Tag: 1990s

Phantom of the Toilet (トイレの花子さん, Joji Matsuoka, 1995)

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A transfer student quickly becomes the magnet for the anxieties of her classmates amid an ongoing spate of serial murders of primary school children in Joji Matsuoka’s kids adventure movie Phantom in the Toilet (トイレの花子さん, Toiret no Hanako-san). Loosely inspired by the classic urban legend about the ghost of a little girl who haunts school toilets, the film is less a horror movie than a tale of bullying, mass hysteria, and the ways in which childish emotions can spiral out of control.

Natsumi’s (Ai Maeda) no stranger to that herself. A tomboy, she’s largely excluded from the group of popular girls at her school and exists in a rather liminal space. Her older brother Takuya (Takayuki Inoue) is in the year above, but predictably doesn’t like being bothered by his little sister at school and is for some reason embarrassed by the fact his widowed father is a milkman. Nevertheless, he’s incredibly earnest and righteous and volunteers for various things at the school like the student council. Natsumi’s problems begin when the popular girls insist on doing a Ouija board to find out the identity of a serial killer who’s already killed two children their age from different schools. Natsumi doesn’t realise that it’s a trick the other girls are playing on her, but the Ouija board says the killer is Hanako, the toilet ghost, and Natsumi is the next victim.

Meanwhile, a new girl joins their school in Takuya’s class and is immediately resented by the popular girls because she’s pretty and clever, so obviously they turn against her. Chief among the complaints against Saeko (Yuka Kono) is that she used the cubicle at the end of the girls’ toilets which supposedly belongs to Hanako, because obviously she doesn’t yet know this bit of school lore. After a series of odd things happen, including the murder of the school’s pet goat, everyone comes to the conclusion that Saeko must be possessed by Hanako and is planning to murder them all. Even Natsumi has her doubts, but eventually decides to defend Saeko while Takuya, who seems to have a crush on her, eventually gives in to peer pressure despite his promises to protect her and vision of himself as someone who does the right thing.

To that extent, it isn’t really Hanako that haunts the children so much as the idea of her is misused as a means of social control. A silly rumour soon gives way to mass hysteria as the popular girls bring more of the children over to their side to gang up on Saeko while the teachers are largely absent or oblivious. While in another film the kids might band together to look for the killer of the other children and thereby protect themselves and each other, instead they become ever more paranoid and the outsider figure of Saeko becomes the focus of all their negative emotions from the jealousy of the other girls to the uncertainness of Takuya who doesn’t know what to do with his confusing feelings for Saeko. In a touching moment, he replies via writing on the blackboard rather than speaking when Saeko uses it to communicate with him after losing her voice, but later ends up shouting at her to go away and leave him alone. “Silence means you agree,” one his classmates points out when Takuya attempts to abstain from an otherwise unanimous vote to subject Saeko to a kind of test akin to a ducking stool to prove whether or not she really is Hanako. Only Natsumi remains on her side.

Meanwhile, the real child killer hovers in the background like an abstract threat before finally invading the school like a refugee from a slasher movie. Swinging his scythe around, his crazed moaning may prove too prove frightening for younger audiences while not even Natsumi’s father and their teacher can stop him from murderous wandering. In the end, the “real” Hanako surfaces but as a more benevolent figure who calls the kids back to the school and creates a more positive sense of mob mentality as they all shine their torches on the killer as if confronting him with what he is and what he’s done. The curse itself is lifted as the other kids rally round to save Saeko and finally accept her as one of them. A charming exploration of a 90s childhood from Grandpa playing Nintendo shogi to the looming anxieties of stranger danger, the ultimate message is one of solidarity and friendship as Hanako helps the kids let go of their petty disagreements to confront the real monster and save each other.

Trailer (no subtitles)

XX: Beautiful Hunter (XX ダブルエックス 美しき狩人, Masaru Konuma, 1994)

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An assassin raised inside a weird Catholic hitman cult begins to reassess her life after falling for a reporter trying to expose the cult’s wrongdoings in Masaru Konuma’s adaptation of the novel by Mangetsu Hanamura, XX Beautiful Hunter (XX ダブルエックス 美しき狩人, XX: Utsukushiki Karyudo). In the classic V-Cinema mode, the film is a guns and girls crime thriller, though in other ways perhaps unusual in exploring the heroine’s gradual liberation in the wake of her sexual awakening. 

Shion (Makiko Kuno) comes of age twice, in the sense that in the opening sequence in which she undergoes a kind of baptism to become a “warrior of God,” she appears to get her period shortly after shooting her first target. Raised by the priest whom she calls “Father”, Shion is an emotionless killing machine with seemingly no thoughts at all beyond completing her mission. She does not even really seem to subscribe to the religion and is killing because Father told her to rather than for the glory of God while most of her targets are political figures that have become inconvenient. We can see both how little women are valued in this world and what a bad guy Ishizaki is when he uses his wife as a human shield before being dispassionately assassinated by Shion who does not particularly care about the collateral damage as long her primary target is killed. When the reporter she falls in love with, Ito (Johnny Okura), asks her what she’d do if he tried to run in a crowded public place, she says that she’d shoot him and that a lot of people would die, as if didn’t matter to her on either moral or practical grounds. Strangely, no one seems to react very much to the sound of a gun being fired even when Shion uses hers to bust open a coin locker, so perhaps she simply doesn’t worry about the laws of man.

