Tag: 2000s

Survive Style 5+ (Gen Sekiguchi, 2004)

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“What is your function in life?” It is, after all, quite a difficult question as an air stewardess (Tae Kimura) points out when interrogated by an irate British hitman (Vinnie Jones), and perhaps one that most people never really think about. Indeed, many of those questioned struggle with the meaning of “function”, replying with the most obvious answer of their occupation or job title without really considering any deeper implications or whether their existence is really meaningful. The hitman seems to have a secondary mission of eliminating those whom he deems “unnecessary”, while simultaneously giving his only sign of approval to a man who straightforwardly tells him that he doesn’t have one.

Gen Sekiguchi’s Survive Style 5+ is full of this kind of questioning but ultimately a tale of how one learns to survive in an often absurd world. Like many films from the mid-2000s, it cuts between several interwoven plot threads that at first seem nonsensical but finally coalesce into a complete whole. An artist (Tadanobu Asano) repeatedly kills his wife (Reika Hashimoto) who is forever trying to kill him in bizarre ways only for her to respawn back at their very weird Western-style country lodge in the woods. An ad executive (Kyoko Koizumi) becomes fed up with her vain hypnotist boyfriend (Hiroshi Abe) who mocks her career. A salaryman (Ittoku Kishibe) is hypnotised to think that he’s a chicken, and a trio of burglars (Kanji Tsuda, Yoshiyuki Morishita, Jai West) deal with repressed emotion and romantic longing. 

They are all to some extent trying to find some way to survive along with a sense of purpose in their lives. Ad executive Yoko is forever coming up with zany ideas for TV adverts that she records on her dictaphone, sniggering to herself at their surreal humour though she is the only one who finds them funny and her work is often dismissed by her corporate clients who complain that her ads don’t do anything to inform the prospective customer about the nature of the product. Sekiguchi was himself also a director of TV adverts which informs the film’s short and snappy style, and Yoko’s artistic frustrations perhaps echo his own as she tries to fulfil herself creatively while meeting the client’s demands. 

The CEO of the pharmaceuticals company she’s working with (Shinichi Chiba) is forever taking “emergency” calls from his wife about such important issues as the bulb having gone in the bathroom which he treats with the upmost seriousness while admitting that he really doesn’t know how to address any of these domestic issues. Similarly, the salaryman is prevented from living a full family life because of the demands of his job, but becomes a temporary hero after getting tickets to see the sold-out hypnotist. In someways, he might even be happier as a bird which after all offers more “freedom” if only he could learn to fly. While his wife and daughter are most interested in curing him so that he can become a stereotypical salaryman again and fulfil the roles of father and husband by providing for the family, only his son determines to accept his father’s new reality and love him for who he is now. 

The family’s home is designed with an artificial quality giving it the appearance of the set for a TV sitcom, bearing out the ersatz nature of conventional family life in which everyone is forced to bear out their particular “function” without imbuing it with much meaning. When the burglars break in, they too inhabit this space as if they were children who’ve come over to play by sitting down and playing cards rather than looting the place, though it turns out the family don’t actually have very much worth stealing. While Tsuda is forever taking calls from a girlfriend, Morishita and J exchange a series of longing looks but are otherwise unable to express their feelings for each other due to lingering societal homophobia and emotional vulnerability. Only when challenged by the hitman are they able to express their feelings after questioning their own “function in life”.

Jones was clearly hired for his hardman image which he’d successfully brought off the football pitch and into a series of gangster movies in the late 90s, imbuing each of his lines with an absurd intensity which is equally matched by Yoshiyoshi Arawakawa’s comical attempts to echo his intimidating speech patterns as his interpreter though without the physical presence to pull it off. The hitman is quite clearly a harbinger of death, but at the same time it’s his existential probing that points the way towards survival as his various targets are forced to consider what their “function in life” really is and if they’re living in ways that are meaningful and fulfilling. The film’s anarchic production design and deadpan humour add to the sense of surreality as Sekiguchi gleefully ricochets between one storyline and another looking for new modes of survival in an increasingly absurd world.

Survive Style 5+ is currently screening in select UK cinemas and released on UHD/Bluray on 19th October courtesy of Third Window Films.

Trailer (dialogue free)

I Wish I Had a Wife (나도 아내가 있었으면 좋겠다, Park Heung-sik, 2001)

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A lonely bank clerk dreams of married bliss but ignores a promising match right under his nose in Park Heung-sik’s offbeat romcom, I Wish I Had a Wife (나도 아내가 있었으면 좋겠다, . As much about the loneliness and serendipity of city life at the turn of the century, the film takes its time in bringing its two leads together while subtly filling the air with a deep sense of melancholy uncertainty as each attempts to process their deep-seated childhood trauma.

