Tag: 1980s

Willful Murder (日本の熱い日々 謀殺・下山事件, Kei Kumai, 1981)

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Beginning to piece something together, the dogged reporter at the centre of Kei Kumai’s Willful Murder (日本の熱い日々 謀殺・下山事件, Nihon no Atsui Hibi Bosatsu: Shimoyama Jiken) looks out at an industrial complex and reflects that when he visited it eight years previously it was a “piddling little factory” and has since become a “major company”. His comments might equally stand for Japan itself as Kumai charts the course of the nation’s post-war economic miracle viewing it as a kind of Faustian bargain with the Americans largely conducted by former militarists driven by personal gain and ideological fury. 

Based on the book by Kimio Yada, The Killing: The Shimoyama Incident, the film turns on the mystery surrounding the still unexplained death of Japan National Railways CEO Sadanori Shimoyama whose dismembered body was discovered by the railway tracks in July 1949 suggesting he had been hit by a train. Given the investigative techniques available at the time, Shimoyama’s demise has never been conclusively ruled either a murder or a suicide with experts from rival universities coming to opposing opinions and the police later closing the case in somewhat suspicious circumstances. 

Kumai’s film leans towards the murder angle though like the real life investigators cannot definitively rule out that Shimoyama may have taken his own life presumably due to the pressure he felt himself under after being ordered by the occupation authorities to dismiss 30,000 railway workers from their jobs as part of the so called “Dodge Line” economic plan intended to halt runaway inflation. As the film’s opening voice over also reveals, the Japan Railways Union was at the centre of the labour movement at the moment in which occupational approach was shifting from its original purpose of demilitarisation and democratisation, towards remilitarisation and capitalisation as the Americans sought to make Japan a foreign policy ally in their opposition towards communism in Asia. 

The film’s thesis is that US forces were already planning for the Korean War and urgently needed to crush the labour movement. Shortly after Shimoyama’s death, two other railway incidents occurred firstly with the runaway train in Mitaka which crashed into the station killing six and injuring 20, and then the Matsukawa derailment for which 17 men were falsely convicted (four sentenced to death) all of whom were members of the railway workers’ union. The conclusion that dogged reporter Yashiro (Tatsuya Nakadai) slowly comes to, is that Shimoyama was murdered and the train incidents staged to discredit the labour movement on the orders of the occupation forces while former militarist collaborators continued on the same path in a newly “democratic” Japan.

Japan certainly did very well out of the Korean War the economic stimulus of which allowed that “piddling little factory” to become a “major company” in under a decade much as the nation rocketed towards the economic prosperity which culminated in the 1964 Olympics against which the film’s finale is played. The portrait the Kumai paints is of a nation which has lost its soul, mired in hypocrisy which makes a mockery of “pacifism” and “democracy”. There are in fact at least three unexplained deaths presented in the film, the second of the being that of Michiko Kanba who was killed during the protests against the Anpo security treaty which was later forced through parliament despite clear public opposition. The same possibly corrupt pathologist is assigned to the autopsy and argues that the young woman died as the result of a crowd crush despite the attending physician’s report that the cause of death was strangulation. 

The true villain is however the American occupation and Japan’s continuing complicity even after it ended. Kumai includes several scenes of mass protest against the presence of the American military in Japan, and often places American soldiers ominously hovering in the corners of the frame such as those standing directly outside the police station. Yashiro attempts to interview a Korean man who tried to blow a whistle on the Shimoyama murder only to be arrested by US Counter Intelligence and later physically dragged out of the visiting room by a lurking MP. It all sounds like a conspiracy theory and one Yashiro doesn’t know if he should believe but then has to ask himself why all these people are seemingly being silenced if there is nothing to hide. He maintains his conviction that Shimoyama was murdered, but cannot necessarily say whether it was by a communist foreign nation as the Korean whistleblower had suggested or by the Americans trying to frustrate the “democracy” they’d previously been so keen on lest it disrupt their capitalist agenda. 

In the closing scenes, Yashiro is confronted by yet another death which cannot be ruled suicide or murder along with the realisation that he will never learn the truth. The grills from a grate on the platform of a train station above cast shadowy bars that imprison him in the shady cynicism of the Cold War society. Kumai films in boxy 4:3 academy ratio and in the black and white of golden age cinema, lending a degree of cinematic realism to his devastating tale of post-war moral decline which contains a note of inescapable dread in the faces of two men caught in the intermittent flashes of a train going by obscuring a truth that can never be revealed.

Break Out (行き止まりの挽歌 ブレイクアウト, Toru Murakawa, 1988)

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Good cop or bad cop? A maverick detective crosses the line in the name of justice in Toru Murakawa’s hardboiled thriller, Break Out (行き止まりの挽歌 ブレイクアウト, Ikidomari no Banka: Break Out). Like many of Murakawa’s films throughout the ‘80s, the main villain turns out to be political corruption along with a complicit police force which the hero must in a sense divorce realising that he can enforce the law only by breaking it but tragically failing to protect those most in need of his care. 

Kaji (Tatsuya Fuji) is indeed the archetype of the lone wolf cop. Stumbling out of bed with an obvious hangover and fuzzy beard that stands in stark contrast to his clean-shaven colleagues, he immediately butts heads with follow officer Sakura (Renji Ishibashi) who is technically in charge of the latest homicide case which Kaji believes may be connected to the death of a young woman at a hotel that the force has so far proved reluctant to investigate. To him, it all seems to point to local gangster Nakai (Kiyoshi Nakajoe) with whom he seems to have an ongoing rivalry which might be why Nakai has implicated Kaji’s ex wife Saeko (Saiko Isshiki) in his drug smuggling operation. 