But she is rattled by Ito’s photo of her executing his friend Sakuma because it reflects something of herself she didn’t want to see and has perhaps been repressing. Ito suggests that maybe she just likes killing people, which seems to bother Shion on some level, but an attempt to masturbate with her gun does indeed suggest a link between killing and sexual pleasure. It is though sexual contact with Ito that seems to awaken her when he rather strangely begins giving her oral sex after tearing at her clothes pleading for his life. As though imprinting on him, Shion becomes fascinated by Ito and the “normality” he represents. He gives her a crash course in dating while seemingly deprogramming her by getting her to eat meat and do “normal” things like going on drives in her sports car. Shion also starts dressing in more noticeably feminine fashions echoing the link between her baptism and coming of age with the suppression of her womanhood. 

It’s through this sexual liberation that Shion begins to break away from her programming and ask questions of the cult such as who her real parents were. Father seems to have a stoical attitude, exclaiming that “women are all the same” as if he knew this day would come and that Shion has evolved on falling in love. He seems to welcome this development on one level, but at the same time reduces Shion from the beautiful weapon he’s created to maternal vessel in suggesting that her true destiny lies in childbirth and that his dream is to hold her child whom he will presumably also train as an assassin. 

Meanwhile, the cult also paradoxically tries to use sex to control by subjecting her to a torture session at the hands of a lesbian dominatrix who insists she’ll show her a heaven men can never know and make her forget all about men. She does this by inserting a giant electrified dildo, which paints a very confusing picture of the cult’s views on sex, whether hetero or homosexual, penetrative or not. Ito turns up to “save” her, but thankfully it isn’t a case of a random man walking in and taking over, so much as providing a distraction for Shion to save herself while further empowering her with the motivation of love. In this world, however, love is futile and elusive. Even after freeing herself from the oppressive control of Father, Shion loses everything and intends to end her life only to turn around with another gesture of defiance though whether one of the killing machine reasserting itself or the desire for life overriding her nascent pain is difficult to say.

Danger Point: The Road to Hell (Danger Point: 地獄への道, Yasuharu Hasebe, 1991)

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A pair of hitmen find themselves conflicted when their latest target dies gripping the photo of an innocent-looking nurse. Who was this man, what’s his relationship to the woman in the photo, and why did he have to die? Asking questions is taboo when you’re a hired killer, and you’re probably better off not knowing anyway, but there’s something that’s bugging veteran executioner Joji (Jo Shishido) and it’s not just the missing 20 million dollars.

Nikkatsu veteran Yasuharu Hasebe’s V-Cinema noir Danger Point (Danger Point: 地獄への道, Jigoku e no Michi) is a classic tale of nihilistic fatalism in which the bond between the two assassins is tested by the intervention of greed and mystery. Shishido’s Joji is the more old-fashioned of the pair yet fascinated by the mystery behind Sakai’s death, not necessarily wondering if he bears any culpability but confused about why he had to die despite not actually having the missing money. This puts Joji partially at odds with the younger Ken, a more dynamic and less morally ambivalent figure played by the contemporary star Show Aikawa who’d come to represent for V-Cinema what Shishido once had for Nikkatsu action. Together, the chase the various clues they’ve been given looking for the person behind the job and, of course, the missing money.

But the money presents a problem too. Ken begins to wonder if Joji will abandon him and take the prize for himself, though that doesn’t seem to be something that Joji is actively considering. The relationship between the two men is more brotherly than paternal, though Joji does scold Ken for his treatment of Yumi (Nana Okada), the nurse from the hospital and their key witness. He beats and sexually assaults her, though it’s less his lack of chivalry that Joji criticises than the wisdom of bringing a woman into their business. He’s suspicious of Yumi in a way Ken does not seem to be, though they both agree that eventually she’ll have to go before she does them any harm because now she knows too much.

Ultimately, the money turns out to be from a bank job in the Philippines that the American criminals were hoping to convert to US dollars in Japan, though predictably everyone wants the whole amount for themselves, not least Joji and Ken along with the kingpin’s horse-loving girlfriend Saeko (Miyuki Ono) who is playing her own side of the game. Neither Saeko nor Yumi do very well out of this particular affair and are each constrained by the men around them. While Yumi was apparently seduced and abandoned by corrupt cop Sakai, Saeko is hemmed in by her gangster boyfriend Takamura (Hideo Murota) and seeks escape through stealing the money with the help of Sakai, one way or another, at least. Though this world doesn’t seem to want to let either of them have it while the  men fight over the spoils in a desperate struggle to assert dominance over the situation.

