Tag: 2000s

Connected (保持通話, Benny Chan, 2008)

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A kidnapped woman’s only hope is a distant stranger in Benny Chan’s intense thriller, Connected (保持通話). Inspired by 2004’s Cellular, Chan shifts the action to contemporary Hong Kong with all of its global anxieties but eventually insists that we are all in a sense connected and have a responsibility to each other in the face of corrupt authorities and an increasingly selfish society. In contrast to other techno thrillers, technology is not threat but cure enabling unlikely alliances and facilitating justice both legal and emotional as the heroes work together yet apart to unscramble the shady threat that follows them. 

Mainlander and top robotics engineer Grace Wong (Barbie Hsu) is having a fairly normal day dropping her daughter Tinker off at school before heading into work only to be blindsided by an oncoming truck and stolen away to a secret location. With no clue what’s going on she realises the landline in the shack where they’re keeping her is still connected but one of the goons smashes it before she can get through to anyone. Using her engineering skills she’s able to rewire the surviving bits but can only make random connections which is how she ends up getting through to conflicted debt collector Bob (Louis Koo) who has problems of his own as his son, raised by his sister after his wife’s death, is supposed to be emigrating to Australia this very day and will forever lose faith in his father for his constant disappointments if he doesn’t make it to the airport by 3pm. 

Bob’s buried goodness is immediately signalled by his discomfort with his job as he watches the more violent members of crew harass and intimidate a lone woman and her crying children in an ironic mirror of his son and Grace’s daughter both also in tears while pulled into the orbit of vicious outside forces. Though originally reluctant, assuming he’s on the receiving hand of a prank call, Bob soon comes to realise that Grace and also her daughter are in real danger and after an early attempt to enlist the police fails he is the only one who can save her. Nevertheless, he is torn between conflicting responsibilities, this one to a stranger and the other to his son who has entirely lost faith in him because of his broken promises and internalised shame over the nature of his job. He finds himself doing quite extraordinary things to keep both promises which further mark him out as a “good person”, such as firing a gun at the floor to get the attention of a bored shop clerk who’d been trolling him but then insisting on paying the full amount for his phone charger and not even stopping for the change. 

Even so, there’s further conflict on the horizon when it turns out the crooks, led by a spooky Mainlander, are carrying Interpol badges leaving a huge question mark about what’s really going on, who the good guys are in this situation and whose side everyone else is on. Unthinkable in the current cinematic climate, the spectre of police corruption raises its ugly head though despite having failed to respond when originally hailed wronged hero cop Fai (Nick Cheung) eventually jumps into action after noticing something suspicious enabling Bob to fulfil his heroic missions and followthrough on his promises. 

Filled dry black humour, Chan’s worldview is tinged with an irony that also makes its way into the extremely elaborate action sequences including a car chase that later plows through an entire truck of Pepsi Max, and a flirtatious boyfriend who swears to protect his lady love for all eternity only to run off at the first sign of danger. Yet there’s also an idealistic faith in human goodness in Bob and Fai’s refusal to back down in the face of injustice, each of them somewhat revitalised in their quests to rescue Grace whose engineering skills made the whole thing possible in the first place along with her determination of save herself and protect her family. It really is all connected, the intricate, slow burn mystery gradually revealing itself thanks to the growing connection between the heroes, each of them strangers but stepping up when needed unable to abandon someone in danger while refusing to allow corrupt authority to treat their homeland with such contempt.

Original trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Transparent: Tribute to a Sad Genius (サトラレ, Katsuyuki Motohiro, 2001)

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What would life be like if your every thought were audible for miles? Adapted from the manga by Makoto Sato, Katsuyuki Motohiro’s Transparent: Tribute to a Sad Genius (サトラレ, Satorare) considers how ironically isolating such a talent may turn out to be as the sufferer finds themselves withdrawing from others in embarrassment while wider society begins to resent being unable to tune out of their every inane thought or avoid being hurt by hearing something no one would ever say out loud even if they thought it privately. 

The “Committee for the Preservation of the Specially Gifted” is dedicated to protecting the so-called “Transparents” whose thoughts are audible for a 10m radius though they have no control or even idea that it is happening. They’ve started an extensive public information campaign to reduce the stigma held against them because as they claim Transparents are a valuable natural resource mainly as they all have super high IQ and are at the forefront of technological advancement. Then again this extensive campaign seems like overkill as there are only currently seven confirmed Transparents on record, but in a minor twist the campaign is necessary because it’s essential that the Transparents never find out that their thoughts are public, the first apparently having taken their own life because of the intense embarrassment of trying to live without any kind of privacy. 