Kaji quickly identifies the body as a bass player, Shimada, who just happens to have played at a club connected to Nakai, and soon realises that a young woman, Miki (Yoko Ishino), who belongs to a local biker gang, is most likely responsible for his death. But, somehow feeling sorry for her and suspecting she may have access to information that would help him take out Nakai for good, Kaji actively helps Miki evade the police by harbouring her in his own apartment while they are both stalked by a mysterious, Terminator-esque hitman who seems intent on recovering some kind of evidence obviously harmful to his client whoever that may be. 

Murakawa’s greatest successes had occurred in the 1970s partnering with the great Yusaku Matsuda who had at this point moved away from genre films though he would later reunite with the director in his final screen appearance, a television movie in which he played an earnest policeman investigating a terrorist incident, before sadly passing away of bladder cancer at only 39. In any case the image of Matsuda hangs heavy over Murakawa’s subsequent films and it’s quite obvious that the menacing hitman has a distinctly Matsuda-esque silhouette, while Tatsuya Fuji plays a similar role to that he’d inhabited in Yoichi Sai’s Let Him Rest in Peace only this time as a world weary ‘80s cop who has his own particular code of righteousness he feels the world has failed. 

His more cynical boss, played by Murakawa stalwart Mikio Narita, is quick to tell him that he should have resigned after a previous incident and that if he had done so his wife would not have left him, a sentiment which she later confirms which is in part surprising because the incident involved him fatally shooting her father. The implication is that Kaji is a true defender of justice who refused to surrender to institutional corruption even at great personal cost. Yet we do definitively see him cross the line, coldly executing a suspect who goads him by claiming he has already killed someone he cared about and thereafter little caring for conventional morality deciding to take the bad guys down with him no longer having anything left to lose except perhaps the girl, Miki, with whom he has developed a paternal bond. 

Meanwhile his earnest partner, Nishimura (Hiroaki Murakami), who originally disapproved of Kaji’s old school, maverick policing has changed his tune now seeing the value in his belligerence not least when his own wife is taken hostage by Nakai leaving him equally powerless at police HQ. Kaji is constantly told to back off the hotel case because of pressure from above, eventually discovering a connection to a sleazy politician but knowing that he can’t touch him or Nakai while bizarrely ordered to continue investigating Shimada’s death despite the evidence that suggests they are quite clearly connected. Still as the rather more poetic Japanese title which means something more like “elegy for a dead end” implies, this world is already beyond redemption and the only recourse open to Kaji is to make a sacrifice of himself in the name of justice. A good bad cop, all he can do is pass on his outrage to those left behind. Shot with Murakawa’s trademark hardboiled mist, and a noirish sense of fatalism the film paints a bleak picture of infinite corruption in Bubble-era Japan in which the only hero on offer is a morally compromised cop prepared to die for an illusionary justice. 

Luminous Woman (光る女, Shinji Somai, 1987)

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“I’ve come to the city and my heart has turned black” sings a monstrously corrupt former opera singer turned bizarre nightclub impresario in hellish Bubble-era Tokyo. A tale of urban “sophistication” versus pastoral innocence, Shinji Somai’s Luminous Woman (光る女, Hikaru Onna) sends a pure-hearted mountain man into the dark heart of the modern day city hoping to rescue the woman he loves who swore she would return to him but instead has been swallowed whole by the neon-lit landscapes of the contemporary capital. 

“Tokyo is lonely place” the hero immediately exclaims on witnessing it from the urban sprawl across the water in the company of an opera singer, Yoshino (Monday Michiru), whom he describes as like a doll without any blood coursing though its body. The incongruity of Sensaku’s (Keiji Muto) presence is immediately signalled by his appearance. Dressed in a bearskin jerkin and baggy trousers, walking with bare feet (all the way from Hokkaido!) and his face mostly beard, he looks every part the frontiersman as if he’d somehow stepped out of the 19th century straight into Bubble-era Japan. As he explains, he’s come looking for his woman, Kuriko (Narumi Yasuda), who travelled to Tokyo to study accounting to help the local farmers manage their businesses when she returned to run a farm with Sensaku. 

The first note of discord arrives when the man travelling with the opera singer, Shiriuchi (Kei Suma), tells him that he knows a woman by that name who also came from the same town in Hokkaido but she now works as a bar hostess. Shiriuchi only agrees to tell Sensaku the rest of what he knows if he makes an appearance at his club in its gladiatorial floor show. Sensaku is used to the primal struggle, he’s a mountain man after all and physically robust. He isn’t afraid of a fight only warning that there’s a chance he may kill his opponent to which Shiriuchi declares so much the better.

This a Tokyo populated by those who are in a sense already dead. Shiriuchi’s floor shows leverage mortal struggle as a means of existential validation, yet his concept of “sophistication” founded in European classicism is directly contrasted with the idealised pastoralism to which Sensaku eventually returns as he and the other villagers plant new crops surrounded by greenery and an incongruous mix of animals including a mischievous racoon. Yoshino, the “bloodless” opera singer has lost her ability to sing seemingly because of her oppression at the hands of Shiriuchi who describes as her as a “commodity”, “precious as a diamond”, but later treats her as a kind of broken toy complaining that if he cannot “enjoy” her body nor exploit her voice she has no further value to him. 