As the ironic “Dead End” sign at the film’s conclusion implies, however, that chasing money is a fool’s errand and leads only to hell. A chase past the no entry signs into an industrial complex suggests that this world is not quite fully formed or in the process of falling apart. The ironic and strangely obvious product placement for Perrier sparkling mineral water might hint at a more sophisticated world the hitmen are on one level trying to inhabit, but in other ways their presence is incongruous. They belong to an earlier time as does this hidden world of bank robberies, smuggled cash, criminal gangs and fixers that seem out of place amid the tail end of the Bubble era. Or in that sense at least, perhaps it’s Japan heading for a crash desperately chasing the riches that seem only slightly out of reach. Nevertheless, there’s a genuine sense of mystery that leads Ken and Joji to their final destination in which they discover that it might not be greed that does for them after all, but in an odd way, love. Their desire for togetherness and fear of separation in the end can have only one conclusion and as much as it is the money that leads them to their doom, it’s loneliness and brotherhood that eventually seal their fate.

The Hitman: Blood Smells Like Roses (ザ・ヒットマン 血はバラの匂い, Teruo Ishii, 1991)

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After his fiancée is killed during a yakuza shootout in a restaurant, a former spy in training plots revenge in Teruo Ishii’s Hitman: Blood Smells Like Roses (ザ・ヒットマン 血はバラの匂い, The Hitman: Chi wa Bara no Nioi). Ishii has been in retirement for 12 years before making the film but steps right into the zeitgeist with his bubble-era nightclub opening in which a yakuza goon pretends to be the son of a stockbroker to seduce a young woman he intends to press into prostitution, while looking back to classic noir and the borderless action past.

The young woman is rescued, though not soon enough to escape harm, by the titular hitman, Takanashi (Hideki Saijo), though he does not intervene to save her, only to take out the trio of yakuza who were one side of the gun battle in which his fiancée Reiko (Mikiko Ozawa) was killed. Reiko’s innocence is emphasised by her position as a teacher at a Christian school which is directly contrasted with the sleazy world of contemporary Shinjuku in which Takanashi becomes involved with a series of women. The Asia Town that he strays into is another international space with its samba bars and Filipina hostesses, while Takanashi is later sent to track a boat coming in from the Philippines which is thought to be smuggling guns. 

That’s a tip off he receives from Nakatsuka (Kiyoshi Nakajo), an old mentor from the defence academy who now works for the Cabinet Intelligence and Research Office, the nation’s primary intelligence authority. Nakatsuka is also seen meeting with the police chief who tells him that the yakuza have been complaining that police are encouraging the gang war rather than trying to stop it. So much the better, Nakatsuka says, let them massacre each other then take them all out right before the election to manipulate public opinion. If the election goes their way, the police chief will have additional budget to hire more policemen. Thus Takanashi also becomes a kind of pawn in cynical political machinations conducted by Nakatsuka and CIRO who are helping him both out of friendship and sympathy and because it is useful for him to make use of Takanashi and his desire for revenge. Only veteran policeman Uchino (Tetsuro Tanba) smells a rat, but even he later lets Takanashi go after making a moral judgement that justice has been served and Takanashi hasn’t really done anything wrong.

And so Takanashi tries to avenge Reiko by setting the gangs against each other in a recreation of the original gang war. He’s first frustrated and then aided by Shinjuku party girl Rumi (Natsumi Nanase) who steals his briefcase and gives it to the yakuza, and also be her friend Hisako (Yuki Semba) whom he meets after ducking into a soapland to escape the police. Hisako’s apartment is well furnished with even the modern convenience of an exercise bike, while Rumi’s feels empty, like a hideout with its bare floors and sparse decor. The walls are decorated with posters for Casablanca and Bonnie and Clyde that bring home and older noir past that Takanashi is echoing in his quest to avenge Reiko’s death at the hands of a crime-ridden society. We’re told that he gave up his place at the defence academy and became a truck driver when his parents objected to their marriage, but now fulfils his destiny in tackling the yakuza threat head on.

Meanwhile, as a kind of counter to Rumi, Hisako, and Yasuda’s girlfriend, Kumasa’s woman Beniko (Kimiko Yo) who is very much involved in policy decisions and actively fights back in defence of Kumasa who is otherwise a bit useless. The film is sleazy from its opening rape sequence to the soapland escapade and inexplicable closing credits which consist of a number of raunchy gravure shots backed by a power ballad that otherwise have little to do with the rest of the film, but is perhaps less cynical that it appears or at least seems to edge away from nihilism towards something that appreciates that a more emotional, poetic kind of justice is possible and valid. Takanashi is allowed to complete his quest, though it incurs additional casualties, and then leave the scene having achieved a kind of closure and brought the cycle to an end leaving the rest to Nakatsuka and Uchino who now seems to have crossed over to Nakatsuka’s side if perhaps lamenting that he may be working far too hard to a achieve a justice that now seems surprisingly easy to enact.

Burning Dog (襲撃 ＢＵＲＮＩＮＧ　ＤＯＧ, Yoichi Sai, 1991)

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Freedom lies outside the confines of Japan In Yoichi Sai’s gritty crime thriller Burning Dog (襲撃 BURNING DOG, Shugeki Burning Dog). As the film’s name suggests, Shu (Seiji Matano) is a man on fire looking for a way out. When he’s betrayed by a gang member who shoots him and tries to make off with the do., He hot tails it back to Okinawa but as his old friend Takuji reminds him, he’s still in Japan and not as far from Tokyo as he might like to think. 

