as a police officer. Though somewhat disjointed having passed through so many hands, there are some typically To flourishes in the fluidity of the camerawork in the early stretches along with a gloomy romanticism in the fatalistic noir of the pre-Handover society even as he continues to find his feet as a purveyor of moody policier. 

Trailer (no subtitles)

Between the Knees (무릎과 무릎 사이, Lee Jang-ho, 1984)

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“We are all suffering from this Westernised lifestyle and way of thinking. They are not really meant for us,” according to a sympathetic doctor, played by the director himself, at the end of Lee Jang-ho’s erotic melodrama, Between the Knees (무릎과 무릎 사이, Muleupgwa muleupsai). The heroine does indeed find herself trapped between the Korea of the past and the modern society, but the film often seems confused in its central messages in its own use of the woman’s body as metaphor for that of the nation despoiled by foreign influence. 

This is most obviously the implication of Ja-young’s (Lee Bo-hee) flashbacks in which she is quite clearly molested by her flute teacher who is a bearded white man. When her mother walks in on the abuse, she blames Ja-young beating her and shouting what we would assume to be unpleasant words branding her as a seductress though she is a clearly a child. As is later explained, Ja-young’s mother is carrying her own baggage in that her own mother was the mistress of a married man and fearful of the same fate befalling her daughter, she has brought her up with problematic notions of bodily purity that have caused Ja-young to develop a complex surrounding her sexuality in which she is unable to process her desires as a young woman. 

She later says that through her “immoral behaviour and desire to sin” she has found “freedom” as if sexuality was her way of rebelling not only against her mother’s tyranny but social conservatism in general. However, she also characterises it as the extreme opposite, blaming her mother in insisting that her treatment of her has left her with no control at all over her sexuality. In the film’s problematic framing, she essentially allows herself to be raped by a series of men partly as an act of self-harm, partly as rebellion, and partly because she has no other way of permitting herself to satisfy her sexual desires. This is of course dangerous, portraying a woman who says no as one who is really saying yes but resisting out of shame, but there is also a completely paradoxical criticism of Korean men all of whom are rapists except for Ja-young’s sort of boyfriend Jo-bin (Ahn Sung-ki) who is so obsessed with traditional Korean culture that he has earned the nickname “antique”.

Jo-bin lives in a Korean-style home and spends his time playing the flute, training in traditional martial arts, and watching pansori in comparison to the pursuits of other young people such as Ja-young’s brother Ji-cheol who mimics Michael Jackson and spends all his time in discos. Towards the beginning of the film is seems that Ja-young will be torn between Jo-bin to whom she originally says “if you’re so old-fashioned I may have to run away with you” and an incredibly unpleasant fellow student who refuses to take no for an answer and in fact eventually rapes her during an expressionist rainstorm that violently awakens her sexuality. The battle then really becomes whether or not Ja-young will be able to accept it, despite the realisation that she is “no longer the kind of virtuous bride that Korean men expect.”

This hints at the pernicious double standard of the contemporary society in which men largely behave like animals, treating women like trophies to be conquered and then discarded while insisting on a “pure woman” for a wife. The discord in Ja-young’s home stems from patriarchal failure, not only that of the man that made her grandmother a mistress and not a wife, but her father’s in having fathered a child with a 17-year-old Korean War orphan he took into his home. Resentment over his betrayal has further embittered Ja-young’s mother and caused her to double down on her sexual conservatism while fiercely resenting her husband’s other daughter. Yet in the film’s final stretches, a degree of female solidarity arises between the women that largely excludes the father with Ja-young’s mother accepting Bo-young as another daughter and inviting her to live in their home now her still young mother has remarried. 

Violent male sexuality also rears its head in a subplot in which a mute man who had developed feelings for Bo-young’s mother while they were being raised in the same orphanage attacks Ja-young’s father for ruining her life, as he undoubtedly did even if he tried to take at least some responsibility for his transgression. Bo-young later says that her mother hated the mute man and did not want to be in a relationship with him anyway, though he too it seems could not take no for an answer. In any case, it is only the traditionalist, Jo-bin, who is willing to accept Ja-young for who she is. He knows all of her ordeal and does not reject her for her sexually active past, rather scoffing when she had described sex as being a sin with the perhaps mistaken implication that such things were not regarded as taboo in the Korea of the past even as, paradoxically, it appears that Jo-bin is drawn to Ja-young’s old-fashioned modernity in rejecting his mother’s constant attempts to set him up with an arranged marriage. 

