Tag: 2000s

The Faceless Dead (行旅死亡人, Kishu Izuchi, 2009)

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If you suddenly got a phone call one day to tell you that someone with your name living at your address had been taken ill, how would you feel? Sponsored by the Japan Journalist College, Kishu Izuchi’s mystery drama The Faceless Dead (行旅死亡人, Koryo Shibonin) sends its aspiring investigative reporter through a murky world of crime and identity theft to discover why someone would need to discard their name and live a life of constant inconvenience in an ever modernising society. 

As she explains in her opening voiceover, Misaki’s dream is to become an investigative reporter working on important social issues exposing scandals such as contaminated blood supplies, mislabelled food, and people trafficking but has found little interest from publishers when pitching her ideas. Currently she regards herself as a “job-hopper” working part-time at a local supermarket which has recently been taken over by a larger conglomerate intent on introducing a new creepily cult-like corporate mentality. With her lease about to expire, Misaki is feeling desperate only to receive a weird phone call from another apartment building informing her that “Misaki Takigawa” has been taken ill and is currently in hospital. Obviously this comes as quite a surprise to Misaki as she tries to explain she is Misaki Takigawa and she feels fine to the dumbfounded man on the phone. On venturing to the hospital to find out what’s going on she discovers that the person using her identity to rent a flat is a woman she worked with at a publishing company some years ago, Yasuko. 

Misaki can’t figure out why or how Yasuko would be using her name and documentation but is both curious and feeling a sense of obligation to find out not least because Yasuko also had a bank book with a substantial amount of money in it that’s in her name. Her quest leads her on a meandering path discovering that it obviously wasn’t the first time the woman she knew as Yasuko who had always seemed kind and honest had been living under an assumed name even though it’s something quite difficult and inconvenient to do in contemporary Japan because it makes it all but impossible to access medical care, rent an apartment, or even get a mobile phone all of which require verified documentation. Having access to Misaki’s employment record presumably enabled her to get what she needed to sign a lease and open a bank account in her name and perhaps explains one reason why she elected not to get treatment when a routine workplace checkup highlighted possible medical concerns, the other reason being a sense of guilt which also explains why she chose to live in austerity saving all her money and later instructing Misaki to send it to an older couple living in a remote country village. 

More and more, Misaki is forced to admit that she really didn’t know Yasuko at all even if she felt indebted towards her for having taken her under her wing at her first job, or perhaps that she did in a sense know “Yasuko”, the persona she had adopted at the time, but not the woman underneath it. Apparently based on a real case, Misaki’s quest for the truth takes a rather dark turn that eventually intersects with the weird company that has taken over her supermarket intent on turning all its workers into soulless drones who live only to serve, the boss ominously instructing his subordinate to inject their new philosophy directly into the arms of the unenthusiastic shop staff after failing to achieve their desired sales goals. 

Maybe you could say it was all done for love and Yasuko is simply a hopeless romantic willing to sacrifice her identity but not her life in order reclaim past happiness but even if every life has a price as she reflects in a moment of desperation you can’t simply buy someone else’s no matter how much you’ve lost or suffered in the one you’ve been given. Through her quest to ascertain Yasuko’s true identity along with the original one, Misaki is forced to reflect on and reconsider her relationships with others as well as her own identity while hoping to prove her journalistic skills investigating this very strange and ultimately sad case as borne out by the post-credits sequence which finds her, perhaps strangely, still working at the supermarket trying to organise her life goals around her financial responsibilities in an intransigent society. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Vital (ヴィタール, Shinya Tsukamoto, 2004)

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“There is the vast realm of the unconscious,” one of the professors explains to vacant medical student Hiroshi a soon-to-be physician attempting to heal himself from a trauma he doesn’t fully understand. Perhaps as the title implies, Vital (ヴィタール) sees Tsukamoto branch out from his vistas of urban alienation to find a new paradise in nature albeit one that it exists largely in the mind and that the hero can never fully return to because this place of life is also one of death which exists inside a kind of eternity.