Takuji welds his desire for a fake passport against him to convince Shu to participate in his plan to rob a nearby American base on payday. For his part, he doesn’t really know what he wants to do with the money, but later tells his wife Ryoko that they could go anywhere together which is to say the money represents freedom in the ability to escape Japan. Then again, Takuji tells her that they could go the three of them, including his minion Koji who has been sleeping with Ryoko seemingly with his knowledge. There’s a strange kind of homoeroticism between Takuji and Koji that suggests that at least from Takuji’s view it’s a kind of proxy relationship. He allows Koji to sleep with his wife because he can’t actually sleep with him, though he doesn’t really appear to like his wife very much either. Shu tells him off when he first arrives in Okinawa for taking him to a club to look for women, pointing out that he has a wife at home, though Takuji describes her as a kind of inheritance and otherwise chases sex workers while dreaming of a life in which he’s not treated like “garbage” in particular by the Americans. 

“Women never forget when they’ve been wronged,” Shu warns Takuji, though it might also go for his relationship with former flame Mei who also took part in the traumatic bank robbery 10 years previously in which one of their teammates shot a policeman and then got killed. Mei now works at a furniture shop supplying Japanese-style furnishings to the resident Americans including Captain Ford, Takuji’s mark who apparently has no combat experience or chance for promotion but does have a drinking problem and a susceptibility to bribes. The fact he smuggles drugs out from the American base is more literal representation of the corruption caused by the ongoing presence of the American military. The Americans are currently involved in the Gulf War, which according to Takuji is why they’ve taken their eye off the ball. Huge amounts of money are flying through Okinawa to pay soldiers and they won’t be expecting anyone to try to steal it. 

The robbery is then a way of rebelling against the dominance of the American military and the marginalisation of men like Takuji. Captain Ford, meanwhile, may actually be smarter than he looks and a little bit ahead of the game or perhaps not far enough ahead while Mei’s allegiance seems uncertain. Shu’s isn’t all that clear either, but in any case just like back in Tokyo committing a heist together doesn’t so much bring people together as tear them apart. Someone’s double crossed them. It isn’t clear who, but it might not matter to Shu whose only goal has been to leave Japan completely with some money he could actually spend unlike the loot from the Tokyo heist which still hasn’t been laundered. He can’t take it all, but at the same time he may not want to share it and is willing to blast away his last chance at romance or redemption in attempt to escape his traumatic past.

Which is all to say, there are no real winners in this nihilistic game. As much as Shu is an antihero outsider trying to rebel against the constraints of Japanese society, he’s also a rampant misogynist sexually abusing the girlfriends of his targets for information and striking women who displease him while pushed to extremes geographical, social, and psychological. But like many of the hero’s of V-Cinema, the truth is that there is no real place for men like him in post-bubble Japan and only finally breaking free of its constraints can he hope to reclaim his identity and live as a free man.

Stranger (夜のストレンジャー 恐怖, Shunichi Nagasaki, 1991)

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Driving through the city by night, a young woman finds herself plagued by a mysterious force while struggling to break out of her self-imposed inertia in Shunichi Nagasaki’s moody thriller, Stranger (夜のストレンジャー 恐怖). The film’s Japanese title, “night stranger terror”, perhaps more clearly hints at a sense of urban threat while surrounded by so many unfamiliar people, yet it is in many ways Kiriko’s (Yuko Natori) mistrust and suspicion that isolates her from the surrounding society and keeps her trapped in a kind of limbo unable to escape her past.

It might be tempting to read her aloofness as a direct consequence of her experiences, but in an early scene when she was still a bank employee we hear a colleague criticise her for being “anti-social” while Kiriko’s rejection of her seems born more of contempt than shyness or a preference for solitude. Working as a cashier at the bank at the tail end of the bubble is a pretty good job, especially given the still prevailing sexism of the working environment, that positions Kiriko firmly within an aspirant middle-class. She still lives at home surrounded by her family, but is in a relationship with a man who pressures her for money to invest in the stock market. She begins embezzling and lives as if there’s no tomorrow, splashing out on fancy sunglasses before meeting her boyfriend having left work early feigning illness. Unfortunately for her, she gets caught and her boyfriend predictably abandons her.

Just like the asset bubble, her life implodes and plunges her into a lower social stratum as a woman with a criminal conviction for financial impropriety and a hefty debt in needing to pay back the money she stole from the bank for her ex’s harebrained stock speculation schemes. All in all, you could say she’s been betrayed by economic forces, but also as she later admits, but her own uncertain desires in being wilfully deceived by Akiyama (Takashi Naito) and making a clear choice to defraud the bank. She realises that it might not have been a desire to please Akiyama that led her to do it, but the illicit thrill she felt in tapping away on her keyboard stealing the money and otherwise being in a position of economic power over a man, buying him things and taking him out for fancy food. Her sense of malaise is only deepened when she meets Akiyama by chance and tries to tell him all this, but he isn’t really interested. He seems to have moved on and planning to marry another woman. 