Of course, all of this is also very much informed by the climate of contemporary Korean cinema which had descended into an era of softcore pornography deliberately supported by the Chun regime as part of a bread and circuses social policy designed to distract the people from their democratic desires. Lee opens with sexually charged closeup of Ja-young’s lips on her flute, a phallic symbol also present in Ja-young’s forbidden fantasises as she idly fondles it after hearing heavy breathing on the telephone and experiences another moment of sexual crisis. Perhaps that’s paradoxical itself in that it’s learning to play this Western instrument that has led to her corruption in an allegory for a nation’s pollution by Western culture. In any case, Lee seems to imply that sexuality can be an act of resistance towards oppressive social codes but is otherwise unsure if that represents liberation or merely another form of oppressing one’s self.

Mermaid Legend (人魚伝説, Toshiharu Ikeda, 1984)

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“Even if someone kills you, you wouldn’t die,” a drunken husband somewhat sarcastically replies having pledged to come back and haunt his wife if he died and she married a man who didn’t drink. His words take on a prophetic quality given that the heroine of Toshiharu Ikeda’s Mermaid Legend (人魚伝説, Ningyo Densetsu) takes on a quasi-supernatural quality as an embodiment of nature’s revenge after someone tries, and fails, to kill her having already killed her husband for witnessing their murder of another man who’d tried to resist their plans of buying up half the town to build a nuclear plant. 

By the mid-1980s, Japan’s economy had fully recovered from post-war privation and was heading into an era of unprecedented prosperity which is to say that the coming of a power plant was not welcomed with the same degree of hope and excitement as it may have been in the 1950s when it was sold not only as a new source of employment for moribund small towns but an engine that would fuel the new post-war society. Several industrial scandals such as the Minamata disease had indeed left those in rural areas fearful of the consequences of entering a faustian pact with big business, which is one reason why the guys from Kinki Electric Power sell it as an amusement park project though even this has the locals wary not just of the disruption it will bring to their lives and potential ruin of their livelihoods which are dependent on the protection of the natural environment but that what is promised simply won’t be delivered. Fisherman Keisuke (Jun Eto) says as much when lamenting a previous aquaculture programme which didn’t pan out and caused lasting damage to marine life. 

In any case, as others say there’s no money in going out to sea anymore and its clear that the old-fashioned, traditional way of life practiced by Keisuke and his newlywed wife Migiwa (Mari Shirato) is no longer sustainable. Migiwa is an abalone diver working without modern equipment but using heavy weights to dive deep enough to reach the shells. As such she’s dependent on her husband to pull her back up to the boat when she tugs the rope. She must put her life entirely in his hands though in truth, he does not seem to take his responsibility all that seriously. The couple bicker relentlessly and not even she really believes him when he says he witnessed a murder which might be understandable given the extent of his drinking. All of which is further evidence against her when she manages to escape from the assassination plot and runs straight to the nearest policeman who thanks her for turning herself in implying he believes she is responsible for Keisuke’s death. 

The possible collusion of the policeman hints as a further sense of distrust in authority which has become far too close to corporate interests. Shady industrialist Miyamoto (Yoshiro Aoki) ropes in both the mayor and the head of the fishing association in his talks with Kinki Electric Power along with Shimogawa from the local tourist board who evidently opposes the plans as he is the man Keisuke witnesses being murdered. As Miyamoto says “sometimes your hands get a little dirty” though he never “directly” involves himself matters such as these. The situation is complicated by an unresolved love triangle between Miyamoto’s spineless son Shohei (Kentaro Shimizu), a sometime photographer, who is resentful of Keisuke and in love with Migiwa complaining that Keisuke always outdrinks him and gets the girl too hinting at his sense of wounded masculinity. Isolated by his class difference, he appears not to approve of his father’s actions but later does little to stop them and eventually sides with corporate interest over his feelings for Migiwa who in any case seems to have become more attached to Keisuke following his death which she vows to avenge. 

There is there is something quite strange in the prophetical quality of Keisuke’s words also predicting the “black sweat” of the Jizo on the beach and the mystical storm which does eventually sweep everything clean destroying the signs for the new nuclear power plant already installed on the beach. In this way, Migiwa becomes a vengeful force of nature taking up arms against those who wilfully ravage and pollute the natural environment while damaging the lives of those who lived on its shores such as herself and Keisuke. She takes revenge not only for the murder of her husband by corrupt capitalists but against that corruption itself even as she laments that “no matter how many I kill, they just keep coming.” “Don’t worry, maybe all this was just a dream,” Keisuke once again prophetically intones though it’s difficult to know if it’s defeating the capitalist order that is a fantasy or the maintenance of the idealised rural life to which Migiwa seemingly finds her way back swimming into an unpolluted sea surrounded by the floating barrels of ama divers and clear blue skies, a creature of nature once again.