This explains to some extent Hiroshi’s (Tadanobu Asano) temporal confusion. Having lost his memory following a car accident in which he later learns his girlfriend Ryoko (Nami Tsukamoto) was killed, he shifts between “reality” and what first seems to be flashbacks of his unremembered past but are actually taking place in a kind of alternate, perhaps idealised reality in the “vast realm of the unconscious” as Hiroshi attempts to reconstruct his image of Ryoko along with that of himself. Another of his professors more philosophically asks were lies the seat of the soul in the human body and is this something that Hiroshi maybe unconsciously looking for during his anatomy classes in which he is coincidentally assigned Ryoko’s body to work on only realising when he sees her tattoo in one of his visions. 

In some ways this grim task of dissection is a bid for greater intimacy, to take Ryoko apart and then put her back together as the students diligently do at the end their studies reassembling the bodies and placing them in coffins in keeping with culturally specific death rituals. The faces of the cadavers are covered with a bag until the students are instructed to remove them, but they are always reminded to treat the dead with dignity and that their role here is one of understanding as they attempt to work out not only how these people died but also how they may have lived. Hiroshi causes conflict with some of his fellow students on just this point, seeming rather creepy in his vacant intensity over the body while also wanting to take ownership over that of Ryoko rather than work as part of the group complaining that the others are too clumsy and it’s affecting his ability to learn. 

Ryoko’s father comes to say that though he once blamed Hiroshi, his daughter had been in a way dead for a long time before she died, the light apparently going out of her eyes when she was still in high school. Only in Hiroshi’s unconscious does she say that she didn’t want to die despite an apparent obsession with death in Hiroshi’s other resurfacing memories/visions of her as symbolised in her repeated requests for him to strange her during in sex. Another of the professors had said that the suppressed desires of the unconscious could create conflict and this alternate reality is also in some senses Hiroshi’s own latent desire for death, to be with Ryoko in this new paradise that is founded on an idyllic beach rich with nature and sunshine where they are free to be together liberated from the oppressions of civilisation. 

Indeed, it’s been raining all through the film as if in expression of Hiroshi’s gloomy mental state but we later learn that Ryoko’s most treasured memory was simply standing in the rain with him and breathing in its scent. Verdant nature is aligned with the vitality that is often absent from the soulless concrete of a city in which everyone seems to exist in tiny, separate worlds which only border on but never join each other. Ikumi (Kiki), a strange female student who develops a fascination with Hiroshi, has an illicit conversation with a professor she’s apparently been sleeping with each of them speaking into mobile phones while standing steps apart. Tsukamoto often isolates the protagonists, placing them in corners or blurring the periphery as if they alone existed in this moment. In Hiroshi’s idealised alternate reality, these barriers disappear as he and Ryoko share an entire world in love and freedom. 

The irony is that he resurrects himself through the process of dissecting Ryoko’s dead body. His Da Vinci-like sketches begin to shift as do the ink-like shadows on the wall amid the reflection of the rain as Hiroshi stares vacantly trying to reassemble his past. Through accepting Ryoko’s death, he rediscovers life and is in a sense reborn insisting he will continue medicine even though his professor and parents advise him not to given what he’s just been through though his parents had also said that before the accident they didn’t really think he had it in him to become a doctor. Their disapproval may explain some of the pressures he was experiencing as perhaps was Ryoko that may have urged them to long for death. In any case, what the film presents is the archaeology of grief, a prolonged period of introspection and loneliness and a seeking of intimacy no longer really possible but discovered only in the vast realms of the unconscious.