Both Bong-soo (Sul Kyung-gu) and Won-ju (Jeon Do-yeon) are each in their way arrested in childhood have not yet really fully grown up despite being fictional adults with jobs and responsibilities. Bong-soo’s sometime girlfriend, with whom he first reconnects while she’s attending a funeral, remarks that he hasn’t really changed since they were at school though she has been married and divorced. Having lost his mother as a small child, at least part of Bong-soo’s desire to be married seems to have to with searching for a maternal connection and wanting to be taken care of. When the train he is on breaks down and he’s stuck in a tunnel in the dark for over an hour, it saddens him that unlike the other passengers he doesn’t have anyone to call. No one is immediately worried him, nor can he ease his own anxiety by hearing a familiar voice. Though his friend and roommate Hongtak (Seo Tae-hwa) says he could have called him, Bong-soo didn’t want to. He wanted this specific connection with a woman rather than the brotherly camaraderie he has with Hongtak. Nevertheless, he’s irritated when he realises that Hongtak, a confirmed bachelor, is going to get married before him.

Won-ju similarly lost her father in childhood and is also to some extent looking for a reliable male presence which is something she detects in Bong-soo with his dull if stable position at the bank. Like him, she is likened to a child and often depicted on an equal level to those she teaches at the school opposite where Bong-soo works. She finds one of the little girls she teaches crying in the classroom because the other kids said she looks like her and turns it around saying she’s flattered to be compared to someone so pretty before pointing out that it’s probably because they have a similar hairstyle. Won-ju still wears hers in a youthful way that that adds to her air of unsophisticated innocence which stands in strong contrast to the earthy sexuality of Bong-soo’s childhood friend Tae-ran (Jin Hee-kyung).

Like a child, she tries to ask Bong-soo out through a cutesy manoeuvre by using a paying in slip as a confession letter, but he rejects her in an overly harsh way by typing his reply on a receipt and reprimanding her for not taking banking procedures seriously enough. Even so, like many similar films of their era their romance is facilitated by the new technology of video as each is seen to talk into security as a way of communicating with themselves or delivering a message they don’t really intend to be delivered. Bong-soo also does this through the video diaries he records for his future wife, though why he thinks she’s want to watch hours of his monologues is anyone’s guess. Nevertheless, it’s not until he sees Won-ju’s speech to the ATM security camera that he begins to take her seriously as a romantic prospect despite the video not picking up any sound. 

After his relationship with Tae-ran ends badly, Bong-soo gives up doing his magic tricks and becomes cold and cynical, swearing off romance and closing himself off from the serendipity of city life. He might have found Won-ju’s ditsyness irritating with her tendency to drop her change and generally get into some kind of amusing mishap, but later warms to it after seeing her from another angle through the CCTV footage at the bank. Even so, she is not unaware in the irony of Bong-soo’s desire for “a wife” while idly exclaiming she’d like one for herself while Bong-soo points out that what she’s describing is basically a slave which is how wives have been seen even if he insists it’s not that way anymore. Their view of romance is therefore more clear-eyed and realistic, and in its way magical as the edge their way out of monsoon into the relative serenity of the autumnal skies.

Sorum (소름, Yoon Jong-chan, 2001)

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There are different types of ghosts, according to frustrated novelist Lee (Gi Ju-bong) in Yoon Jong-chan’s supernaturally tinged noir, Sorum (소름). Some don’t know they’re dead yet, others possess the bodies of living people. In their own way, the residents of the Migum apartment block all seem to be wandering ghosts themselves, stuck in this place that’s somewhere between life and death that they otherwise seem unable to escape while the building saps the life out of them with its depressing decor and flickering lights.

One might ask themselves why it is that taxi driver Yong-hyeon (Kim Myung-min) has chosen to move in here given that the building is scheduled for demolition. Obviously, the rent is cheap, not least because the previous tenant died in mysterious circumstances, though Yong-hyeon appears to have been unaware of that. Not that it bothers him. For all intents and purposes, he is our hero, a newcomer to this strange and lonely building meeting its ghostly inhabitants for the time. But gradually, we start to wonder about him. Police start sniffing round in connection with the disappearance of a woman said to have embezzled money and borrowed signifiant amounts from friends for no clear purpose. Suspiciously, Yong-hyeon has a bag of women’s jewellery including a ring hidden in his fridge, which would at least have paid a deposit on a nicer apartment if he were able to sell them. 