Kiriko tries to look at his hands to see if he has burn scars like the man who attacked her in her taxi, but he doesn’t. Perhaps there was a small part of her that wanted it to be him. At least if it was, it would mean he still felt something for her, which would also prove that he ever did. And it would make sense, which is less frightening than her stalker just being a nutty fare, another irate man with a nondescript grudge wandering the city. Taxi driver is one of the few jobs open to her with a criminal record, but it’s also an unusual profession for a woman which further isolates her in her working environment. Her boss keeps calling her “little lady,” while patronisingly offering to put her on the day shift because it’s less dangerous. Kijima (Kentaro Shimizu), an obnoxious colleague, picks at Kiriko for thinking everyone who strikes up a conversation must be sexually interested in her. But the truth is that they are and like Kijima demand her attention. When they don’t get it they’re pissed off. The cab is perhaps the place she feels the most safe, though she faces her fair share of weird fares from drunk men trying to flirt to religious maniacs proselytising from the back seat. 

Now living alone in an apartment, her aloofness is both a personal preference and means of punishing herself. When her brother calls, he encourages her to come home but she says she can’t even though she wants to because she hasn’t yet dealt with her past or taken steps towards being able to forgive herself. She tells Kijima, who in truth behaves in an incredibly creepy way that suggests she’s right to avoid him, that she wonders if she isn’t the only one who can see the mysterious Land Cruiser, as if she were really imagining it. The Land Cruiser does indeed come to stand in for the buried past by which Kiriko is haunted and her eventual besting of it is a symbolic act that suggests she’s finally managed to overcome her guilt and shame to be able to leave the past behind.

As she told Kijima, this was something only she could do by her own hand or none. Akiyama’s dismissiveness of her reflects the fact that he couldn’t give her this absolution either, she needed to find it for herself. Kijima accused her of still being hung up on the guy that scammed her, but that wasn’t quite it. The resolution might hint at his being right when he told her that she needed to learn to trust people more in that it seems to lead to a greater willingness to open herself up to the world. Once again, her sunglasses get broken as a new truth becomes visible to her. A lonely little boy she meets who, like her, enjoys driving in circles and going nowhere, probes her lack of human connection by suggesting that she doesn’t know what it’s like to love someone which is why she can’t understand his obviously inappropriate love for her, though it’s a fact that Kiriko has to acknowledge is truth in interrogating the reality of her relationship with Akiyama.

Nevertheless, in the end, she saves herself and embraces her solitude and independence looking out at the peaceful bay in a city that no longer seems so threatening even if the unseen threat in this case did turn out to be random and have no rational explanation. Nagasaki never again worked in the realms of V-Cinema and his entry is fairly atypical in starring an older, established actress as an action lead while requiring no nudity or sexual content, instead quite literally allowing her to grab the wheel and take control of her life to claim freedom and independence rather than solely romantic fulfilment.

Neo Chinpira: Zoom Goes the Bullet (ネオ チンピラ 鉄砲玉ぴゅ～, Banmei Takahashi, 1990)

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In the classic yazkua films of old, going to prison for the gang could be a badge of honour and one of the ways you could catapult yourself into the higher ranks. By the 1990s, however, the yakuza is a much depleted force and it seems few are willing to give up years of their lives on a point of honour for an uncertain reward. At least, that’s how it is for most of the gangsters at the centre of Banmei Takahashi’s Neo Chinpira: Zoom Goes the Bullet (ネオ チンピラ 鉄砲玉ぴゅ～, Neo Chinpira: Teppodama Pyu) , a slacker comedy in which a young hanger on faces a dilemma when he’s made the lookout on a squad sent to bump off a rival only for his squamates go to great lengths to injure themselves first so they won’t have to go through with it.

Junko (Sho Aikawa) is an unlikely hero. With a rockabilly quiff and a red jacket, he’s nominally the driver for gangster Yoshikawa (Toru Minegishi) which means he gets to drive his limo and act like a big man for a while making calls on his carphone. But as much as Junko shows off to his girlfriend Noriko, a hostess at a Korean bar, by instructing the landlady not to clear up his empty bottles because they’ll make a good weapon in an emergency, he’s otherwise something of a joke. The limo ends up getting “stolen” by a young woman who just likes American cars and sexually aroused by gunfire.

Even Yumeko (Chikako Aoyama) chuckles that Junko sounds like a girl when he says he wants to see the ocean while they’re driving around. “Junko” is ordinarily a girl’s name. He picked it up as a kind of hazing based on an alternate reading of his name kanji. She says the same thing again when he reveals he’s never brought a girl back to his place before, probably because it’s in a disused building he was given to manage where he’s surrounded by junk like an old barber’s chair and pinball machine while the figure of Humphrey Bogart in the Maltese Falcon looks down at him from a poster as if embodying his unattainable gangster dreams. As masculine icons go, Junko is also plagued by his uncle, Mizuta (Joe Shishido), a legendary gangster and representative of old school yakuza who take the code seriously and wouldn’t put up with people like Junko’s colleagues who engage in “zooming”, deliberately shooting themselves to get out of being ordered to carry out a hit. He’s not overly impressed by Junko either, unable to understand why he’d become an errand boy for a petty gangster rather than be his own boss as a small-time crook.