This is the first ethical problem with the Transparent program which is curiously contradictory in its approach. The government could easily have said that Kenichi (Masanobu Ando), the sole survivor of a plane crash at three years old plucked from the wreckage when rescuers heard his internal monologue begging for help, had died and raised him in a lab, but instead they choose to return him to his grandmother in a designated Transparent town where they provide him with the illusion of a “normal” life while simultaneously micromanaging his existence. Their problem now is that he’s qualified as a doctor and wants to practice, but clinical medicine is obviously an occupation which requires discretion. Patients overhearing his “real” thoughts might not be helpful to their recovery, while he can hardly claim patient doctor confidentially when he’s likely to leak private medical details simply in the course of his work. Meanwhile, it tuns out that he’s already invented a revolutionary cure for athlete’s foot which is another reason why the council want to manipulate him into shifting towards research rather than clinical practice. 

That’s why they’ve dispatched military psychologist Yoko (Kyoka Suzuki) who specialises in Transparents hoping that she can find a way to bend him to their will, but gradually she begins to come to a new understanding of what his life is like even while he has no idea everyone knows what he’s thinking. For example, no one wants to date a Transparent because they don’t want the intimate details of their love lives broadcast all over town, while the perfectly ordinary thoughts which should definitely stay in his head on catching sight of crush Megumi (Rina Uchiyama) can’t help but make her feel uncomfortable. The entire town is forced to pretend that they can’t hear him think, which seems somewhat unfair, leaving him at a disadvantage and more often at not at a loss as to why someone might seem hurt or upset by him when didn’t even say anything. Meanwhile, much of Yoko’s role lies in gently manipulating him, the entire committee decamping to a summer festival in a nearby town so they can let him down gently by leading him to believe Megumi already has a steady boyfriend who is kind to children and the elderly so he’s forced to be happy for her that’s she’s found such a great guy and can give up on his romantic aspirations. 

The tone is in general admirably progressive in that it ultimately argues for a greater sense of acceptance for all minorities, but it’s difficult to square the positive message with the ways the Transparents are also being uncritically manipulated, forced to live a simulacrum of a life in an engineered small-town Japan which grateful to have them only for the massive subsidies they receive for local development in return for making sure the Transparents are kept in the dark about their condition so that the committee can exploit their genius as they plan to do with Kenichi after getting him to the research institution. Even so what they discover is that Kenichi knew what his genius was and only through letting him follow his dreams can they truly unlock it, while the committee is forced to reckon with the various ways they’ve dehumanised him, the chairman eventually referring to him as a person as opposed #7 as he’d always called him before. Somewhat contradictory and more than a little uncomfortable in its implications, Transparent: Tribute to a Sad Genius is presented as heartwarming drama and it does indeed warm the heart with this its messages of equality and acceptance not to mention the right to follow one’s dreams whatever they may be but never really reckons with its central thesis in which the authorities pat themselves on the back for being kind and doing the right thing while simultaneously exploiting those they claim to care for without their knowledge or consent. 

Tokyo Sonata (トウキョウソナタ, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2008)

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Orphaned salarymen are the soulless ghosts haunting an increasingly empty city in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s eerie tale of urban anxiety Tokyo Sonata (トウキョウソナタ). Undermining the certainty of the traditional family, Kurosawa paints it as a simulacrum dependent on each member playing their respective role blindly or otherwise, though in this case the integrity of the family unit is shaken by an economic intervention in which the accepted rules of the society have been upended with a vindictiveness that seems inexplicably unfair. 

This is the bargain of the salaryman dream. A man like Sasaki (Teruyuki Kagawa) now aged 46 came of age at the tail end of an era of economic prosperity. He was brought up in an atmosphere of jobs for life in which the corporate family was almost more “real” than the emotional which is one reason why it comes as such a shock when his boss effectively divorces him. He’s found someone new, planning to outsource Sasaki’s entire department to China while less than kindly explaining that as he has no other skills he of no more use to the company. Sasaki immediately clears his desk in anger, walking home early with a pair of carrier bags then, after meeting his son in the street, attempting to climb in through an upstairs window to avoid alerting his wife, Megumi (Kyoko Koizumi), to the fact he’s home early.

Sasaki is unable to tell her that he’s lost his job in part because of the acute embarrassment it would cause him. Somewhat dazed and confused, he’s become one of many disenfranchised salarymen who survived the 15 years of economic stagnation only to have the rug pulled out from under them. Being a salaryman was in a way his whole identity and without it he doesn’t know who he is, which is one reason he puts on a suit every day and goes to sit in the park surrounded by other similarly dressed men with briefcases who now seem to haunt the city like crows ominously dotting the horizon. In a repeated motif, Kurosawa shows us people trapped in kafkaesque queuing situations shuffling around buildings while prevented from moving forward but forced to keep pace with the increasingly glacial environment. At the moment an old school friend he runs into, Kurosu (Kanji Tsuda), seems to give up he is swept into a great parade of the suited and hopeless while Sasaki hovers on its edges. 

It’s this threat to Sasaki’s masculine pride which is largely founded on his economic ability to support a family that kickstarts a chain reaction in his home even he becoming increasingly violent and authoritarian in an effort to overcome the sense of humiliation and powerlessness he feels after being made “redundant”. His younger son, Kenji (Kai Inowaki), tells him he wants to learn the piano but Sasaki irritably shuts him down either because he’s now worried about the money or simply sees it as a frivolous waste of time. Later when Megumi asks him why he won’t he change his mind he insists that he has to stick to his original decision otherwise it would undermine his patriarchal authority as a father. 