It’s the ring that attracts the attention of his neighbour, Seon-yeong (Jang Jin-young), who is trapped in an abusive relationship with a man who has a gambling problem. Whether driven or drawn here, Yong-hyeon develops a fascination with Seon-yeong that he later finds difficult to categorise. When she appears before him covered in blood, he helps her bury her husband’s body and then enters a sexual relationship with her that is equally ill-defined. Hearing her say that anyone would have done while arguing with her friend and neighbour Eun-soo (Jo An) causes him to doubt her motivations. Perhaps she’d been waiting for an opportunity to kill her husband and merely made use of his attraction to her to help her do it.

But at the same time, there’s a curiously incestuous quality to their relationship in that Seon-yeong is trapped in the inertia of grief having “lost” her son. Yong-hyeon is an orphan who has no place to call home and on some level is in search of a mother, latching on the maternal quality he sees in Seon-yeong. She buys a scarf for him, as a mother might for a son, while he is touched by her bending down to tie his shoelaces, wondering if his mother would have been kind like her had he had one. Their connection is also echoed in the mysterious history of the apartment in which a woman is said to have been murdered by her husband 30 years previously. The couple had a baby who was left alone there and likely would have starved to death if it had not been for a fire which led to his rescue by other residents. 

The apartment’s previous tenant, aspiring novelist Gwang-tae, had been investigating the murder as material for a book before he died in mysterious circumstances, apparently the victim of a hyper-localised fire which occurred only in the centre of the room. Gwang-tae had claimed that the apartment was haunted by the ghost of a woman singing a lullaby who insisted her son would soon return. Gwang-tae told his girlfriend Eun-soo, pregnant with their child, that he needed to leave this building or something bad would happen to him, but like everyone else, he found himself unable to. His story then becomes fodder Lee, whose latest attempt to make a literary comeback may not all be his work though he continues to try to write the story we are currently watching by constructing a fanciful narrative around Yong-hyeon and the apartment and then convincing himself that what he’s writing is coming true. 

In that sense, he may have an authorial god complex or extreme main character syndrome, while for Yeong-hyeon it’s the opposite. He’s learned to live a carefree life by acting on his impulses and then giving them no more thought. The last thing he wanted to be was the protagonist of this story, though he begins to discover strange and unexpected connections with the building and the tragedy that occurred there 30 years previously. This is the “invisible fear” that Lee proclaims as the high point of his novel, a noirish sense of dread that suddenly reorders an ordinary person’s existence. Yeong-hyeon is no longer someone who exists within the world. The world now exists around him. Lee suggests the ghost in 504 is trying to trap her adult son within this purgatorial space in order to escape her loneliness, just as everyone else is trapped in this building by irresolvable despair. Yeong-hyeon knows he has to get out, but at the same time, where else is there to go? All he can see is the building blinking back at him, refusing to give up its ghosts.

My Sassy Girl (엽기적인 그녀, Kwak Jae-yong, 2001)

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A smash hit and social phenomenon on its original release, My Sassy Girl (엽기적인 그녀, Yeopgijeogin geunyeo) is one of a small number of films from the early 2000s that like Japan’s Densha Otoko drew inspiration from the new media of online blogging and message boards. In a meta touch, the film includes these origins within the action as the hero, Gyeon-woo (Cha Tae-hyun), begins writing about his relationship with a strange and intimidating young woman (Jun Ji-hyun) on the internet only to see his work optioned for major feature film.

In some ways, these meta themes play into the central ideas of fate and time travel while giving the love story a sense of epic, romantic heft. It could be said that in the character of the unnamed woman, the film undercuts contemporary notions of gender roles and traditional femininity, but at the same time even in subverting them perhaps leans into a societal sense of misogyny. Gyeon-woo paints himself as a feminised man, raised for a time as a girl which is why he is mild-mannered, submissive, and lacks ambition in life. All qualities he associates with traditional femininity. He is attracted to the girl, but also disgusted by her unfeminine behaviour and most particularly by her public drunkenness. Her chewing of her own vomit on the train is apparently inspired by a real-life event and the reason for designating her the “bizarre and freakish” woman of the title. 

Gyeon-woo also suffers physical violence at the hands of most of the women in film including his mother, further marking him out as weak and hard done by in comparison to these strong women while most of the men, such as his own father and that of the girl who is a habitual drinker, are ineffectual and go along with their wives for a quiet life. The girl continues to boss him around, ordering for him in cafes, making him wear her high heels while she takes his trainers when her feet hurt, and generally telling him what to do in the relationship. Gyeon-woo appears to have a slightly masochistic streak and despite describing his discomfort this rejection of traditional femininity, actually seems to like being bossed around and physically abused by the girl, even later seeking out similar women, though the film does also include a transphobic joke that is very of its time. 