Vital is released on UK blu-ray 30th September courtesy of Third Window Films.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

The Fourth Portrait (第四張畫, Chung Mong-Hong, 2010)

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A young boy struggles to forge his own identity while lost amid the legacy of perpetual displacement in Chung Mong-Hong’s whimsical coming-of-age drama The Fourth Portrait (第四張畫). As the title implies, Chung structures his tale around four images as the boy looks for guidance through each of his relationships but perhaps finally discovers only that he is on his own and has only himself for protection yet must find the courage to try and escape even if it causes him pain. 

At 10 years old, young Xiang (Bi Xiao-Hai) is impossibly burdened in the way no child should be as a doctor coldly tells him that his father will soon pass, a nurse instructing him to stay put and let them know when his father is gone. Xiang impassively places a napkin over his father’s face, the undertakers bickering amongst themselves while deciding to do the funeral for free seeing as this child is now all alone and seemingly has no other family. Yet no one comes to take care of Xiang, he has to go home on his own and begins living independently eventually resorting to stealing lunch boxes at school only to be caught and scolded by a grumpy janitor who both tenderly offers him food but then roughly slaps him when he notices the boy is crying. 

As Xiang is about to become, the old man, Zhang (Chin Shih-Chieh), is also a displaced person having travelled from the Mainland 50 years previously. He takes him to scavenge abandoned buildings meditating on what it is that gets left behind, why it has value to some and apparently not to others. Xiang himself was abandoned by his mother who took his older brother with her but chose to leave him with his father, wondering perhaps if he is valuable or not. Technically if not literally orphaned, Xiang is later reunited with his mother, Chun-lang (Hao Lei), but is then displaced himself, forced to move to the city and into the house she shares with her second husband and infant child. Like Zhang his mother came from the Mainland in search of a better life she did not find and is living with a sense of disappointed futility trapped in her marriage to a dejected and violent man (Leon Dai) while forced to support the family through sex work at a nearby hostess club frequented largely by Mainland gangsters. 

Unanchored and insecure in his new environment, Xiang begins having strange dreams of his apparently absent brother Yi but his attempts to discover the truth about the past only further destabilise the foundations of his new home. His mother cannot fully embrace him because of her guilt over leaving him behind while unable to fully process the reality of what may have happened to Yi too frightened of the truth to risk poking around. His stepfather meanwhile is a haunted man, unable to work and seemingly the primary carer to their small child though neither them are ever really seen paying much attention to the baby. When Chun-lang tells Xiang that he is a stranger in their house, that she is no longer the mother she once was because she has married another man and has another child with him, she does so perhaps partly to encourage him to leave advising him to steer clear of his stepfather in a bid to keep him safe yet blaming herself for all the tragedy which has befallen her accepting it would not have happened if she had not “messed up” her life. 

Perhaps this is why Xiang finds himself bonding with a decidedly strange middle-aged man he meets by accident in a public toilet. “Big Gun” paints himself as something of a big brother figure, suggesting that they can drift together travelling around on his moped. His conduct towards the boy is extremely inappropriate in more ways than one involving him in his life of petty crime, yet Xiang finds in him a sense of acceptance that he doesn’t get from the other adults along with a new sense of independence. Yet Xiang’s illusions are eventually shattered twice over, the first revelation paving the way for a greater loss of innocence in discovering the truth about his brother while the second perhaps leads him to feel that he really is alone, continually displaced, and entirely unanchored in a world with offers little prospect of warmth, affection, or a place to belong. 

Like Zhang and his mother, Xiang is fails to settle in contemporary Taiwan lost amid a stream of constant dislocations and bound only for endless wandering. Yet staring into a mirror preparing for his fourth portrait he perhaps begins to forge an image of himself informed by those he’s drawn before and giving him the sense of confidence to survive the emptiness of the world around him. Beautifully shot with a lingering ethereality, Chung’s enigmatic storytelling coupled with the whimsical score lend a note cheerfulness to what in many ways is a fairly bleak situation but perhaps reflects the surreality of the boy’s life in his constant quest for belonging. 