But this “authority” was perhaps already largely illusionary given that an intense work schedule meant he was rarely home to do much parenting. After finding out Kenji spent his lunch money on piano lessons behind his back he ironically shouts at him for lying and keeping secrets even though this is obviously what he himself has been doing in keeping up the illusion of his identity as a conventional salaryman. His older son, Takashi (Yu Koyanagi), was keeping secrets too his being his desire to join the US military believing that Japan no longer has a future for him in an atmosphere of stagnation not only economic but emotional and spiritual. Takashi tells his mother she should leave Sasaki, but to her question of who would play the role of mother replies that it makes no difference simultaneously encouraging her to reclaim an individual identity and perhaps robbing her of one just as Sasaki lost his in being shorn of his salaryman credentials. 

Lying on the sofa one evening she raises her arms and poignantly asks someone to lift her up but Sasaki has already gone to bed without even looking at her. Her life as a housewife is thankless and emotionally unfulfilling. Donuts she spent ages making go uneaten while her husband and sons brood on their own problems alone. At a car dealership, the salesman shows her a people carrier explaining that it’s perfect for family camping trips while she gravitates towards a red convertible, mesmerised by the way the roof can just disappear as if it were literally freeing her of her stultifying existence. On showing Takashi the shiny new driving license she’s just got as a symbol of her desire for independence, he scoffs that she’ll never use it but she counters him that it’s for “ID” which it is in more ways than one.

The family is imploded, the illusions of a conventional middle-class life upturned as Sasaki and Megumi each ask themselves if there’s a way to start again and escape their sense of middle-aged futility and disappointment. Cracking under the weight of conventionality, the foundations begin to fracture but the family nevertheless finds itself returning if with greater degrees of clarity and perhaps with less inclination to play the play the roles assigned to them rather than those they might wish to play as embodied by Kenji’s moving performance at the piano capturing all of the chaos and confusion of the world around him but finding in it also harmony and a gentle breeze that feels almost as if the city itself were breathing once again.

Tokyo Sonata screens Feb. 18 as part of Family Portrait: Japanese Family in Flux

International trailer (English subtitles)

Spring Bears Love (봄날의 곰을 좋아하세요?, Yong Yi, 2003)

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Sometimes it’s nice to think there’s more to life, that that there’s some kind of greater plan or grand adventure in the works but there’s always the danger of falling into the wrong story on a desperate quest for meaning in the mundane. This is in a sense what happens to Hyun-chae (Bae Doona), the quirky heroine of Yong Yi’s charming rom-com Spring Bears Love (봄날의 곰을 좋아하세요?, Bomnalui Gomeul Johahaseyo?) as she comes to believe that someone is leaving her secret messages in a series of art books she’s been borrowing for her hospitalised father from the local library. 

The notes in the books are poetic if a little absurd which Hyun-chae attributes to their nature as a code which she’s come to believe is exclusively for her. She has no real reason for thinking this yet is determined to find the author whom she’s privately called “Vincent”. Meanwhile, she abruptly runs into an old high school friend, Dong-ha (Kim Nam-jin), who has since become a train driver and is currently working as an operator on the Seoul underground (according to Hyun-chae he’s only there as a ringer crossing a picket line). It’s quite clear that Dong-ha has designs on her, in fact he says she’s the whole reason he came to Seoul in the first place. Yet Hyun-chae isn’t really interested, partly because she’s hung up on her illusionary romance with Vincent and partly because it seems she just looks down on him, idly catching sight of his oil-stained fingers as they sit down at a greasy burger bar. 

It has to be said, Dong-ha is his own kind of strange as obsessed with trains as Hyun-chae is with Vincent yet his interest is at least practical and down to earth. As he says, thousands of people travel on the subway every day. It’s a good steady job with a nice salary and drivers’ families can ride for free. By contrast, Hyun-chae’s high school dream was to become an air hostess travelling the world literally with her head in the clouds. Now she’s working a dead end job at supermarket and lamenting that nothing, not even her love life, seems to go her way. Her dilemma is in a sense between fantasy and reality dismissing the wholesome practically of a man like Dong-ha for the ethereal romanticism of Vincent whom she has after all almost entirely constructed in her mind without really even knowing if the messages were actually intended for her in the first place. 

Her taste for fantasy can be seen in her tendency take off on flights of fancy imagining herself in theatre scenes inspired by the paintings in the books and starring her current Vincent suspect. Her more worldly friend, Mi-ran (Yoon Ji-hye), tries to explain to her where she’s going wrong with dating leading to a flashback in which she’s basically Dong-ha on a date with a sophisticated guy who is clearly exasperated with her constant slurping of a soft drink and chattering through the movie (One Fine Spring Day), describing song at a restaurant they go to as reminding him of Bagdad Cafe while she sings loudly and publicly. 