Eventually, he begins to realise that the girl’s violence and demanding nature are awkward ways of expressing love while she works through issues of her own that exist to one side of him. There are reasons that all her screenplays are about a heroic woman travelling in time to save someone she loves while simultaneously convinced she is destined to meet someone from the future. Gyeon-woo, meanwhile, an engineering student, is more grounded and down to earth. He nurtures their love in another way, replanting a damaged tree solely so the girl won’t be sad if she returns to find that it has died. Fate deliberately keeps them apart as their paths repeatedly fail to cross with a series of near misses before a fateful encounter, implying that romantic timing is much about the readiness for love as anything else, or as someone puts it, building a bridge of chance. Only once the girl has begun to work through her feelings, and Gyeon-woo has accepted his filial responsibilities, can their love be fulfilled. 

This is perhaps most obvious in the episode in which they become involved in a military siege when a soldier takes them hostage in an amusement park after deserting because his girlfriend has left him for another man. While the soldier’s obsessive love turns dangerously destructive, the girl is able to talk him down by reminding him that if he really loved his former girlfriend he’d set her free and rejoice in her happiness. The film’s quirky atmosphere with its series of weird events in a strange way recall the world of Tomihiko Morimi with its cosmic coincidences and tiny ironies that are nevertheless underpinned by a genuine sense of poignancy and warmth, willing these two star-crossed lovers to finally find each other at the right time as past and future finally coalesce into a more perfect present. 

My Sassy Girl screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Romantic President (피아노 치는 대통령, Jeon Man-bae, 2002)

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A pure-hearted politician finds himself falling for an uncompromising teacher in Jeon Man-bae’s nonsense comedy Romantic President (피아노 치는 대통령, Piano chineun daetongnyeong). This president is indeed “romantic” in the sense that he is an idealised vision of a political leader. The film doesn’t go into his politics at all and it’s ambiguous where he belongs on the political divide. Instead, he is depicted as a man of integrity who is good and kind. In short, the kind of political leader that might not really exist in real life.

Min-wook (Ahn Sung-ki) first appears in disguise having gone undercover to talk to a group of homeless people living at the station. While talking to them, he himself is harassed by a policeman overstepping the bounds of his authority. The policeman calls the men “trash” and says that they disgust ordinary people. Little knowing who he is, the policeman bullies Min-wook who then identifies himself by striking the same pose as on as his campaign photo.

Something similar happens later when Min-wook decides to take a day driving a taxi in order to get closer to the people he is supposed to be serving. All of which marks him out as someone who is genuinely interested in the lives of the electorate and how to make them better. Though references are made to other political scandals, Min-wook seems to be held to a different standard and is a figure of integrity and incorruptibility. This is, however, why his romance is so dangerous in that It complicates his image and the secrecy involved because of his position makes it seem like he’s done something wrong or that there is an illicit quality to his relationship with schoolteacher Eun-soo (Choi Ji-woo). However, at the film’s conclusion, Min-wook admits that the “piano-playing president” was a persona he constructed for the purpose of winning the election, which is to say inauthentic. He has been lying all along, but his romance with Eun-soo has made it impossible for him to continue with the subterfuge. Only by being his true self can he gain romantic fulfilment even if it comes at the cost of his political career.

For her part, Eun-soo may also be harbouring a secret that paints her as something of a political rebel and possible extremist. She has failed to keep a job for more than six months because of her eccentric behaviour and intense interest in teaching in which, like Min-wook, she is invested in her pupils lives and wants to do what she can to make them better. On arrival at her new school she poses as a pupil to find out the class gossip and then becomes determined to save Young-hee (Im Soo-jung) who has become a delinquent little knowing she is the president’s daughter. No one else is willing to go against the Blue House with the consequence that Young-hee has become drunk on power, rebelling in the hope that someone will push back. Eun-soo is that person and soon earns Young-hee’s trust precisely because of the genuine interest she takes in her that is undaunted by her father’s position.

Young-hee too responds to authenticity and gradually becomes more authentic herself through her interactions with Eun-soo. Nevertheless, at the same time, the film suggests that society remains judgemental and is not always prepared to recognise an individual’s authentic identity. Eun-soo’s roommate is a transwoman who is repeatedly deadnamed and then eventually outed by the invasive press when Eun-soo’s relationship with Min-wook is exposed. Nevertheless, Eun-soo strives to protect her friend while accepting that she may have to deny her feelings to protect Min-wook’s position.

Despite all the silliness and zany antics, the film has a degree of earnestness at its heart in which it believes that it shouldn’t be wrong to express one’s true feelings. Authority figures can fall in love too, and it’s better for everyone if they do, otherwise you end up with the toxic combination of power and unhappiness that causes the policeman to abuse his authority to bully the homeless. Even so, the irony is that on becoming Min-wook’s official partner, Eun-soo must again play another role, radically altering her appearance to conform to the image of the president’s wife. Nevertheless, once authentically embraced, their love is accepted by the wider society which is then itself improved as a result.