Junko’s dilemma is whether he’s really up to this task and will be to go through with it or will end up chickening out and injuring himself too. Crows are more cowardly than they seem, Yumeko explains in an obvious allegory for the yakuza. They pick a place and defend it as a group, while their numbers are way up lately so their individual turfs are shrinking. But now Junko’s all on his own and filled with uncertainty not knowing if he can pass this rite of passage and be accorded a man or will forever be trapped in a liminal space of adolescence never to be taken seriously or make any progress in his life. In an effort to toughen up, he swaps his red jacket for a suit and finally puts on a shiny leather overcoat, ripping off the buttons to bind it more tightly around him with the belt as if it were a kind of armour. 

Somehow the lighthearted ridiculousness of this world of bumbling yakuza and creepy corrupt cops lends an additional poignancy to Junko’s final gesture as he sets off on his path, not really believing he will return. He doesn’t even wait for the pictures he had taken at a photo booth. They won’t be much use to him where he’s going, but at the same time it’s like he’s treading water never quite getting closer to his destination but continuing along his long sad walk. Banmei Takahashi sticks firmly to his pink film roots, sticking in a weird sex scene at regular intervals as Yumeko becomes enraptured by pistols, but also has quite a lot of fun with his “uncool” gangsters and the lost young man who looks up to them while perhaps knowing that this image of stone cold masculinity only really exists in the movies.

The Phantom Lover (夜半歌聲, Ronny Yu, 1995)

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For his last film in Hong Kong before decamping to Hollywood, Ronny Yu looked back to a lost classic in loosely remaking 1937’s Song at Midnight, itself loosely based on Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera. A Hong Kong/Singapore co-production, the film was, perhaps surprisingly, shot entirely in Beijing where Yu constructed an opulent set including a full-scale replica of the theatre which he then burnt down for real during the legendary climax of the classic story. 

Set in 1936 (one year before the release of A Song at Midnight and the intensification of the Sino-Japanese war), the film opens with a gothic scene of carriages racing through the fog. A troupe of left-wing actors has come to make use of a ruined theatre to put on their revolutionary play. On arrival, the troupe’s leading man Wei Qing (Lei Huang), who is in a relationship with leading lady Landie (Liu Lin) but claims he is too poor to marry so they will have to wait until he’s famous, is captivated by the auditorium, convinced he can hear strange sounds of a woman singing. The strangeness of the surroundings continues to bother him until he finally decides to ask creepy caretaker Uncle Ma (Cheung Ching-Yuen)to disclose what he knows of the fire which destroyed the theatre 10 years previously. 

Counter-intuitively, Yu shoots the ‘30s sequence in a washed-out sepia with occasional flashes of colour almost like hand-tinted photographs. As Ma spins his story, we transition into a sumptuous world of reds and golds in the old opera house designed, as we’re told, by the famous actor Song Danping (Leslie Cheung Kwok-Wing) who is said to have perished along with it in the fire. Danping, to whom Wei Qing is constantly likened, was the greatest actor of the age famous for his performances in Western theatre, such as the Mandarin musical adaptation of Romeo and Juliet in which he was performing immediately before his death. In a case of life imitating art, Danping had fallen in love with the daughter of a wealthy family, Yuyan (Geng Xiao-Lin), and wished to marry her, but actors belong to an undesirable underclass and in any case, Yuyan’s father had already arranged her marriage to the idiot son of a powerful politician, Zhao (Bao Fang), in exchange for smoothing the path for his new factory enterprise. 

In a direct reversal of the 1937 film, it is Wei Qing who is the left-wing revolutionary proudly singing communist songs about the “national humiliation” which, it seems, partly accounts for their low audience numbers, while Danping is the reactionary libertine performing in “decadent” Western theatre which seemingly has no political import other than its capacity to cause annoyance to the conservative older generation extremely concerned about Danping’s effect on the local young women. With that in mind, it seems strange that Wei Qing is so quick to accept Danping’s offer once he finally reveals himself and drops the playbook for Romeo and Juliet into his hands. Nevertheless he is content to accept the older man’s tutelage, hoping that the increased revenue will save the troupe and, as implied earlier, he doesn’t actually seem to be very invested in the idea of revolution so much becoming famous. 

Nevertheless, it turns out that he does indeed have integrity. To gain additional funding, the troupe’s leaders end up schmoozing with none other than Zhao, the man who eventually married Yuyan after the fire but quickly discarded her on learning she was not a virgin. Now apparently having risen in politics in Shanghai, Zhao is a misogynistic bully carrying a grudge towards women because of his humiliation by Yuyan. In the scene in which we re-meet him, no longer quite so moronic but definitely nastier, he forces his dining companion to eat 60 meat buns because she had the temerity to declare herself full and try to leave the table. When Wei Qing snaps at him he takes a liking to Landie who is more or less pimped out by the impresario in the same way that Yuyan was sold by her father to the Zhaos in order to further his business interests. On discovering Yuyan, who has since descended into madness, wandering the streets, he stops his carriage to give her a public whipping, ranting about how he had her 10 years preciously but she turned out to be a “slut” who’d already slept with the famous actor Song Danping which seems like a curious thing to announce in the public square. 