During her search for Vincent, she ends up on a date with the librarian (who later claims to be married) to a zoo where he mainly gives her lectures about bears which had featured in the first note and she tries her best to play the straight woman to his absurdist banter. Uncharitably her journey could be read as one of learning to settle, that she should give up on her dreams and submit to the practicality of Dong-ha, yet for her it is perhaps shaking off her fear of the real letting the idealised vision of Vincent go while coming to accept Dong-ha’s earthiness. Then again, he does hide a few truths from her in order to manipulate her feelings, so perhaps not all that wholesome after all even if he does put it right in the end and can always be counted on for midnight ramen. Replete with zeitgeisty detail and and absurdist humour, Yong Yi’s quirky comedy may not have all the answers in its convoluted mystery but does at least allow its heroine to find her feet finally getting the message and running fast towards her certain destiny.

Spacked Out (無人駕駛, Lawrence Ah Mon, 2000)

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There’s a sense of abandonment and rootless melancholy that pervades Lawrence Ah Mon’s post-Handover drama Spacked Out (無人駕駛). Each shorn of their parental relationships, the four teenage girls at the film’s centre find themselves floundering for direction, seeing no real future for themselves in a Hong Kong that has itself in a way also been abandoned to a new perhaps overbearing parental entity that cannot really be embraced or fully trusted while struggling to find the means to redefine itself. 

The only real authority figure the girls know is their is ineffectual, authoritarian school teacher, Mr.Chan, who challenges 13-year-old Cookie (Debbie Tam Kit-Man) on her late arrival to school over her dyed hair and (according to him) inappropriate footwear. He asks her if she really wants an education, but then robs her of it by forcing her to stand in the playground all morning next to two other students, a girl getting similar treatment for wearing earrings, and a boy who isn’t wearing any socks. Mr. Chan evidently isn’t interested in these kids, their lives or prospects, but only in enforcing the arbitrary rules of social conformity. When another of the girls, Beancurd (Maggie Poon Mei-Kei) whose head is shaved, is accused of slashing another girl with a box knife in a convenience store, he point blank tells them that he doesn’t usually care about what happens to them outside the school but knives are on another level. “How is she supposed to wear low-cut clothes from now on?” he rather bizarrely asks despite having reprimanded each of the girls for their “inappropriate” attire while advocating a rather sexist vision of his teenage charges in which all that matters is that the wounded girl may no longer be as conventionally attractive as she might have been rather than focusing on the causes of this problematic violence or the mental and physical distress caused to the victim.

The film’s Chinese title, “unmanned”, neatly symbolises the girls’ rootlessness but also their own internalised patriarchy in which they continue to look to men for protection and guidance. Abandoned by her mother to whom she leaves long voice messages she never replies to, Cookie has only a violent father who seems otherwise absent from her life. She has begun dating a young man, Wing who is 16 years old and sells pirated VCDs in Mongkok. After sleeping with him Wing has ghosted her while Cookie is worried she’s pregnant having fallen for Wing’s dubious insistence that the first time doesn’t count. Her friend, Banana (Angela Au Man-Sze), meanwhile is the group’s man expert, having apparently had several abortions while continuing to meet men through telephone dating lines as well as the girls’ work in local karaoke booths. Only Beancurd who is a lesbian and in a fraught relationship with the more materialistic Sissy (Christy Cheung Wing-Yin) attempts to subvert male authority but is also driven to acts of self harm by traumatic memories of sexual assault. 

Box cutters become ominous symbols of the frustration and despair felt by the teens, another boy in the girl’s class openly self harming but finding no support from those around him. At least the girls have each other even if they’re all just as lost and confused. On learning that Cookie may be pregnant, they rally round to solve the problem by pooling their resources to get her a backstreet abortion though on another level they’re also railroading Cookie into a decision she hasn’t quite accepted for herself. The place they end up in is grim in the extreme, filthy and with rusty equipment not to mention unsympathetic staff who just like all of the other adults care little for her wellbeing. 

For much of its running time, the film adopts a kind of naturalism but descends into nightmarish psychedelica, possibly provoked by the drug-fuelled party the girls had just left after it took a rather sour and tragic turn, as Cookie undergoes the abortion and simultaneously accepts her abandonment acknowledging that boyfriends aren’t important only friends are suggesting a new solidarity which exists between the Handover generation navigating turbulent seas together in the absence of parental care or guidance. Unjudgemental of his young heroines, Lawrence Ah Mon captures a breezy sense of teenage of life with days spent at the pool with friends if equally the more destructive presence of sex, drugs, cross border smuggling, and exploitation in all of their lives while granting them at least a degree of freedom to define themselves in a new and confusing age. 

Spacked Out opens at New York’s Metrograph Dec. 29 and will also stream in the US via Metrograph at Home courtesy of Kani Releasing.