It soon becomes clear that Kuiriko too has fallen under his spell, working at an equally weird nightclub where the pale-faced hostesses wear kimono and sing children’s folksongs. She came to the city for education, but has become a drug user which leaves her vulnerable to Shiriuchi’s manipulation. Several times he is referred to as “master” and there is something Devil-like about him in the influence he seems to wield in these strange spaces of the prosperous city buried somewhere beneath the neon lights and sprawling office blocks. The pinkish tint of Somai’s colour grading along with his characteristically roving camera add to the sense that we already in hell and if Sensaku does not escape from it soon, he too will be consumed like Akanuma (Hide Demon) before him who came to look for a woman only to discover that she had already found happiness with someone else. 

Mountain man Sensaku’s identification with fisherman Akunuma is only further deepened by the sensation that he too is “burning” in the literal flames which lend a hellish glow to the empty swimming pool where he consummates his relationship with Yoshino who subsequently regains the ability to sing. They are both in a sense pure-hearted men out of place in the emotional austerity of a modern capitalist society, a pair of Orpheuses descending into hell in search of lost love but finding only disappointment and ruination. Sensaku is finally able to escape in accepting that he cannot rescue Kuriko in part because she has no desire to be rescued, while Yoshino may still come with him if she too chooses to leave. Somai’s characteristically long takes add an edge of eerie oscillation to his often theatrical composition which culminates in the scene of two women connected via telephone call seemingly sharing the same space even as one is surrounded by a spiderweb of laser-like red string. Dreamlike and often surreal, Somai’s etherial fable casts the Bubble-era society as a hellish underworld of broken dreams and human cruelty but finally takes refuge in a scene of pastoral restoration neatly mirroring the trash-heap paradise of its opening.

Luminous Woman screens at Japan Society New York on May 5 & 13 as part of Rites of Passage: The Films of Shinji Somai

Teaser trailer (no subtitles)

Sa Bangji (사방지, Song Kyung-shik, 1988)

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The presence of an intersex person presents an existential threat to a fiercely patriarchal social order in Song Kyung-shik’s intense feudal-era drama, Sa Bangji (사방지). Inspired by the life of a historical figure who was exiled from mainstream society because of their gender identity, the film finds its protagonist continually exploited as a fetishised object of desire challenging the sexual repression of a society in which women were required to display no sexuality. 

The monks at the temple where Sa Bangji (Lee Hye-young) was raised advise them that they cannot live in the secular world and with good reason, as the hostility with which they are later greeted makes clear. On looking at them, a shamaness immediately has a vision of a snail, which is as she later explains a “hermaphrodite” creature, and immediately seems to have grasped their secret. The shamaness explodes with rage and insists the noble house by whom Sa Bangji has reluctantly been taken in as a maid should expel them at once for they will only bring misfortune and potentially death. They are later told that they are abomination born from their parents’ bad karma and made to pay the price for it with only the kind Buddhist monk reminding Sa Bangji that there will always be a place at the temple for them and that bad karma can always be overcome with goodness and light. 

Sa Bangji hadn’t wanted to leave the temple because they longed to see the world beyond it, only that even in this comparatively safe space they felt a burden while again ironically caught between two worlds neither nun nor layman. Though they present as a woman, Sa Bangji has male genitalia and is at pains to keep their true nature hidden. When the widow Lee So-sa (Bang Hee) encounters Sa Bangji at the temple, she too is drawn to their uncanniness and determines to “rescue” them from a monastic existence by taking them back to her home as a maid. Once there, she begins on what can only be described as a campaign of sexual harassment in which she continually makes advances to Sa Bangji who repeatedly turns them down because they are afraid of what will happen once their gender atypicality is exposed. So-sa in fact forces it out of them by accusing Sa Bangji of stealing a precious ring as a pretext for strip searching them. 

This ring is later exchanged as a token of their love once they have indeed become intimate and discovered in each other romantic fulfilment. Yet the ring also echoes the constraint which surrounds each of them by virtue of not being male in feudal society. “How dare you make decisions all by yourself” So-sa is told when she arrives home to the estate of her husband’s family with Sa Bangji in tow, even as a noblewoman unable to exercise much agency and dependent on relatives who blame her for her late husband’s death. Her chief oppressor is of course her mother-in-law who, as an older woman, has more power, though no more freedom, and uses it to control other women. So-sa keeps Sa Bangji captive as a kind of plaything and accidental sex slave, in part to ensure their identity is not revealed, but they do seem to have found a transgressive freedom in the genuine connection between them which is brokered by Sa Bangji’s otherness.

It is Sa Bangji’s hidden “masculinity” that both gives them power and makes them vulnerable. So-sa eventually betrays them, unable to defy the feudal order to protect the person she loves, and Sa Bangji finds themselves once again imprisoned this time by the shamaness who pimps them out to other sexually frustrated women who are not permitted to express sexual desire such as widows and concubines as part of what she originally claims is a plot of revenge against oppressive nobility who forced her shaman husband to father a noble woman’s child and then killed him to keep the secret. 

Sa Bangji too wants revenge and eventually insists that they are going to show the word the beauty of their body, only for that body to be repeatedly commodified and seen as little more alive than the dildo So-sa shockingly removes from a locked chest in order to ease her frustrated desires as a youthful widow. They are called a “freak”, and eventually come to see themselves as a “monster”, “neither male nor female” and therefore existing outside of the tightly ordered patriarchal feudal society which is what makes them such a threat. In the end, not even the sacred land of the temple is safe from secular intrigue. Sa Bangji makes a drastic decision in an attempt to free themselves from gender-based oppression but it isn’t enough to overcome the world’s cruelty and leaves them once again caught between two worlds, unable to overcome the fragile masculinity of the patriarchal feudal order. 