Mermaid Legend screened as part of this year’s JAPAN CUTS.

Zero (零戦燃ゆ, Toshio Masuda, 1984)

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The Zero Fighter has taken on a kind of mythic existence in a romanticised vision of warfare, yet as Toshio Masuda’s Zero (零戦燃ゆ零戦燃ゆ, Zerosen moyu) implies its time in the spotlight was in fact comparatively short. Soon eclipsed by sleeker planes flown by foreign pilots, the Zero’s glory faded until these once unbeatable fighters were relegated to suicide missions. On one level, the film uses the Zero as a metaphor for national hubris, a plane that ironically flew too close to the sun, but on another can never overcome the simple fact that this marvel of engineering was also a tool of war and destruction. 

The film is loosely framed around two members of Japan’s Imperial Navy, Hamada (Daijiro Tsutsumi) and Mizushima (Kunio Mizushima), who as cadets consider deserting to escape the brutality of Navy discipline. Having left the base they’re accosted by an inspirational captain who talks them out of leaving by showing them a prototype model of the Zero and convincing them they only need to stick it out for a few more years in order to get the opportunity to fly one. Mizushima, the film’s narrator, doesn’t qualify as a pilot and is related to the ground crew while Hamada does indeed get to pilot a Zero fighter and becomes one of the top pilots in the service. 

The viewpoint is is then split between the view from the ground and that from the clouds. Mizushima makes occasionally surprising statements such as candidly telling love interest Shizuko (Yû Hayami) that they are unlikely to win the war, while becoming ever more concerned for Hamada at one point telling him there’s a problem with his plane in the hope that he won’t take off that day. Hamada meanwhile is completely taken over by the spirit of the Zero and even when given a chance to escape the war after being badly injured, chooses to return because he does not know what else to do. When he visits home after leaving hospital, no one is there. His mother eventually arrives and explains that the family has become scattered with his siblings seconded to the war effort in various places throughout the country. 

Hamada’s dedication and personal sacrifice are in some senses held up as the embodiment of the Zero. The reason for its success is revealed to lie in the decision to remove the armouring for the cockpit leaving the pilot’s life unprotected, something which the American engineers describe as unthinkable. In an early meeting, a superior officer complains that they’re losing too many pilots and need to reinstall some of the armouring, but finds little support. Not only this is a cold and inhuman decision, but it’s poor economic sense given that skilled pilots are incredibly valuable and in short supply. After all, you can’t just make more. If you start from scratch you’ll need to wait 20 years and then teach them fly, but it’s a lesson the Navy never learns that is only exacerbated with the expansion of the kamikaze squads which squander both men and pilots for comparatively little gain. 

These “philosophical differences” are embodied in the nature of the Zero which is configured to be nimble and outmanoeuvre the enemy but is quickly eclipsed not least when foreign powers figure out the way to beat it lies in numbers in which they have the advantage. There is something of a post-Meiji spirit in the feeling that Japan is lagging behind Western powers and desperately needs to develop its own military tech in order to defend itself. On hearing rumours of the Zero fighter, MacArthur scoffs and says that Japan can’t even build cars so he doesn’t believe they could design a plane that could fly such large distances while others suggest that they will still need the element of surprise if they ever go to war with America because its technology is still superior. 

Walking a fine line, the film tries to avoid glorifying “war”, but it cannot always help indulging in nationalist fantasy such as in its statement that thanks to the Zero “the Japanese flag covered a vast area of the Pacific” in the wake of Pearl Harbour. These may be fantastically well designed machines that were incredibly good at what they were created to do, only what they were created to do was kill and destroy. The plane’s fortunes and Japan’s are intrinsically linked, the sense of superiority in the air lasts only a short time before Western technological advances over take it and the war continues to go badly. The film dramatises the tragedy of war through the friendship between the two men which eventually causes Mizushima to sacrifice his love for Shizuko by convincing her marry Hamada hoping that his priorities would change and he’d decide to take a position as an instructor rather than heading back to the front. 