Trailer

Darkness in the Light (日本の黒い夏ー冤罪, Kei Kumai, 2001)

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The summer before the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995, a similar incident had taken place in the small town of Matsumoto, Nagano. A panicked provincial police force quickly homed in on the man who had first reported that something was wrong as the likely culprit, though he was later proved innocent when, following the subway attack, Aum Shinrikyo claimed responsibility for the trial run in Matsumoto revealing that they intended to test out the gas while killing a series of local prosecutors they assumed were about to rule against them in a land dispute raised by townspeople who objected to the cult’s intention to set up a new branch in the area. 

Kei Kumai’s films had often dealt with difficult subjects and particularly with those who suffered under a false accusation, but Darkness in the Light (日本の黒い夏ー冤罪, Nippon no Kuroi Natsu – Enzai) was also personal to him as he knew the man concerned, Kono renamed for the film as Kanbe (Akira Terao), and found it absurd that such an ordinary person could have planned and carried out a deadly chemical attack literally in his own back yard. Essentially putting both mass media and the police force on trial, he frames the tale through the eyes of two earnest high school students who are making a documentary about the way Kanbe was treated for their high school film club. 

The obvious point is that if the Matsumoto police force, which the film claims had become aware that Aum possessed sarin gas, had conducted a better investigation then there is the possibility that the subway attack might have been prevented. The teens want to know what went wrong and how an ordinary citizen can suddenly be made public enemy number one overnight with no physical evidence linking him to the crime. What they discover through interviewing the only local TV news outlet that did attempt to conduct an investigation and contradict the reports being issued by the police, is a dangerous collusion between police and media that is supported by the business interests that underpin the news industry. Most outlets simply print press releases or unofficial leaks from the police without fact checking them. Sasano (Kiichi Nakai), the TV station editor, no longer does this because a previous false report implicating a teenage boy in a murder he had not committed had resulted in his suicide.

Nevertheless, his junior associate, Koji (Yukiya Kitamura), has his mind less on the truth than the scoop. He thinks they should publish the information they get as quickly as possible otherwise other outlets will publish first. Koji is also the most certain that Kanbe is guilty, believing they are being overcautious in their reporting and will pay for it later. The station’s managers and sponsor committee feel much the same, directly telling Sasano that he should refrain from creating his own news and instead publish what everyone else publishes. They also imply that public opinion has now in a sense become “the truth” and his reporting should be in line with it, rather than the other way around with responsible media as an arbitrator of objective facts which have been thoroughly researched and confirmed. 

Sasano airs an alternative view but admits he does so more in the interest of ratings than he does for truth or justice realising that there is some currency in going against the grain and that if Kanbe turns out to be innocent after all they will come out of it much better than everyone else who published the police press releases unquestioningly. Even so, they too become subjects of harassment with relentless calls from locals decrying their irresponsible attempt to undermine the police and let a mass killer go free. Despite the care they had taken in investigating the information presented to them, they too had broadcast falsehoods such as the “expert” testimony that any old fool could make sarin gas by chucking some stuff in a bucket and standing back, only learning later from a university professor that it requires a high level of chemical knowledge, specialist equipment, and professional protective gear not available to a man like Kanbe who did have various chemicals in his home but only the kind easy to buy for use in harmless hobbies such as photography and ceramics. 

Even they have cultivated close relationships with people in the police who feed them information on investigations, Sasano having a personal connection with the officer in charge of the case, Yoshida (Renji Ishibashi). Appearing somewhat conflicted, Yoshida faces pressure from his superiors to pin the case on Kanbe despite beginning to believe he is likely innocent not least because he does not give in to their pressure tactics and confess. Kanbe asks to be allowed to speak to witnesses who have supposedly given the police information on him, as if aware the police may simply be making things up to prod him into confessing while they otherwise break an agreement to restrict interviews to two hours given that Kanbe was also injured in the gas attack and is in poor health. His original reluctance to talk to the police because he was seriously ill and incapable of answering their questions seems to have annoyed Yoshida and given him the impression he must be hiding something as does his sensible decision to consult a lawyer. As Kanbe is interviewed as a “witness” rather than a “suspect” his lawyer is not present in the room allowing police to get away with what is quite clearly an abuse of their power. 

Sasano points out that an Olympic ski event was also taking place nearby so the police were keen to keep the investigation under wraps, while their later reluctance to change tack when Kanbe refused to confess is nothing more than an attempt to protect their reputation fearing that they would look foolish in the press for having painted Kanbe as the villain when he wasn’t. Their plan was to arrest Kanbe anyway and suggest that he was involved with the cult while acknowledging that they had planned the attack to end the land dispute. Kanbe becomes a hapless victim of circumstance, an everyman misused by an authoritarian institution trying to maintain its own grip on power rather than fulfilling its responsibility to keep the people safe by ensuring the real culprits were prevented from committing further crimes. 