Sa Bangji screens at Genesis 29th April as part of this year’s Queer East 

Typhoon Club (台風クラブ, Shinji Somai, 1985)

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A collection of frustrated teens find themselves trapped within a literal storm of adolescence in Shinji Somai’s seminal youth drama Typhoon Club (台風クラブ, Taifu Club). “You’ve been acting weird lately” one character says to another, but he’s been “acting weird” too and so has everyone else as they attempt to reconcile themselves with an oncoming world of phoney adulthood, impending mortality, and the advent of desires they either are unable or afraid to understand, or perhaps understand all too well but worry they will not be understood. 

Most of the teens seem to look to the pensive Mikami (Yuichi Mikami) as a mentor figure. It’s Mikami they call when some of the girls end up half drowning male classmate Akira (Toshiyuki Matsunaga) after some “fun” in the pool gets out of hand. Luckily, Akira is not too badly affected either physically or emotionally, but presents something of a mirror to Mikami’s introspection. Slightly dim and etherial, he entertains his friends by seeing how many pencils he can stick up his nose at the same time, but he’s also as he later says the first to see the rain once it eventually arrives. Notably he leaves before it traps several of the others inside the school without adult supervision and otherwise misses out on the climactic events inside. Even so, Rie (Yuki Kudo), who also misses out by virtue of randomly stealing off to Tokyo for the day, later remarks that he too seems like he’s grown though her words may also be a kind of self projection. 

Mikami’s kind of girlfriend, perpetual spoon-bender Rie, finds herself at a literal crossroads after waking up late because her mother evidently did not return home the night before. Eventually she sets off for class running all the way, but then reaches a fork in the road and changes her mind heading to Tokyo instead. Mikami has been accepted into a prestigious high school there, and perhaps a part of her wanted to go too or at least to get closer to him through familiarity with an unfamiliar environment. Unfortunately she soon encounters a firearms enthusiast (Toshinori Omi) who buys her new clothes and takes her back to his flat which she thankfully manages to escape even if she’s stuck in the city because of a landslide caused by the typhoon.  

Mikami, however, continues to worry about her unable to understand why he’s the only one seemingly bothered about her whereabouts believing she’s “gone crazy”. Trapped in the school, the kids try to ring their teacher Umemiya (Tomokazu Miura) for help but he’s already drunk and can’t really be bothered. In any case he has problems of his own in that his girlfriend’s mother suddenly turned up during class to berate him for stringing her daughter along and also having borrowed a large amount of money which obviously ought to have some strings attached, only as it turns out Junko leant the money to another guy she was seeing though it’s not exactly clear whether she and Umemiya actually broke up or not. “In 15 years you’ll be exactly like me” Umemiya bitterly intones into the phone when Mikami directly states that he no longer respects him deepening Mikami’s adolescent sense of nihilistic despair. 

Of all the teens, he does seem to be the most preoccupied with death. “As long as she’s an egg, the hen can’t fly” he and his brother reflect on discussing if it’s possible for an individual to transcend its species and if it’s possible to transcend it though death all of which lends his eventual decision a note of poignant irony even if its absurd grimness seems to be a strange homage to The Inugami Family. As he points out to his somewhat disturbed friend Ken (Shigeru Benibayashi), “I am not like you” and indeed Ken isn’t quite like the other teens. Obsessed with fellow student Michiko (Yuka Ohnishi) but unable to articulate his feelings, Ken pours acid down her back and watches her squirm as it eats into her flesh. Repeating pleasantries to himself as a mantra, he later attempts to rape her after violently kicking in the dividing walls of the school only to be stopped in his tracks on noticing the scar again and being reminded that he is hurting her. 

The storm seems to provoke a kind of madness, the teens embracing an elusive freedom entirely at odds with the rigid educational environment. The other three girls trapped in the school are a lesbian couple who’d been hiding out in the drama department and their third wheel friend who might otherwise have been keen to hide their relationship from prying eyes having previously been caught out by a bemused and seemingly all seeing Akira. But in this temporary space of constraint and liberation, the teens are each free for a moment at least to be who they are with even Ken and Michiko seemingly setting aside what had just happened between them. They co-opt the stage for a dance party and then take it outside, throwing off their clothes to dance (almost) naked in the rain while a fully clothed Rie does something similar on the streets of the capital. In some ways, in that moment at least they begin to transcend themselves crossing a line into adulthood in a symbolic rebirth. In any case, Somai’s characteristically long takes add to the etherial atmosphere as do his occasional forays into the strange such as Rie’s encounter with a pair of ocarina-playing performance artists in an empty arcade. “We want to go home, but we can’t move” Mikami says looking for guidance his teacher is unwilling to give him neatly underlining the adolescent condition as the teens begin realise they’ll have to find their own way out of this particular storm. 

Typhoon Club screens at Japan Society New York on April 28 as part of Rites of Passage: The Films of Shinji Somai

Ping Pong (乒乓, Leong Po-Chih, 1986)

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A young woman wrestles with her cultural identity when tasked with executing a will she can’t even read in Leong Po-Chih’s 1986 diaspora drama, Ping Pong (乒乓). The dead man’s family members can agree on only one thing, that they hate the will and won’t sign it, but are also constantly reminding themselves that “the third principle” of being Chinese, according to uncle Siu Loong (Victor Kan), is to obey the elders’ wishes and never question them. 