For her part, it seems that Shizuko was also in love with Mizushima, but also caught in a moment of confusion between love and patriotism that encourages her to think she should do as Mizushima says and embrace this man who has dedicated his life to his country. In the end, it buys them each loss and misery, but also a moment of transcendent hope even if it was based on a falsehood in the pleasant memory that Mizushima gives Hamada of the life he is giving up by rejecting it to return to the front. For Mizushima, Hamada and the Zero may become one and the same. At the end of the war he can’t bear to see the remaining Zero’s sold for scrap and asked to be “gifted” one as the Captain who’d first shown one to him said he would be, so that he can give it a proper a “funeral”, or perhaps send it to Hamada in the afterlife after he is killed mere days before the surrender. Masuda cannot help romanticising the wartime conflict with his dashing pilots and their thrilling dogfights, often depicting it more as a kind of game than an ugly struggle of death and destruction, but does lend a note of poignancy to his tale of lives thwarted by the folly of war.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Summer Vacation 1999 (1999年の夏休み, Shusuke Kaneko, 1988)

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The curious thing, or perhaps a curious thing among many, about Shusuke Kaneko’s loose adaptation of Moto Hagio’s The Heart of Thomas Summer Vacation 1999 (1999年の夏休み, 1999 Toshi no Natsuyasumi) is that it takes place in a theoretical future that is also quite clearly an imaginary past. In a second introductory sequence, the voice of an adult man tells us that his is his memory, a fragment of the past kept alive by the clarity with which he remembers it. We don’t know who this voice belongs to, though the images encourage to think it must be the man the boy on screen, like the others played by a girl, will one day become but in another sense this boy doesn’t really exist either or at least is the bearer of several different identities.

The fact he travels to this remote mansion in the countryside on an otherwise empty train signal’s the place’s unreality and detachment from the regular world. We’re told it’s 1999, a year that was still to come on the film’s release in 1988, and inevitably hints at a millennial dread along with the new dawn the writer describes himself having in experienced in what is otherwise a summer holiday movie. However, in the opening sequence we witnessed a boy who looked very like this one slip what is later assumed to be a suicide note under another boy’s door before walking through the gothic space of the country mansion and out to a rugged cliff where he takes his own life by jumping into a nearby lake. The name of the boy who died, apparently brokenhearted and filled with despair after his romantic overtures to another boy were rebuffed, was named Yu (Eri Miyajima). This one claims his name is Kaoru (also Eri Miyajima) and is different in temperament in character to the boy who may have died, his body has not been found, though to the others staying at the school over the summer holiday he seems somehow like a vengeful ghost arriving to take them to task for Yu’s death. 

Kaneko specifically frames the school as haunted through the gothic photography of its billowing curtains and 19th century European aesthetics but also through its emptiness. The sound of children laughing, the boys who have left and returned somewhere else, echo through empty corridors further framing it as a place of memory and it seems true enough that the other boys who remain are trapped here in the same way they are trapped within themselves in their inability to express their emotions. The youngest of the boys, the sensitive Norio, (Eri Fukatsu) intensely resents Kazuhiko (Tomoko Otakara) who is as he describes beloved by all but himself cannot bear to be loved and may have contributed to Yu’s suicide through the abruptness of his romantic rejection. 

Later Kazuhiko recalls a memory of himself watching the sunset as a child in which he felt so terribly alone, as if he were the only person left on earth and there was no one with whom he could share this beauty. This sense of loneliness and isolation is further symbolised by the remote nature of the boarding school which seems to exist outside of time itself. Inspired by the setting of the novel, the boys dress in a fashion more associated with 19th century aristocracy than the late 1980s yet they are surrounded by machines and makeshift, retro futuristic technology in which they spend their days programming some kind of computer system. The leap into the lake is also into memory, but otherwise a kind of rebirth or rebaptism which allows Kazuhiko to make sense of himself and the other boys to come to an acceptance of Yu, Kaoru, and everything he embodies in relation to themselves. 

Even so, the elliptical nature of the film’s ending hints that this is a continually looping story replaying endlessly in the memory of a now much older man recalling the journey into adolescence in which he ruptured the shell of his ignorance much as the caterpillar becomes a butterfly even if that butterfly was something that Kaoru wanted to kill without harming its beauty. Perhaps in away that’s what the man has done in preserving this memory with its all of its gothic shades of billowing curtains and shadowy corridors amid the ethereality of the twilight of youth.

Summer Vacation 1999 screened as part of this year’s Queer East.