Kumai comes in hard for mass media, exposing the network that sees local information bounced back through Tokyo head offices, the collusion between police and the press that leaves reporters unwilling to rock the boat for fear of losing access, and a general indifference for the welfare of individuals caught up in the real events they report on. Despite the youthful eyes of his protagonists whose untainted idealism gives the newspaper men pause for thought, a slightly dated approach displays little of the intensity or visual flair present in some of Kumai’s earlier work while falling back on sentimental cherry blossom imagery if offering a poignant opportunity for reflection on a system in urgent need of repair as Kanbe prepares to go on with his life leaving the past far behind him. 

Coo-Coo 043 (一家子兒咕咕叫, Chan Ching-lin, 2022)

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Why would a pigeon, or a child, return to you if you failed to make them a home? The enigmatic title of Chan Ching-lin’s gritty familial drama Coo-Coo 043 (一家子兒咕咕叫, yījiāzi ér gū jiào) refers to a homing pigeon that unexpectedly arrives seven years late but bringing with it less joy than an unwelcome confrontation with the unresolved past. A tale largely of male, patriarchal failure the film revolves around the taciturn figure of a middle-aged man obsessed with pigeon racing who attempts to build a coop an in abandoned field for the birds he no longer has means to care for even as his own home crumbles.

Old Ching (Yu An-shun) appears to be a broken man who’s never quite recovered from the massive success of having won a lot of money on a pigeon race several years previously though most of his birds since have never returned at all. Gambling is technically illegal in Taiwan, and the sport of pigeon racing is itself a little taboo though popular enough at least in the small town where Ching lives. It appears the family is mostly supported financially by his second wife Ming’s (Yang Li-yin) banana farm, while ironically enough his daughter Lulu (Rimong Ihwar) dreams only of flying the coop for a less depressing life somewhere else. Part of the reason for the difficult atmosphere in the family home is the sense of absence left by Shih, Ching’s son from his first marriage who disappeared on his way to school aged 12 more than a decade earlier.

Ching continually blames Ming for Shih’s disappearance because on that day she did not drive him to school as usual, ignoring the fact that she stayed to clean up the house after he trashed it in a violent fit after losing at gambling and told the boy to walk. Ching’s irony is that he is always waiting for something to come back to him, but never gives any reason why it should. Though he is often seen tenderly caring for his pigeons, he treats his family members with coldness and contempt and is on occasion violent towards Ming who has a sideline working as part of a troupe conducting death rituals and is considering leaving him. She takes pigeon 043’s miraculous return after seven years as a sign that they should look into having Shih declared legally dead to help them accept he won’t come back but Ching refuses to do so and continues to wallow in his own violent and angry grief unable to see that it may be him that drove his son, and later his daughter, away.

His limp also hints at a violent past as do his ties to a group of local gangsters who seem to be well into the pigeon racing scene, while gang young toughs make a living kidnapping birds and ransoming them back to their owners or else killing them for fun if they don’t pay. Ching finds a surrogate son in the orphaned Tig (Hu Jhih-ciang), Lulu’s sometime pigeon-catcher boyfriend, but fails to see him as such until it’s too late. Unlike Lulu, Tig is a man looking for a coop. He slides into the vacant space in the family longing to be accepted, but finds only coldness and abandonment left behind while everyone else flies away in search of a better life. 

Often captured behind bars, the two men are just as caged as the pigeons though the kind that don’t fly away when the doors are opened. Some of those who leave do so for the after life, no longer seeing any point in continuing this miserable existence which shows no sign of improvement and unable to envisage any other kind of escape. Even Lulu’s flight to the city to become a nightclub dancer seems as if it may just be another kind of cage from which she cannot fly. Ching’s pigeon coop is eventually ruined by a more literal kind of storm, but mainly because he failed to protect it unable to look past his personal despair and indifferent to the vulnerabilities of his home. Bleak in the extreme, Chan paints a grim picture of life on the margins in rural Taiwan in which the wings of all have long been clipped and those who return do so only because they have nowhere else to go.

Coo-Coo 043 screened as part of this year’s London East Asia Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

The Abandoned (查無此心, Tseng Ying-ting, 2022)

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Just about everyone in Tseng Ying-ting’s psychological thriller The Abandoned (查無此心, Chá wú cǐ xīn) has been in some way left behind. The title most obviously refers to the body of a murdered woman unceremoniously dumped in a local river though as we later discover she wasn’t so much abandoned as returned, but the investigating officer is also battling her grief in feeling abandoned by her husband who took his own life and it could as well apply to the liminal status of migrant workers in Taiwan who have been largely abandoned by a society that is increasingly dependent on their labour. 

As policewoman Wu Jie (Janine Chang Chun-ning) points out to rookie Wei-shin, if she found a body she’d obviously call the police but if you can’t call the police because you’re afraid they’ll deport you you might have no other option than to make it go away. But the strange thing is that Waree’s body was left where it would be found and Jie will later claim that it is in a sense Waree who “saved” her by unwittingly frustrating her attempt to take her own life while consumed by grief and guilt over her husband’s death. Later it seems as if the killer of these women, each of whom has their heart and ring finger removed, intended to send the bodies back to their exploitative employers making a grim a point while leaving them with an impossible choice knowing that they can’t very well go to the police and risk undermining their entire business enterprise which relies on the labour of workers of who’ve either left the positions the visas they were granted were originally for or never had any in the first place.