Sam Wong (K. C. Leong) is found dead in a telephone box still clasping the receiver not far from his incredibly successful Chinatown restaurant. Elaine Choi (Lucy Sheen) is a young British-Chinese lawyer who arrived in the UK from Macao around the age of seven following the deaths of her parents. Her first problem is that she no longer remembers any Chinese and is unable to read the will she’s been charged with executing, eventually getting a family member to help her decode it while realising that it’s going to set the cat amongst the pigeons. Her sense of cultural dislocation is only deepened when she attends Sam’s Taoist funeral and admits to the British wife of Sam’s son Alan (Ric Young) that she has no idea what’s going on either. Sam’s wife Ying (Lam Fung), who came to the UK at 17 for an arranged marriage, hurriedly shoos her daughter-in-law out while berating her son for not knowing how inappropriate it is for a pregnant woman to attend a funeral. Elaine is also told that her presence is inappropriate and invited instead to a dinner at Sam’s restaurant the following day to read out the will. 

Of course, it’s not unusual to encounter discord among family members when it comes to settling an estate, but Sam seems to have either entirely misunderstood his relatives or else deliberately set out to teach them a lesson, one that will help them recover the Chinese identity they may each be in danger of losing. Alan has become a professor and married an upper middle-class British woman (Victoria Wicks). Their home is the epitome of a certain kind of stereotypical Englishness while Alan appears to show little interest in his cultural legacy. The absent Michael (David Yip) who doesn’t even attend the funeral or will reading runs a flashy fusion-style “Chinese” restaurant which is entirely staffed by Italians and holds regular cream pie parties. Michael is an embodiment of the spirit of the age. Educated in expensive boarding schools, he’s become an obnoxious English gentlemen in cricket jumpers and sharp suits who plans to build a seven-storey leisure complex on Gerrard Street with money from a Hong Kong millionaire looking to escape Handover anxiety. For Michael, his Chinese heritage is just something to be sold and repackaged to people to who don’t know any better. The design for the leisure centre is like some orientalist fever dream, a fairytale pagoda channeling Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and Cinderella’s Castle. 

Sam left him the restaurant on the condition he run it “the Chinese way”, which obviously isn’t something Michael was particularly keen on doing. Michael’s older half-sister, Cherry (Barbara Yu Ling), a child of Sam’s first marriage in China, is also resentful that her father left the warehouse she’d been managing to her step-mother Ying along with the family home, while leaving a farm they owned growing Chinese vegetables to family friend, Mr Chen (Robert Lee), rather than to one of the descendants. Her husband Siu Loong, a former Hong Kong cop, tries to teach their children “Chineseness” through rote learning and casual violence including the instruction that children should obey without question, but otherwise supports his wife’s hope of firing Elaine in favour of someone who knows the way Chinatown works and can be relied upon to reinterpret the will in their favour. 

That she wasn’t from “Chinatown” might be why Sam chose Elaine in the first place, realising that she’d carry out his wishes rather than her own interpretation of them. She becomes preoccupied with the identity of the person on the other end of the phone when Sam died while herself growing to like the Wongs and trying to smooth over their familial discord. What she comes to understand is that Sam knew exactly what he was doing, trying to engineer a course correction in the lives of his overly Westernised children to force them to get back in touch with their roots rather than lose their Chinese heritage. But then China is also changing. Sam wanted to be buried in his hometown back on the Mainland, and so Elaine heads to the embassy only to met by an ironic civil servant who has pictures of pandas and pagodas on the wall of his office. He hands Elaine a bunch of tourism pamphlets while instructing her that she should learn her Chinese so she can go back to her “homeland”. “Which one?” she scoffs, chuckling at the newly open China now also commodifying its cultural heritage as a destination for curious Westerners as she chucks the pamphlets in the bin directly outside the embassy. 

Sam’s will may be the ultimate act of patriarchal manipulation, not least in his passing over of his daughter in favour of the prodigal son who had seemingly rejected everything he stood for, but does ultimately allow the family to begin repairing itself while reclaiming their cultural identity. Elaine, who had deftly fended off the patronising overtures from her sleazy boss who refers to her as his “pretty little Chinese lawyer”, also gains a sense of herself as a female warrior like the wuxia comics she loved as a child in Macao while doing her best to protect Sam’s legacy in executing his wishes. An atmospheric evocation of  smokey ‘80s London Chinatown on the brink of change, Ping Pong allows its heroine to begin to find her answers only to discover they lead her right back to source. “Everything moves in cycles” Elaine philosophises envisaging her own new beginning in a changing society. 

Ping Pong screened as part of this year’s Hong Kong Film Festival UK.

All About Ah-Long (阿郎的故事, Johnnie To, 1989)

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“Don’t ever make mistakes, you’ll never get a second chance!” warns the hero of Johnnie To’s melancholy male melodrama, All About Ah-Long (阿郎的故事). Ah-Long is indeed a man who’s made mistakes, mistakes he fears can never be corrected that have removed all possibility of his redemption only to be presented with new hope through a chance encounter and to have that hope eventually smashed by the cruel hand of fate. 

A former motorcycle racer, Ah-Long (Chow Yun-fat) has a job driving a truck at a quarry and lives in a tiny two room apartment sharing a bed with his 10-year-old son, Porky (Huang Kun-Hsuen). A fateful introduction from an old friend, Dragon (Ng Man-tat), accidentally reunites him with former girlfriend Por Por (Sylvia Chang), now calling herself Sylvia having become a successful ad executive after moving to the US following the couple’s acrimonious breakup while Ah-Long, badly injured in a motorcycle crash, ended up spending some time in prison. Sylvia’s class conscious mother had not approved of the relationship and in fact told her that the baby had died to convince her to move abroad. Discovering that Porky is alive, she begins to want him back planning to take him with her when she returns the to the US in the company of her fiancé Patrick (Alan Yu Ka-Lun). 