International trailer (English subtitles)

May 18 (화려한 휴가, Kim Ji-hoon, 2007)

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Following the assassination of president Park Chung-hee in 1979, many assumed that democracy would return and that the society would be liberated from its authoritarian past. That did not, however, come to pass. While the government floundered, general Chun Doo-hwan launched a coup that led to nothing other than a second military dictatorship. Citizens continued to press for democratisation and the lifting of the martial law that had been declared in the wake of Park’s death. In order to cement his authoritarian rule, Chun embarked on an oppressive crackdown of resistance activity, actually expanding martial law and sending troops to monitor universities where the majority of protests were taking place.  

It’s against this backdrop that Kim Ji-hoon’s May 18 (화려한 휴가, Hwaryeohan hyuga) unfolds, so named for the first day of Gwangju Uprising in which citizens of the small provincial city were subject to beatings, torture, rape and murder at the hands of military forces. He opens however with pleasant scenes of the local countryside as taxi driver Min-woo (Kim Sang-kyung) heads back into the city eventually arriving to pick up his younger brother Jin-woo (Lee Joon-gi) from high school and deliver him to the local church. Min-woo also has a crush on mutual friend and fellow attendee, Shin-ae (Lee Yo-won), who works as a nurse at the local hospital. For some reason even though this is a fairly small place, Min-woo also seems to be unaware that Shin-ae is the daughter of his boss Heung-su (Ahn Sung-ki ), a former army captain now retired and running a taxi firm. 

In an attempt to make the political personal, Kim spends the first hour on Min-woo’s awkward romance which by modern standards is quite problematic in that he basically ends up following Shin-ae around and offering to give her free lifts even though she seems annoyed to see him and isn’t keen on him effectively deciding where she doesn’t and doesn’t go. Meanwhile, as he and his brother are orphaned he’s adopted a paternal role towards Jin-woo who is bright and studying hard with the aim of getting into Seoul University to study law while Min-woo most likely had to give up school to drive the taxi so he could support them both. This is also in its way a little uncomfortable in its emphasis on Jin-woo’s bright future which is about to be destroyed by the uprising as if his life is worth more because of all the ruined potential rather than just because he was an ordinary human betrayed by his government and trapped by hellish atrocity. Even so, it hints at a conflict within Min-woo as he wants to keep his brother safe but also has a natural desire to resist injustice and is moved when Jin-woo explains that one of his best friends has been murdered by state violence. 

Then again, the film’s framing is also in a sense reactionary in Jin-woo’s intense offence against being branded as a “rebel” or a “communist” rather refocusing on the fact the military’s actions are inhuman and the their attempt to slur the local people only a means of justification. As the local priest accurately suggests, the military provokes them in order to have an excuse to crack down with extreme prejudice ensuring that there will be no further resistance to increasing authoritarianism. Some army officers begin to ask questions but are quickly shut down by their overzealous commander who claims the North may be on its way to link up with these “communists” and is quite clearly prepared to wipe out the entire town rather than back down and risk a further escalation of their resistance. 

While the soldiers are faceless and implacable, the townspeople are sometimes depicted as naive bumblers with significant time spent on a “loudmouth” comic relief character who is nevertheless one of the first to pick up a gun and join the town’s civilian army led by Heung-su who like the priest is under no illusions and assumes troops will soon storm the town. The comedic tone and melodramatic undercurrent often undercut Kim’s attempts to depict the horror of the massacre even in the irony of their juxtaposition as bullets suddenly rip into a cheerful crowd which had been laughing and joking only seconds before. The closing scenes in which a man refuses to surrender and is killed are framed as heroic but in the end seem futile, as if he’s thrown his life away for no reason. Even so there is something Shin-ae’s loudspeaker pleas to remember the citizens of Gwangju who stayed strong and resisted to the last rather than consent to their oppression even if she is in a sense condemned to be the storyteller bearing the horror of it all alone along with the loss of her own happy future crushed under the boots of violent authoritarianism.