Waree’s former boyfriend You-sheng (Ethan Juan) is left with just such a dilemma when the body of another woman, Yeti, is delivered to their factory calming the worried workers while secretly burying her himself in the mountains little knowing that a similar fate has befallen Waree whom he’s been looking for ever since she dropped out of contact as has her sister Saipin, also an undocumented worker from Thailand. The killer seems to target these women because he knows it’s unlikely anyone will look for them though they also have personal motives in their own sense of abandonment, resentful in feeling as if they’ve been deceived in love while unable to see how the other party may have felt trapped and exploited while their passport was held captive depriving them of the free choice to leave. 

As it turns out, the person who left Waree’s body in the water did it because they were worried she wouldn’t be able to return home, not wanting her to be disappeared in the way their employer might have wished her death hushed up like so many other anonymous workers whose families never hear of them again but at least acknowledged. Wu Jie is also unable to return home, mostly sleeping in the car directly below the bloodstained bullet hole under which her husband shot himself. Her boss ironically tells that if her heart remains in the car she’ll never escape, echoing the missing hearts of the murdered women taken as grim trophies by the heartless killer. 

Ironically enough, to solve the case Wu Jie must regain the desire to live finally facing her abandonment along with her grief and guilt for her inability to save her husband while working with the conflicted You-sheng who similarly feels both abandoned and guilty in the failure of his relationship with Waree whom he was reluctant to marry and might have saved if he had. Tseng aptly demonstrates the precarious position of undocumented migrant workers in Taiwan who are often exploited by their employers and rendered invisible by a society which largely treats them with disdain while left vulnerable to crime and violence in being unable to turn to the authorities for help. He also hints at a degree of misogyny present in the police force as Jie is at one point asked to leave the case as the higher ups don’t like the idea of two women working together while Jie simultaneously feels pressured to stay knowing that the situation is too complicated for an earnest rookie to manage on her own. Exploring the grimy underbelly of an otherwise prosperous nation, the film has only sympathy for those have in one way another been abandoned and can see little prospect of escape from their fear and loneliness. 

The Abandoned screens July 26 as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Images: @Renaissance Films Limited. Love Me Tender Production Company

Sorasoi (そらそい, Katsuhito Ishii, Shunichiro Miki, Yuka Osumi, 2008)

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Students on a dance summer camp pick up a few lessons in authenticity and self-confidence while staying in an out of the way coastal hotel in Katsuhito Ishii, Shunichiro Miki, and Yuka Osumi’s goofy comedy Sorasoi (そらそい). Reuniting Ishii and Miki after Funky Forest, the film is less episodic in nature than the directors’ other work and quirky rather than surreal but otherwise offers some of the same lessons as those found in Party 7 as the students begin to discover new things about themselves and others while practicing dance on the beach. 

Led by teacher Tabe (Sota Aoyama) who claims to have been a top dancer with the Royal Ballet before an injury ended his career, the dance team consists of four girls and three boys all of whom Tabe regards as no hopers with little motivation to succeed. A trio of men lounging in donuts floating nearby in the sea gently mock them from a distance, but nevertheless utter a few words of encouragement as they leave the beach. Meanwhile, another young woman, Yuri (Sayuri Ichikawa), arrives to stay at the hotel after approaching the local tourist information office and asking for a reservation at somewhere that isn’t listed in the phonebook. 

Her request may echo that of Party 7’s Miki and her reasoning is similar in that she is clearly hoping to take some time out and doesn’t want to be bothered as evidenced by her decision to ignore missed calls and texts on her phone. The inn owner is forever trying to convince her to travel to a nearby beauty spot named the Cape of Love and its Lovers’ Bell though also dropping in casually that people sometimes take their own lives there which may be irresponsible given Yuri’s ambiguous mental state. In any case, she quickly catches the attention of student Ryu (Ryu Morioka) who begins pursuing her in a friendly if decidedly inappropriate way. 

The three guys tell each other that they’re only doing dance to get girls and that the fact the ones from the dance troupe aren’t interested in them can be excused because they are “different”. Engaging in stereotypically crude male banter one of them later tries to steal the girls’ underwear but as it turns out, at least two of them do actually like dancing and discover new things about themselves in the midst of their romantic pursuits, Ryu’s for Yuri and Atsushi’s (Atsushi Yoshioka) for Kano (Kanoko Kawaguchi ), a mysterious kimono’d woman who arrives to visit. The girls meanwhile are similarly focussed on romance with Ai (Ai Makino) besotted with the grumpy teacher Tabe and Kikka (Kikka) dropping entirely unsubtle hints that she’s in love with the seemingly straight Mako (Masako Satoh) who thinks she’s just playing around. 