The situation may be somewhat reminiscent of the then recent Kramer vs Kramer but the parameters of the dilemma are different. Sylvia did not wilfully abandon her child nor is she being asked to choose between motherhood and personal fulfilment though as we later discover the traumatic circumstances of Porky’s birth have left her unable to bear any more children meaning that Porky is the only possibility of her reclaiming her maternity. Her request is in its own way selfish, considering her own feelings over Porky’s in suggesting they remove him from his home and everything he’s known while disrupting the clearly very close relationship between Ah-Long and his son. There is also something uncomfortable in the mediation of her love as she showers Porky with expensive gifts Ah-Long could never hope to provide, almost as if she were trying to buy him or at least tempt him away from wholesome working class Hong Kong towards consumerist paradise in the US hinting at the new international possibilities of a future outside of the post-Handover nation. Emptying his bank account, Ah-Long buys the puppy in a pet store window that Porky had doted on, but the boy barely reacts too busy playing with the new desktop computer Sylvia has set up for him in addition to tidying the apartment and making soup while Ah-Long was out. 

Through flashback we realise that Ah-Long was womanising bad boy, drunk and abusive, but has apparently seen the error of his ways humbled by his accident and matured by fatherhood now apparently reformed and dedicated solely to Porky’s upbringing. All he wants for him is a comfortable life and he knows that Sylvia can give that to him even if it means leaving Ah-Long behind alone in Hong Kong. While Sylvia’s fiancé Patrick claims not to care about her past but becomes increasingly controlling and paranoid, unwilling to accept Porky and insistent that they adopt a child of their own while resentful of her relationship with Ah-Long, Ah-Long continues to dream of a traditional family reunion with Porky showing the former lovers how to walk together during a parents’ three-legged race at the school sports day. 

Yet there is always a degree of distance between the one-time couple. To opens the film with the camera looking up at a pair of high rise buildings as it sinks to street level and then rises finding first Ah-Long’s moped and then the tiny apartment he shares with Porky. The camera pulls up again to catch the name of the swanky hotel where Sylvia is staying, a captivated Porky mystified by the elegant glass elevators rising inside, while Sylvia can hardly bear the literal rollercoaster ride at a local theme park the implication being that she can no longer bear the ups and downs of a life like Ah-Long’s while Porky may not be able to ascend to her life of middle-class stability. The promise of a life of comfort threatens to break the bond between father and son, the question becoming whether it is selfish of Ah-Long to prioritise their emotional bond in a life of wholesome poverty rather than sacrifice himself in allowing Sylvia to take Porky with her back to affluent if emotionally empty America. 

Even so, it begins to seem as if the pair may reach a form of equilibrium that places them on a similar level as Sylvia rejects the overbearing Patrick and leaves a door open for the reunion of the traditional family with a reformed Ah-Long who has learned the error of his ways and done his best to make amends. In true To fashion, however, fate has other ideas. Ah-Long sees his longed for dream in front of him and rides fast towards it only to be denied as if the universe had suddenly refused to grant him his redemption. The bleak conclusion perhaps implies that there really are no second chances for men like Ah-Long no matter how much they want them, while the peculiar contradictions of pre-Handover Hong Kong preclude such ordinary visions of happiness as could be found in familial reunification. 

Trailer (no subtitles)

Kagemusha (影武者, Akira Kurosawa, 1980)

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“The shadow of a man can never stand up and walk on its own” a shadow warrior laments, wondering what happens to the shadow once the man is gone. Set at the tail end of the Sengoku era, Akira Kurosawa’s Kagemusha (影武者) charts the transformation of a man reborn as someone else and discovers that he’s better at playing the role he’s been assigned than the man who was born to play it only to fall victim to his own hubris and self-delusion. 

The nameless hero (Tatsuya Nakadai) is a lowborn thief sentenced to death only to be reprieved thanks to his uncanny resemblance to the local lord, Takeda Shingen (also Tatsuya Nakadai), whose double he must play if he’s to keep his life. The shadow objects to this characterisation, outraged that a man who has killed hundreds and robbed whole domains dares to call him a scoundrel. Shingen agrees he too is morally compromised. He banished his father and killed his own son but justifies it as a necessary evil in his quest to conquer Japan hoping to unify it bringing an end to the Warring States period and ensuring peace throughout the land. 

The shadow goes along with it, but does not really realise the full implications of his decision. He tries to smash a giant urn hoping to find treasure to escape with, but is confronted by a corpse bearing his own face. Shingen has been killed by an enemy sniper in an act of hubris sneaking around a castle under siege hoping (not) to hear the sound of a flute. Before passing away, Shingen instructs his men to keep his death a secret for three years, retreating to defend their own domain rather than conquer others. But there are spies everywhere and news of his apparent demise soon travels to the allied Oda Nobunaga (Daisuke Ryu) and Tokugawa Ieyasu (Masayuki Yui), his rivals for the potential hegemony over a unified Japan. The shadow Shingen must keep up the pretence to keep the dream alive and protect the Takeda Clan from being swallowed whole by the advance of Nobunaga. 