Then again, these fascist stooges have an odd approach to public humiliation, stopping Danping’s play mid-performance to call out Yuyan which seems like a counter-intuitive and extremely embarrassing move when they could simply have dragged her out of her box. Danping strikes a minor victory for art when he get the goons ejected from the theatre by the irate audience who, he points out, have had their evening spoiled by officials misusing their authority for a spot of personal pettiness. The intervention is mirrored in the film’s conclusion with the “villains” effectively put on trial in the theatre, as theatre, with an appeal made to law enforcement which is eventually successful as the police commander affirms his intention to act for the public good (though in this case is also serving his own while ironically giving justification to mob rule). 

Despite all of that, however, the major stumbling block to the tragic romance turns out to narcissistic vanity on the part of former matinee idol Danping who has been hiding himself away even though he knows Yuyan has gone mad in love for him simply because his face was ruined when Zhao’s goons threw acid at it and then locked him in the burning theatre. He contents himself with singing on nights when the moon is full knowing that hearing his voice on such occasions is the only thing keeping her going. On learning of his mentor’s true purpose to make Yuyan think he, the handsome young actor, is the Danping of old, Wei Qing is extremely conflicted, unable to understand why the now ghoulish Danping would put Yuyan through so much grief when he could simply have revealed himself a decade ago. Nevertheless, realising the intensity of the romantic suffering all around him perhaps pushes him towards ”forgiving” Landie for having schmoozed with Zhao. 

Full on gothic melodrama, Yu’s adaptation of the classic story is all fog and cobwebs, situating itself in a world which is already falling apart. In photographing the 30s in washed-out greys, he perhaps suggests that something has already faded, or at least become numb, in comparison with the life and colour of mid-20s Shanghai in all its art deco glory. Yet even in giving us a superficially happy ending in which justice, moral and romantic, appears to have been served Yu denies us the resolution we may be seeking with a melancholy title card reminding us that happiness in the China of 1936 may be a short-lived prospect.

Who’s the Woman, Who’s the Man? (金枝玉葉 2, Peter Chan, 1996)

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“I don’t care if you’re a man or a woman, all I know is that I love you,” the hero had finally accepted after the heroine’s madcap dash across town in the closing scenes of Peter Chan’s 1994 rom-com, He’s a Woman, She’s a Man. But as it turns out, it isn’t quite that simple. Inverting the structure of the first film, sequel Who’s the Man, Who’s the Woman? finds the heroine romantically confused as her “masculine” persona increasingly interferes in her relationship with the still conflicted Sam (Leslie Cheung).

It certainly hasn’t been plain sailing for anyone as Wing (Anita Yuen) agrees to move in to Sam’s luxury flat but refuses to live downstairs as Rose (Carina Lau) had done, instead insisting on sharing his life and his bed in their entirety. For his part, Sam’s reluctance to share his space is reflective of his fears of intimacy while he resents Wing’s immediate attempts to install herself by remodelling the apartment to her own taste. Meanwhile, the old problem has resurfaced in that now he’s got Wing he’s not all that interested in her and hasn’t written any songs in months. In an attempt to manage her interference in his life, Sam suggests resurrecting Wing’s pop career as a male idol but proves a victim of his own success as she quickly begins earning much more money than him and gains the upper hand in the relationship. 

Wing’s increasing masculinity leaves Sam feeling somewhat emasculated while forced into the “feminine” role previously occupied by Rose. Suddenly successful, Wing is offering to pay large sums of money to help Sam fulfil his dreams which only deepens his sense of shame in his inability to earn money for himself. Wing had insisted on living together in the main apartment, but now that she’s so busy suggests moving into Rose’s old flat downstairs so that they can, after all, have their own space. Sam had wanted it that way before, but now that it’s Wing who suggests it, he’s romantically anxious while simultaneously conflicted because he cannot acknowledge their relationship publicly as he is still uncomfortable with people assuming he is “gay”.

All of which is doubly confusing for Wing who is under increasing strain trying to straddle a gender binary. Not only is she trying to deal with Sam’s contradictory behaviour and resentment of his emasculation, but in growing into her masculine role finds herself questioning her sexuality in experiencing unexpected attraction towards other women and in particular the captivating Fan Fan (Anita Mui), a mysterious former pop star who has moved into the downstairs flat after spending many years abroad. Just as Sam had in the previous film, Wing struggles to accept her desires unable to reconcile falling in love with Fan Fan with her love for Sam while Fan Fan in turn falls for her mainly in her femininity in claiming that she has been looking for something kind and innocent that she no longer believed existed in the world. 