Trailer (English subtitles)

A Man Who Was Superman (슈퍼맨이었던 사나이, Chung Yoon-chul, 2008)

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Maybe it’s impossible to go on living in this world without some sort of delusion. The jaded reporter at the centre of A Man Who Was Superman (A Man Who Was Superman (슈퍼맨이었던 사나이, Chung Yoon-chul, Syupeomaenieotdeon sanai) has built a career out of following eccentric people, but in a slightly uncomfortable way akin to a nature documentary as if she were making a spectacle of them. There is, however, something that prevents her treating “Superman” in the same way in that his desire to help people seems to be genuine and is in the end what gives his life meaning. Though she comes to the conclusion that his life is in danger without medical treatment, a doctor seems to suggest that that may not actually be the best thing for him. He’s happy living in his dream world and being dragged back to this one with all of its trauma, greed, and selfishness might not do him any good.

There are constant references on the radio to yellow dust blowing in from Mongolia as a kind of metaphor for a more spiritual kind of corruption that’s sweeping across the country. What seems to have bothered Superman is that in his past he asked for help and no one came. People just stood by and watched until it was too late while he could do nothing on his own. He says that he has a piece of Kryptonite stuck in his head that prevents him from using superpowers, but we gradually come to learn that the foreign object in his head is a symbol for the trauma stemming from the Gwangju massacre in 1980 in which troops opened fire on democracy protestors as part of an authoritarian crackdown. In his current persona, Superman fears men in white, seeing them as villains who want to erase all his memories echoing the ways in which news of Gwangju was initially suppressed, though also perhaps his own fear of remembering why he was placed in a psychiatric institution to begin with.

Despite herself, Soo-jung is drawn to Superman’s story and begins to sympathise with him along with his messages about helping others and protecting the planet. For him, protecting the planet takes on an environmental belt in which he battles the yellow dust and protests about climate change, complaining that he once lived in the North Pole but had to move because of the ice caps melting. He likens himself to a whale who was caught after the glaciers melted and hit in the head with a spear but went on living until he was 130. This superwhale will apparently come to the rescue if Jaws comes calling.

Superman does however envisage being able to cure himself through kindness. According him, the more endorphins he produces through feeling good after helping people, the faster the kyponite in his brain will be pushed out. Just like Superman in the movies, he hears his father’s voice telling him that him everyone has the ability to help others and that he has to go on helping them until they remember that. That was perhaps what his father was trying to do when he went out protest in Gwangju and never came back, telling his son he’d return if he made sure to be good like Superman. 

Perhaps it seems naive to suggest that kindness can save a society, but there is indeed something that’s been forgotten in an increasingly capitalistic society where everyone’s busy working all the time. Superman’s small acts of kindness such as helping an old woman with her bags did improve the general quality of the world around him. When he encounters another potential tragedy, he is at first unable to help having received psychiatric treatment that turned him into a kind of zombie suppressing his compassion, but once he decides to so, others start to help too. He couldn’t lift a car on his own, but five or six together could lift it enough to make a difference. In essence, he couldn’t survive in this indifferent world in which it’s normal to ignore people in trouble. Ji-soo remembers watching a nature documentary and being angry with the filmmaker for just filming rather than trying to help a rabbit that got eaten by a lion. She does try to help Superman in some ways, but also perhaps comes to the conclusion that there’s not much else she can do for him than bear witness, taking his lessons to heart and trying to heal the earth with small acts of human kindness to beat back the encroaching yellow dust of human indifference.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Warm Water Under a Red Bridge (赤い橋の下のぬるい水, Shohei Imamura, 2001)

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According to the blue-tent philosopher, the real meaning of freedom lies in thinking for oneself and coming to your own conclusions. People today are too educated to admit their desires, he says. That’s certainly true of Sasano (Koji Yakusho), the embodiment of the contemporary salaryman and one who has now been cast adrift in the wake of economic stagnation. He later asks if an officer worker doesn’t have the right to love, and in his present state he might not because it’s made him a stranger to himself who can no longer make his own decisions or identify what he really wants out of life.

That might be the reason that the late Taro (Kazuo Kitamura) decided to send him on a wild goose chase to the Noto Peninsula where he once hid a Buddhist statue he stole from a Kyoto temple in a pot which shoved at the back of a cupboard in the house of a woman he once loved. As we later learn, Taro became a drifter after the war and ended up living with a woman now known only as “Granny” (Mitsuko Baisho) before he unfortunately killed someone and went to prison. After that, he was too ashamed to return, but it seems like Granny spent the rest of her life waiting, sitting by the little red bridge that leads to her home.