Shingen had been the “immoveable mountain”, the solid force that anchors his troops from behind but also an implacable leader famed for his austerity. The shadow Shingen is almost caught out by the honest reaction of his grandson and heir Takemaru (Kota Yui) who immediately blurts out that this man is not his grandfather because he is no longer scary, while he’s also bucked by Shingen’s horse who in the end cannot be fooled. His retainers wisely come up with a ruse that he’s too ill to see his mistresses lest they realise the thief’s body does not bear the same scars even as everything about him from the way he talks and moves and laughs is different. Yet in his sudden conversion on witnessing Shingen’s funeral on lake Suwa and resolving that he wants to do something to serve the man who saved his life, the shadow proves an effective leader who earns the trust and affection of his immediate retainers but is equally struck by their sacrifice as they give their lives to protect him. 

Meanwhile, his illegitimate son Katsuyori (Kenichi Hagiwara), skipped over in the succession, complains that he can never emerge from his father’s shadow emphasising the ways in which the feudal order disrupts genuine relationships between people and bringing a note of poignancy to the connection that emerges between the shadow Shingen and little Takemaru otherwise raised to perpetuate that same emotional austerity. Hoping to eclipse his father, Katsuyori too experiences a moment of hubris, successful in his first campaign but then over ambitious, forgetting his father’s teachings and walking straight into a trap only to be defeated by Nobunaga’s superior technology. 

Nobukado (Tsutomu Yamazaki), Shingen’s brother and sometime shadow, remarks that he hardly knew who he was once his brother was gone, and wonders what will become of the shadow once the three years are up. In a sense, the thief is already dead. As Nobukado puts it, it’s as if Shingen has possessed him, his confidence in his alternate persona apparently solidified by the victory at Takatenjin castle. But the sight of so many dead seems to unnerve him in the hellish spectacle of death that is a Sengoku battlefield knowing that these men died if not quite for him than for his image. When he attempts to mount Shingen’s horse, it’s either born of hubristic self-delusion in wanting to prove that he truly has become him, or else a bid for freedom and to be relieved of his shadow persona. Either way, he becomes a kind of ghost, once again watching his men from behind but this time invisibly and powerless to do anything but watch as they are massacred by Nobunaga’s guns. 

Earlier on he’d had a kind of nightmare, painted in surrealist hues by Kurosawa who conjures battlegrounds of angry reds and violent purples along with ominous rainbows, seeing himself dragged down into the water by Shingen’s ghost which he has now seemingly become. In the end all he can do is accept his fate in a final act of futility running defenceless towards the enemy line and reaching out to retrieve his banner from its watery fate only to be carried past it on a current of red. “I’m not a puppet, you can’t control me” the thief had said, but in the end just like everyone else he was powerless, another casualty of the casual cruelties and meaningless struggles of the feudal order. 

Kagemusha screens at the BFI Southbank, London on 11th & 31st January 2023 as part of the Kurosawa season.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Seven Days War (ぼくらの七日間戦争, Hiroshi Sugawara, 1988)

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“What’s wrong with a little happiness?” one of the “eight heroes” of Aoba Jr. High Class 1-A asks, retreating from the duplicitous adult world into a teenage paradise. Another Kadokawa teen movie, Seven Days War (ぼくらの七日間戦争, Bokura no Nanoka-kan Senso) adapts the first in a series of Kadokawa novels by Osamu Soda and situates itself very much in the throws of the Bubble era in which the young rail not only against a rigid, conformist society but familial disappointment and the enduring legacy of the authoritarian past. 

According to the principal’s assembly speech, at Aoba Jr. High the motto for the day is “intellect, morality, and physique”. While he’s busy talking, another teacher, Yashiro (Shiro Sano), is patiently going through students’ bags and confiscating things he doesn’t like, even such innocent items as hairbrushes lest they should be used “to attract boys” rather than to maintain one’s appearance as the school would doubtless wish seeing as we later see the same teacher taking a ruler to make sure all the girls’ skirts are at regulation length. A boy late for assembly is also taken to task over his hair, accused of having had a perm and physically dragged towards a water butt by violent P. E teacher Mr. Sakae (Yasuaki Kurata) who later beats another overweight student for not performing well enough on the monkey bars. 

It’s small wonder the kids want to rebel. Eight of the boys in Yashiro’s class suddenly disappear one day, seceding to form their own society hiding out in a disused factory. Discovered and questioned, their only demands are to have the bad teachers fired and for all the students to be treated equally, but as expected their requests fall on deaf ears. Mindful of the school’s reputation, the principal tries to calm the anxious mothers but his underling, Nozawa (Yasuo Daichi), cooly absolves himself of all responsibility insensitively telling the parents that their children’s actions are obviously a reflection of poor parenting rather than a reaction to conditions at the school. 

As crude as that sounds, it’s accidentally echoed in another of the children’s demands in that they reject the idea that “children are robbers of parents’ lives”. Many of them are dealing with some degree of familial discord, often caused by the socio-economic stresses of the Bubble era in which everyone works all the time. The parents of ringleader Eiji (Kenichiro Kikuchi) are always arguing because his father is never around to help out at home, claiming that his golf weekends etc are essential work activities while his mother complains she’s worn out expected to handle the domestic responsibilities all alone. The broody Hiroshi (Toshitada Nabeshima) resents his mother for never being home, forever off working and communicating with him largely through answerphone messages. Nakao (Ken Ohsawa), the most studious of the boys, complains that he doesn’t really like the subjects he’s forced to study and only goes to cram school to please his parents. Hitomi (Rie Miyazawa), a female student who ends up joining the group later, is often left to her own devices with her father away working in Mexico and her mother always off “playing golf” which she seems to suspect is a euphemism for some other activity. 