“Love can’t be explained,” Sam admits when talking to his decorators, a gay couple who ironically tell him how much it means to them to see a same-sex couple in the public eye, though Sam still refuses to acknowledge the relationship because he doesn’t want to be seen as “gay” and Wing is in any case a woman. Mirroring Sam’s relationship with the openly gay Auntie (Eric Tsang), Fan Fan’s assistant O (Theresa Lee) is a lesbian who is relentlessly courted by Fish (Jordan Chan) despite her constant rejections of him. He tries to present himself as female by shaving his legs and later crossdressing in order to win her heart, only to end up reaffirming O’s avowed homosexuality. For Wing, however, she has only a dilemma in being faced with a choice between her love for Fan Fan and that for Sam which seems as if it may have run its course just Sam’s love for Rose once did. 

Sam only really begins to understand his himself after a more mature discussion with Rose regarding the realities of their relationship, while Fan Fan effectively plays a similar role in sacrificing her own desire believing that Wing belongs with Sam but taking the new hope their love has given her back out into the world. Neatly inverting the first film’s conclusion, it’s Sam who has to make an active choice about what it is he wants though the ironic ending may suggest he doesn’t have much control over his destination either even if discovering he already has what he was looking for.

He’s a Woman, She’s a Man (金枝玉葉, Peter Chan, 1994)

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A frustrated composer in a moribund relationship with his former muse experiences a moment of existential confusion on feeling an unexpected attraction to his latest prospect whom he assumes to be male in Peter Chan’s hilarious meta comedy, He’s a Woman She’s a Man (金枝玉葉). Broadly progressive in its views of gender and sexuality, the film also takes aim at a growing obsession with celebrity in an increasingly consumerist culture. 

The heroine, Wing (Anita Yuen), is a case in point. She’s completely obsessed with the singer May Rose (Carina Lau) to the point that she almost lives her life vicariously through her. Rose’s successes are her successes, while she earns a few extra pennies peddling celebrity tat like Aaron Kwok’s used tissues. Rose meanwhile is riding high professionally by winning yet another reward, but her relationship with songwriter/manager Sam (Leslie Cheung) has clearly run its course. He’s become bored with the “celebrity” lifestyle and hasn’t written anything new in some time while unwilling to admit that he’s fallen out of love with Rose, refusing to take on new proteges because of his habit of falling in love with them.

That’s one reason he finally agrees to take on a male star, assuming there will be no danger of romantic conflict and intending to kick back against celebrity culture if ironically by creating an “everyman” sensation. But unbeknownst to him, Wing has had a male makeover and decided to enter the auditions in the hope of meeting her idols. Unexpectedly picked up for a recording contract during a spat between Rose and Sam, Wing finds herself having to keep up the act but is conflicted on fearing her presence is only deepening the rift between the “perfect couple” whose wedding it is her life goal to witness. 

Even before her makeover, Wing makes repeated references to her atypical gender presentation in lamenting her flat chest, especially in contrast with a rival celebrity hunter she nicknames “big boobs”. She takes lessons in performative masculinity from her roommate and best friend since primary school Yuri (Jordan Chan), who appears to have no romantic interest in her, and stuffs glow sticks down her trousers to make herself feel more “complete”. Yet despite all that, she is always forced to deny her seeming femininity with several people directly asking her if she is “gay” which is a more complicated question than it seems given that she’s a straight woman but currently living as a man. To find out for sure, Rose tries to seduce her in an attempt which is admittedly predatory and ends in a chase around the bed with Wing desperately trying to avoid being accidentally “outed” in an amorous moment. 

Nevertheless, there is a degree of romantic attraction in Wing’s obsession with Rose which is also a reflection of her internalised sense of shame in her atypical femininity as seen in her wide-eyed observation of Rose’s shadow dance as she slips into something more comfortable along with her admission that she always wanted to know what it felt like to touch a breast (because she feels she has none of her own). Even so, she begins to fall for Sam who is slowly being driven out of his mind with romantic confusion in being unable to reconcile his attraction to Wing with his heterosexuality. One of Wing’s closest associates whom he refers to as “Auntie” (Eric Tsang) is an openly gay man who asks him the all important question of whether of what’s really bothering him isn’t Wing’s ambiguous sexuality but his own. The question takes on a meta dimension in the knowledge that Cheung was himself bisexual but at that point not openly. Much as Sam explains, he might personally not have a problem with it but some people in the industry are very “sensitive about this kind of thing”.

Sam doesn’t know that Wing is “really” a woman, which might neatly explain his inexplicable attraction to her, but cannot begin to reconcile himself until he accepts that it “doesn’t matter what you are” because the fact remains that he loves her. Wing might make her final dash in more stereotypically female attire, but she does so in a voluminous white dress which, aside from its matrimonial connotations, further emphasises her lack of conventional femininity in her literal inability to manage it as she attempts to run while trying not to trip over herself. “Too much reality can really get up your nose,” Rose had complained in trying to keep her fantasy of a fairytale romance alive while internally accepting she can no longer be the “ordinary” girl Sam is looking for in a world of celebrity miasma and consumerist aspiration, finally reaching her own moment of self-acceptance just as Wing decides to shoot her shot right into Sam’s tender heart.

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