The bridge itself comes to represent a path to freedom as Sasano becomes involved with a younger woman who lives there, Saeko (Misa Shimizu) . After witnessing her seemingly wet herself while stealing cheese at the supermarket, Sasano uses an earring she lost as an excuse to enter the house and unexpectedly ends up having sex with her which causes Saeko to gush large amounts of water on orgasm. This is apparently Saeko’s affliction and to her a source of shame that’s ruined relationships and isolated her from society. Every time she has too much water inside her, or in other words, when her libido can no longer be denied, she feels the urge to exorcise it in other transgressive ways such as shoplifting. To that extent, female sexual desire is framed as something seen as taboo, but Saeko’s sexual fulfilment turns out to be good for the world around her. It’s why the trumpet flowers bloom so beautifully outside the house, and when the water flows into the river it beckons the fish in from further out to sea. Saeko doesn’t connect the two things, but it’s also, of course, why she has access to high-quality water that enables her to make delicious traditional-style sweets.

Sasano, meanwhile, begins to discover another side of himself while living in this small town. His wife often calls to nag him to transfer money, and to begin with we might assume that they’re already divorced but the truth is that they’ve been forced to live separately because of Sasano’s economic situation. Though she’s taken their son and moved back in with her parents, Sasano’s wife tells him to hurry up and get another job or else they’ll never get back to Tokyo. Nevertheless, just as he does, she may be discovering a new and happier life outside of the city. When she calls to say she wants a divorce, she tells him that their son has made a lot of new friends and he doesn’t want to move back. It seemed that what she wanted was the salaryman ideal and she resented Sasano for falling from the corporate ladder, but it turns out that there are other ways to be happy. As Taro had put it, corporate culture doesn’t want workers to think. It wants busy drones who complete tasks mindlessly to pay off their mortgages and be accepted as fully-fledged members of society.

By breaking out of the salaryman straightjacket, Sasano begins to find unexpected fulfilment in a simpler life as a fisherman. Through his reconciliation with Saeko and acceptance of the emotional dimension of their relationship rather than the purely sexual, he discovers a kind of serenity as evidenced by the rainbow that emerges above them as Saeko orgasms directly into the sea. Life is about small pleasures, the film seems to say, such as good food and sexual fulfilment, that can also improve the general environment quite literally watering the earth with human warmth.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Hunter and the Hunted (油断大敵, Izuru Narushima, 2004)

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The thrill and excitement of being a thief only exist when there’s a great detective around, according to the legendary cat burglar, Nekoda, in Izuru Narushima’s warmhearted crime drama, The Hunter and the Hunted (油断大敵, Yudan Taiteki). The film takes its title from a four-character idiom, a proverb advising that the greatest danger is complacency, which is indeed one of the weapons employed by Neko, nicknamed “the Cat”, as he builds a relationship with the man he hopes will become his greatest adversary. 

Jin (Koji Yakusho) is a widowed single-father coming to the conclusion that his career as a policeman is incompatible with his responsibilities as a parent. Perhaps bearing out the still sexist nature of the early 2000s society, everyone keeps telling him to remarry so that he won’t have to worry about childcare any more, or else find a job that doesn’t require being constantly available in order to work on the criminals’ schedule. The problem is that Jin really likes his job as a thief catcher having transferred from the local police box after his wife passed away from an illness. He really doesn’t want to give it up, but is beginning to feel as if he has no choice. Neko (Akira Emoto) too encourages him to remarry and Jin lets slip that he’s taken a liking to a lady that works at his daughter’s daycare. But though Misaki really likes Makiko (Yui Natsukawa), the thought of her father remarrying causes her to go on a three-day hunger strike. Reluctantly, Jin has to give up on his romantic hopes, though he refuses to do so in terms of his career and in fact goes on to be promoted after receiving a commendation for catching Neko seemingly by chance when he stepped in to fix Misaki’s broken bicycle while Jin was too busy with something else.

It turns out, however, that it wasn’t really by chance at all. Neko has an MO. He essentially allowed Jin to arrest him because he needed medical treatment. Neko’s life of crime means that he can’t enrol on the government health insurance scheme so he can’t afford to go to the hospital where he’d be arrested anyway. Nevertheless, he seems to take a liking to Jin precisely because of his mild-mannered earnestness and tries to teach him how to think like a thief so that when he gets out in 10 years’ time, he’ll be a worthy adversary and their cat and mouse game can truly begin. Having Neko out there gives Jin a concrete reason to stay in the police and polish his skills, while knowing he has Jin to play off gives Neko a sense of purpose in an otherwise aimless life of total freedom. He describes thievery as his calling and claims that as laws are made by humans and a vocation is given by god, he has a right to pursue it that transcends human justice even if Jin scoffs at his sophistry.