What the kids want is to be free to be themselves, rejecting the salaryman straitjacket the mainstream world seems to be preparing for them. This being 1988, it goes without saying that the older teachers were children themselves during wartime and the legacy of militarism seems to have endured in their extreme love of order and discipline which has also infected the slightly younger and especially scary Yashiro. The wartime echoes are driven home by the very random find of a WWII tank for some reason hidden in the factory which the kids eventually repurpose and weaponise as part of their resistance, fortifying their hideout with a series of otherwise non-lethal booby traps to keep the authorities out even after the principal orders armed troops in. In the final confrontation, Nozawa turns up wearing a WWII German uniform only to be humiliatingly defeated by one of the gang’s Mousetrap-esque devices. 

Their rebellion, however, remains temporary and goodnatured, culminating in a beautiful fireworks display that has the adults admiring their artistry, while they later appear dressed once again in their school uniforms apparently considering their next revolutionary act. A Bubble-era time capsule, Seven Days War has much in common with other ‘80s kids movies, but positions its contemporary teens at the intersection of the authoritarian past and the consumerist present each of which conspire to rob them of their freedom but in their own way fighting back for their right to be themselves in a still conformist society.

Music video (no subtitles)

You’ll Fall For Me (君は僕をスキになる, Takayoshi Watanabe, 1989)

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Two mismatched friends find themselves caught up in an ironic love square in Takayoshi Watanabe’s infinitely charming Christmas rom-com, You’ll Fall for Me (君は僕をスキになる, Kimi wa Boku wo Suki ni Naru). A bubble-era nonsense comedy filled with surreal humour and zany gags along with genuine heart, the film pits friendship against love but not only of the romantic kind as the two women each consider acts of selflessness in knowing that pursuing, or preventing the other from pursuing, their romantic destiny will necessarily cause each of them pain. 

Beginning in the summer the film opens with a bizarre incident in which mousy pudding-obsessed librarian Tomoko (Yuki Saito) thinks she sees her neighbour across the way, Chika (Kuniko Yamada), jump off the roof of a nearby building only it turns out to be a strange practical joke. Chika certainly has a flair for the dramatic along with an unusual personality that has made her something of an outcast at her office job while even her friendship with Tomoko seems somewhat one-sided with her constant refrains of “you’re my best friend!” which are generally met by a blunt reply from Tomoko of “we’re not friends”. In any case, Chika’s current dilemma is that she doesn’t have a date lined up for Christmas Eve and thinks she’s jinxed because she always seems to get dumped right before the big day, while Tomoko is rather shy and it seems had no expectations of getting a boyfriend anyway. 

Their prospective suitors are a couple of salarymen, the feckless son of a CEO, Kyosuke (Masaya Kato), and his nerdy best friend Junpei (Senri Oe) who like Tomoko is a spectacles wearer. The pair have a typical meet cute when they bump into each other at a crossing and knock each other’s glasses off, each ending up with the wrong pair and not realising until it’s too late. Meanwhile, at the office, Kyosuke is being pressured by his father (Jo Shishido) to embrace adult responsibility and meet a prospective candidate for an arranged marriage who looks suspiciously like Chika though Kyosuke never looks at the photo. To get him off his back, he says he’s dating a woman from the company. Because he’s just that popular, a stage event is organised at which Kyosuke is supposed to announce who it is he has his eye on but he scandalises just about everyone by naming Chika who wasn’t really in the running. 

In the opening scenes, however, the guys had been indulging in a bit of 80s excess dribbling champagne from a helicopter some of which had rained down on Tomoko as if anointing her from above. She ends up having a second meet cute, this time with Kyosuke, who accidentally hypnotises her to think she’s a dog leading her to then attack him. A similar thing happens to Chika who is looked after by Junpei after having too much to drink on a date with Kyosuke at a nightclub where Tomoko had also agreed to go on an awkward date with Junpei. Inconveniently, the entirely mismatched Kyosuke ends up falling for the mousy charms of Tomoko who at this point doesn’t know that he’s “dating” Chika.

While the film presents an interesting picture of women in the workplace at the height of the bubble era, it also subtly undermines the prevailing consumerist culture of the age while preserving the romanticisation of Christmas. They two women each want to find a boyfriend to spend Christmas Eve with partly for reasons of social status and partly because they are simply quite lonely, Chika in particular very invested in her friendship with Tomoko while she, much more introverted, seems continually exasperated but despite herself allows Chika to dominate her existence. After becoming aware of their romantic conflict, the two women end up spending Christmas Eve together at a nice restaurant prioritising friendship over romance until one of them realises the other is unhappy and after discovering a note from their suitor asking them to meet in a local park chooses to spend the rest of the evening alone so her friend can go get her man. 

Then again, there’s a clear idea that Tomoko in particular is undergoing a kind of transformation signalling her shift away from Junpei by deciding to get contacts, putting on lipstick, and dressing in a slightly less mousy fashion while Chika’s attempt to become the sort of woman that Kyosuke would date by dressing and acting more like the other women in the office largely backfires. Meanwhile Kyosuke and Junpei are also changing, Kyosuke giving up his womanising ways and becoming more serious in his pursuit of Tomoko while Junpei comes to appreciate the vulnerable force of nature that is Chika. The film takes its title from Kyosuke’s attempt at hypnotising Tomoko into falling in love with him only to find that he’s the one who’s fallen under her spell as they move towards the anticipated Christmas Eve climax accompanied by the now classic song by Tatsuro Yamashita. Faced with the choice, the women do indeed choose friendship over love but discover that it isn’t really a choice at all because they both just want their friend to be happy even if it means a lonely Christmas for themselves as the ironic role reversal of the closing coda makes clear.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Tatsuro Yamashita – Christmas Eve