International trailer (English subtitles)

A Good Lawyer’s Wife (바람난 가족, Im Sang-soo, 2003)

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Sexual repression and rigid patriarchal social codes slowly dissolve a “normal middle class” family in Im Sang-soo’s extremely frank treatise on contemporary gender roles, A Good Lawyer’s Wife (바람난 가족, Baramnan Kajok). The Korean title translating as “adulterous family” perhaps hints at Im’s winder intentions focussed not only on the role of “wife” but each of those within the family unit which is it seems resistant to change even as the society changes around it, the widowed mother-in-law ironically emerging as the most liberated and progressive of them all. 

Hojung (Moon So-ri) may be a good lawyer’s wife, but she’s also quietly dissatisfied eventually drifting into a relationship with a strange teenage neighbour she caught peeping at her in the nude. Her husband Youngjak (Hwang Jung-min), the lawyer, is a poor lover unable to satisfy her sexually while conducting a secret affair with a bohemian artist with whom he is able to have transgressively kinky sex. The couple have a young son, Soo-in, who is adopted and a little insecure worried that his grandmother doesn’t really like him because they aren’t related by blood while the other kids sometimes pick on him at school. Grandma Byunghan (Youn Yuh-jung) meanwhile is also having an affair, contemptuous of Youngjak’s father Changgeun (Kim In-mun) who has just been told he has only a month to live. 

Yet to everyone else the Joos lead “normal middle class life”, words Youngjak later uses unsuccessfully to help a woman get off on charges she otherwise admits. It might be taboo to speak of it, but sexual repression seems to be at the root of all their problems or at least an incompatibility between leading a what is conceived as “normal middle class life” and embracing one’s sexuality. As good lawyer’s wife Hojung remarks to a friend, once you get married “you’re not a woman anymore, you’re really nothing”. As his wife, and as a mother to Sooin, Hojung is no longer perceived as a sexual being by her husband, though as we later discover he remains somewhat passive both with his wife and with his mistress by whom he is penetrated from behind. Hojung meanwhile achieves her only orgasm when positioning herself on top of her inexperienced teenage lover, symbolically if also problematically reclaiming her sexual agency.

Hojung’s rebellion also has an ironic quality in that finally restores her maternity as she experiences what she describes as a miracle pregnancy, pointing at the couple’s sexual incompatibility as the primary reason they were not able to conceive a child. Even so, the film heavily suggests the cruel and unexpected tragedy which later befalls the family is a kind of punishment for the mutual transgressions of husband and wife as they sought the fulfilment denied to them by the constraints of a “normal middle class life” within the confines of a patriarchal marriage. “If your body wants it, give it what it wants” Byunghan eventually offers when meeting with her lover, declaring herself too old to feel guilty or embarrassed for satisfying her sexual desire while openly contemptuous of her husband with whom it seems she had an unhappy life. “Life’s about being truthful to yourself” she explains to her son, finally taking control now freed from marital constraints if ironically immediately considering re-marriage. 

Changgeun meanwhile sings North Korean military songs in the operating theatre and as we eventually realise, has no siblings because his mother and six sisters were all abandoned in North Korea where they died. His father escaped with him alone though it appears they are now estranged and it can be assumed that Changgeun’s drinking habit which eventually leads to the illness which kills him and destroys his marriage is born of a desire to overcome his guilt and trauma. Changgeun’s past too is something which must be repressed, he cannot easily speak of it because of the stigma surrounding his North Korean roots neatly linking back to Youngjak’s work with the families of those still looking for loved ones executed during the war quite literally falling into a mass grave in the film’s opening. All of these buried truths erode the foundations of the traditional family, yet Im seems to suggest perhaps the family in this form at least isn’t worth saving if it only causes people to hurt each other while forced to conform to a series of socially defined roles unable to be their most authentic selves even within a bubble of supposedly unconditional “love”.

Trailer (no subtitles)

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