Deciding against remarriage, Jin’s main personal relationship outside his daughter becomes that with Neko who is somewhere between friend and adversary. Once Misaki has grown up and tells him that she plans to do humanitarian work abroad after training as a nurse, Jin can’t help but feel betrayed. She prevented him from marrying a woman that he genuinely cared about, but now tells him he should meet the woman the lady from the bakery is trying to set him up with and plans to palm him off on someone else, just as she feared he might do if he married again leaving his new wife care to Misaki and devoting himself to work. But what he realises it that his relationships with Misaki and Neko are basically the same. He has to accept that his daughter has grown up and chosen her own path to follow. It’s time to let her go. Neko, meanwhile, has found his freedom in thievery, and so he will never stop doing it no matter how many times Jin catches him or how many times he escapes. All Neko wants out of life is that they both stay healthy enough to keep playing this game right to the very end so that he can die as a thief having experienced the true joy of battling his nemesis while Jin too enjoys the thrill of the chase as a thief-catcher hot on the trail of a master. Which is to say, no one actually wants to win this game, and what has really come to matter is their extremely co-dependent friendship that transcends the limits of the law.

The King of Minami: Special Ver.50 (難波金融伝 ミナミの帝王 スペシャル Ver.50 金貸しの掟, Sadaaki Haginiwa, 2004)

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More than twenty years after the first instalment, Ginjiro Manda (Riki Takeuchi) is still collecting debts in Minami and busier than ever as a stagnant economy and increasingly amoral form of capitalism begins to take hold on the area. Manda likes to think of himself as an ethical loan shark, though he too charges obscene mounts of interest and is not above using threats and manipulation to get his money back even if he stops short of actual violence. 

Hoping to get restaurant owner Sugawara to pay up at least the interest on his loan, Manda’s associate Shin (Kenta Kiritani) goes to the trouble of hiring a hearse to scare him into honouring his debts, while Manda suggests he kill himself and pay them back with the life insurance money. Once again, Sugawara’s woes appear to be caused by what Manda sees as personal failings such as a gambling addiction and inability to knuckle down and focus on honest work. Nizato, meanwhile, is more a victim of circumstance if also his own poor business acumen and what Manda may see as a weak character in his tendency to continue taking out one loan just to pay another in the mistaken conviction that his business will magically turn around. 

Manda advises him to get a divorce because he married into his wife’s family to take over the factory and could apply for more legitimate business loans under his birth name. Spinelessly, he considers it, until his wife shuts him down. The problem is that both he and Sugawara have is that they can’t look past the present and will do anything just to get the money without thinking about the consequences. That’s one way they’re suckered in by a new network of yakuza-backed loan sharks run by moody gangster Domoto (Daisuke Ryu) who is in a permanent bad mood because ever since his boss died, his widow, Yukino, has been running the show rather than appointing him as the new leader. 

Annoyingly for him, Yukino is actually quite good at leading a yakuza clan and is well respected by the other men with only Domoto complaining. His attitude towards her bears out the misogyny of the surrounding society in which it is assumed women always have ways of making money. Another of Manda’s clients, bar hostess Mayumi, is having trouble paying him back because her clients welch out on their debts. Manda and Shin tell her to do sex work instead because it pays faster, in a tactic not dissimilar from the hearse they hired for Sugawara. Despite agreeing to pay the interest, Mayumi eventually dodges the debt because her yakuza boyfriend Kawatani starts throwing his weight around forcing a confrontation between Manda and the yakuza encroaching on his turf.

Though he may not be actually all that much better, Manda is at least more principled Domoto who is only using his debt collecting business to fuel his illegal organ transplant trade. Scamming desperate people by encouraging them to take out impossible loans and then saddling them with even more through nefarious guarantor schemes, he traps them in debt then forces them to use their organs as collateral. A minor subplot explores the precarious position of organ transplantation in Japan due to cultural notions to do with the nature of death and a fear of exploitation which make such procedures much more difficult than in other areas of the world. Yukino, the defender of old-school yakuza values, doesn’t approve of Domoto’s actions, either aligning her with Manda as a guardian of a down-to-earth working-class Minami rather than those like Domoto who think only of money and their own position.

Then again, Ginjiro does otherwise take on a kind of supernatural quality in his insistence that a debt must always be repaid and he will reclaim his money come hell or high water. Though his primary reason for saving Sugawara and Nizato is that they can’t pay him back if they’re dead, he’s not entirely indifferent to their fate and does try to give sensible financial advice such as it being inadvisable to take out one of his high-interest loans especially if you have several existing debts already. He is, however, still a part of this system and wilfully taking advantage of people’s weakness in the pursuit of riches even if he does have, as he says, a code and his own brand of righteousness no matter how compromised it might otherwise seem to be.