They are all, however, keeping some kind of secret mainly because they fear being judged by others whether it relates to their sexuality, having embellished their CV, or having told a slightly bigger lie to help achieve their dancing dreams. What each of them learns is that it doesn’t matter very much if their dancing isn’t very good so long as they enjoy doing it and feel good about spreading that joy to others. Yuri, meanwhile, has some much more grown up dilemmas to consider especially as it transpires she may have been attempting to escape an abusive relationship with a degree of pressure placed on her from various directions to return because her boyfriend is “really a good guy” who made a “mistake” in a momentary fit of temper which is a fairly dated and uncomfortable sentiment to see presented so uncritically even in 2008. Nevertheless, the sense of discomfort is somewhat undercut in a counter courtship from Ryu who offers a sweet and romantic note that leaves the ball entirely in her court. 

In the best tradition of summer break movies, the film’s relaxed atmosphere adds to its laidback charm as do the unfussy indie visuals while the enthusiastic performances from a largely amateur cast of students from Ishii’s acting school (bar the participation of Warped Forest’s Fumi Nikaido and Ryu Morioka) reinforce the central messages of working hard at something you love whether it goes anywhere or not. The mutual solidarity of those around them with similar dreams affords the students the confidence to be more of who they are while clarifying what it is they may actually want out of life even if for some the future still seems uncertain.

Sorasoi is released in the UK on blu-ray on 17th July as part of Third Window Films’ Katsuhito Ishii Collection.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Party 7 (Katsuhito Ishii, 2000)

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“This shit’s for real.” according to the front desk guy at Hotel New Mexico, an out of the way spot just perfect for those looking to lay low for a little while. Like a lot of Katsuhito Ishii’s work, Party 7 is essentially a series of self-contained vignettes which eventually collide following a series of bizarre coincidences revolving around some money stolen from the mob, a two-way mirror in a regular hotel room, and the receptionist’s tendency to almost literally shoot the shit. 

Following a brief prologue, Ishii opens with striking animated sequence which introduces each of the main players with an arcade game aesthetic and explains that Miki (Masatoshi Nagase) has stolen money from the mob and is currently on the run which is why he’s turned up at the infinitely weird Hotel New Mexico. The running gag is that Miki thinks he’s holed up somewhere no one will find him, but sure enough a series of “friends” soon turn up in part thanks to a loose-lipped travel agent. The fact that people can find it so easily dampens the impression of the Hotel New Mexico as some kind of interstitial space. It’s not so much existing in a weird parallel world as a bit run down and staffed by a series of eccentrics. It does however have a “peep room” hidden behind a two-way mirror where “Captain Banana” (Yoshio Harada) is attempting to pass his knowledge on to the young Okita (Tadanobu Asano), the son of a recently deceased friend who has been repeatedly arrested for voyeurism. 

Captain Banana’s insistence on his surreal superhero suit is in a way ironic, if perhaps hinting at the super empowerment of accepting one’s authentic self. “It’s your soul,” he tells Okita, “it’s screaming ‘I want to peep’.’” Meanwhile, Miki gets into an argument with his ex-girlfriend Kana (Akemi Kobayashi) who has turned up in the hope of reclaiming money that he owes her. Kana too seems to be less than rigorous with the truth if perhaps emotionally authentic. She’s now now engaged to a nerdy guy having somewhat misrepresented herself as the innocent girl next-door type. Her refusal to let her fiancé into her apartment perhaps hints at a more literal barrier to intimacy or at least that she is intent on preventing him from seeing her true self. What she doesn’t know is that her fiancé hasn’t been completely honest either, in part because he thinks she’s out of his league and is insecure in their romance. 

Miki too maybe somewhat insecure, having run off with the gang’s money after hearing them bad mouth his associate Sonoda (Keisuke Horibe) who has now been charged with killing him and getting the money back. But Sonoda too has reasons to doubt the boss’ affection for him after Miki and the others point out that gifts he thought were so valuable are really just cheap knock offs that suggest the boss thinks very little of him at all. Okita’s psychiatrist tells him that there are “no rules in making friends”, and maybe in a strange way that’s what everyone is trying to do. Kana wanted the money to overcome her anxiety about having no friends or family to invite to the wedding, while all Sonoda wanted was the boss’ approval and though Miki had deliberately gone somewhere he thought no one would find him nevertheless attracts a series of followers. 

Even the receptionists seem to be desperate for human contact with their strange stories of poo falling from the sky and bizarre approach to hospitality. “The point is whether you believe it or not,” one tells the other after spinning what sounds like a yarn but then again might not be. Ishii’s zany world has its own surreal logic culminating in a piece of cosmic irony and defined by coincidence as the otherwise unrelated stories begin to come together and slowly find their way to Hotel New Mexico but seems to suggest the point is in the serendipity of the meeting and its concurrent authenticity even if a literal shot in the arm is a less than ideal way of brokering a friendship.

Party 7 is released in the UK on blu-ray on 17th July as part of Third Window Films’ Katsuhito Ishii Collection.

Original trailer (English subtitles)