Face (顔, Junji Sakamoto, 2000)

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In some ways an innocent’s voyage through the nihilistic landscape of mid-90s Japan, Junji Sakamoto’s Face (顔, Kao) is also a character study of a woman who developed a fear of being seen, in large part because of social prejudice. In a heartbreaking moment, Masako (Naomi Fujiyama) reveals that her father, who left when she was 10, told her that she didn’t have to learn to swim or ride a bike if she didn’t want to. But Masako did want to learn, she just felt she couldn’t because people found her clumsiness “embarrassing”. It’s not completely clear whether Masako’s father said that because he felt bad seeing Masako being picked on by the other kids, or if he too felt ashamed that his daughter was evidently a little different from the other children.

It’s this sense of rejection and loathing that’s manifested in Masako’s bar hostess sister, Yukari (Riho Makise) who is exploitative of her, pressuring her to mend clothing belonging to one of her customers, and becoming physically abusive by tripping her when she refuses. Yukari lies that their mother agrees Masako should be institutionalised, provoking her into a rare trip out of her house running out into the snow in only her slippers and taking a round-trip on a train until Yukari’s gone. The two women are almost polar opposites, and in some ways Yukari’s cruelty may be motived by seeing in Masako’s face the elements of herself that she most fears and dislikes.

Nevertheless, when their mother dies and Yukari implies she plans to turn the family dry cleaner’s into a cafe evicting Masako in the process, Masako ends up snapping and strangling Yukari with her unfinished knitting. In killing Yukari she has, in a sense, freed herself from the oppressiveness of her hate and the inferiority complex it produced in her. Forced on the run on the eve of the Kobe earthquake, she believes the disaster to be her fault, but also takes advantage of the chaos to disappear into a crowd of other displaced persons making their way towards Osaka. It’s there she ends up getting a job at a love hotel under the name of new wave actress “Mariko Kaga,” but every time she starts to settle into a new life and blossoms when surrounded by more supportive presences, her new family quickly crumbles and she’s forced back on the run.

In an ironic twist, many of the ruined men she comes across, some of whom sexually assault her, take on the role of the father she never had. The manager at the love hotel (Ittoku Kishibe) tries to teach her how to ride a bike, though he is privately drowning in gambling debts and about to lose everything. Later she’s sold by a man trying to escape his life as a yakuza to a regular at a bar where she’s been working who bizarrely also begins to teach her to swim. The man who assaulted her originally had lost work because of the earthquake and tried to exorcise his sense of powerlessness by forcing himself on Masako. Her decision to hand him some of the funeral condolence money she stole before leaving is her way of reasserting power over the situation, paying him for this life lesson and shifting the stigma back onto him rather than accept it herself. 

Hiroyuki (Etsushi Toyokawa), the former yakuza, may have sold her as a kind of revenge seeing as he seems to resent her for her difference, but also identifies with her seeing them both as “losers”, which is a label Masako no longer really agrees with. But unlike her, Hiroyuki can no longer escape his fate and the yakuza is not often an occupation you can just give up even if it were not for vague hints at trouble in the city that’s forced him back to pleasant onsen town Beppu on the southern island Kyushu. Even the man that Masako takes a liking to simply because he’s kind to her (Koichi Sato) has recently been made redundant. His wife has left him with their young son and he’s resorted to blackmailing his former employer to get what he’s owed. This breach of the employer-employee contract exemplifies the sense of betrayal among people of this generation who were promised jobs for life under the post-war salaryman model but have been chewed up and spit out by the post-Bubble economy.

Masako, however, is flourishing during her life on the run. Her family had treated her as if she had some kind of learning difficulties and had forced her into a kind of arrested development in which she feared the outside world and had poorly developed social skills. The scars of her trauma are literally manifested on her face after she falls off her bicycle, but it’s true enough that through her various experiences she is able to take on different personas only for her actual face to give her away in the end. Just as after she’d run away, Masako encountered a strange and possibly over-friendly woman in a cafe who is later revealed to be a fugitive, like her on the run for murder, modelled in the real life murderer Kazuko Fukuda who evaded the police for over 14 years through having repeated plastic surgery. Masako never alters her face, in fact it’s ironically her true face that becomes further exposed as she comes into herself thanks to those she meets, but is able to become various other people hinting at all the lives she was denied as Masako the despised sister hunched over a sewing machine. Though contemporary Japan may seem to be a bleak and hopeless place, denying Masako the romantic fulfilment and happy life she longed for, it’s she alone who wants to live, desperately swimming out to sea having been pushed all the way out of Japan but forever in search of new horizons.