Tag: 2001

Take Care of My Cat (고양이를 부탁해, Jeong Jae-eun, 2001)

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take-care-of-my-catThe time after high school is often destabilising as even once close groups of friends find themselves being pulled in all kinds of different directions. So it is for the group of five young women at the centre of Jeong Jae-eun’s debut feature, Take Care of My Cat (고양이를 부탁해, Goyangileul Butaghae). All at or around 20, the age of majority in Korea, the girls were a tightly banded unit during high school but have all sought different paths on leaving. Lynchpin Tae-hee (Bae Doo-na) is responsible for trying to keep the gang together through organising regular meet ups but it’s getting harder to get everyone in the same place and minor differences which hardly mattered during school grow ever wider as adulthood sets in.

Cheerful scenes of high school mischief give way to the uncertain present as five old friends prepare to celebrate the 20th birthday of the group’s self appointed star, Hye-joo (Lee Yo-won). Hye-joo, however, has moved on to a high level office job in Seoul and is about to blow off her high school friends to hang out with her possibly sleazy boss, only to revert back to plan A when he cancels on her. Too cowardly to ring her friends in person, Hye-joo leaves the business of calling off the party to the chief organiser, Tae-hee, who rings round letting the other three girls – jobless Ji-young (Ok Ji-young), and half Chinese twins Bi-ryu (Lee Eun-sil) and Ohn-jo (Lee Eun-ju), know (and presumably has to then ring them all back to tell them the party’s back on).

Hye-joo moved farthest away from her roots both in terms of location and of her social ambitions through taking a well paid admin job in the city. Increasingly materialistic and status orientated, her friendship with the other girls suffers as she sees herself as transitioning to a higher social class. Ironically, her views are equally deluded as she continues to believe that her dedication and willingness to work hard can make up for her lack of a degree but quickly finds herself displaced when the next batch of newbies arrive.

This growing desire for material status has also contributed to a seemingly unbridgeable rift with Ji-young whose economic status is the most vulnerable. Orphaned and living in a shack with her elderly grandparents, Ji-young has recently lost her job and is having difficulty finding another one precisely because of her circumstances – one firm even point blank refuses her application because both of her parents are dead and they need a direct family member to vouch for her. Hye-joo is insensitive in the extreme and often flashes her money around whilst rubbing salt in Ji-young’s wounds by emphasising her lack of it and pouring cold water over her ideas of saving money to study abroad. Small digs like these and insisting that all the girls leave their home town to visit her in Seoul (leaving aside the additional costs for Ji-young whom she knows is having difficulty making ends meet) point to Hye-joon’s own sense of neediness and insecurity.

As a result, Ji-young distances herself from her friends, ashamed of her desperation and feeling unable to ask them for help. It is she who finds the cat of the title when she hears it mewing whilst trapped behind debris on her way home. The cat becomes almost a mirror of Ji-young – alone and abandoned on the streets with no one to look after her. Originally, Ji-young tries to give the kitten to Hye-joon as a birthday present only to have it immediately returned. The cat is then passed around among each of the friends looking for a more permanent kind of affection, but finding little in the way of stability.

The longest and most devoted guardian turns out to be Tae-hee who is perhaps most affected by the loss of her friends and changing circumstances. Tae-hee is from a moderately well off middle class family and has been helping out in her father’s business since leaving school (apparently without pay). Despite her lack of worry over material comforts, she finds herself feeling restless and increasingly interested in the “foreign” with dreams of taking off alone for adventures overseas. Her desire for freedom is partly down to her domineering father who simply overrules all of her decisions even down to ordering food in a restaurant. Tae-hee is the only one to reach out to Ji-young when she realises she might be in trouble and is the only one still there for her at the end. Their economic and familial circumstances may be different, but in their desire to escape the confines of the rundown Incheon for something outside of what it might have planned for them, the two girls are a perfect match.

Of the group of friends the twins receive the least attention, hovering on the sidelines, separate from the mini dramas erupting between the insensitive and self obsessed Hye-joo and the increasingly desperate Tae-hee and Ji-young. As a unit of two they have their own little world which seems much happier and more solid than that of any of the other girls and arguably have less need for the immediacy of their old friendships. They are therefore the ideal place to deposit them, in the form of a stray cat finally finding a home. The past has its place – in the past, the memories are warm and fluffy and deserve to be taken care of, but there comes a time you have to surrender full custody and be content to visit from time to time.

An extraordinarily well composed debut feature, Take Care of My Cat has a more European feeling than many a Korean coming of age drama but is filled with realistic detail such as the constant ringing of the girls’ ever present mobile phones and the onscreen representation of their straightforward text based conversation. There’s a kind of sadness associated with the transition from carefree adolescence to the difficult journey into adulthood with each of the girls discovering what it is they want out of life, or more aptly what it is they don’t want. Hye-joo emerges as the quasi-villain of the piece as she makes an obvious, superficial choice to follow the consumerist trend over valuing human relationships though it’s hard not to feel sorry for her when it appears she’s being set up for disappointment. Ending on a note of hopeful uncertainty, Jeong’s debut feature is a hymn to the theme of moving on but is careful to admit the bittersweet quality of a new beginning.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Hush! (ハッシュ！, Ryosuke Hashiguchi, 2001)

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hushThe family drama is a mainstay of Japanese cinema, true, but, it’s a far wider genre than might be assumed. The rays fracture out from Ozu through to The Family Game and Crazy Family which sought to ask a few questions about where the idea of “family” was headed in a society of rapidly increasing materialism. Ryosuke Hashiguchi comes at the idea from a different angle in 2001’s Hush! (ハッシュ！) as he once again takes the perspective of the gay community and asks if the “traditional family” is about to change – what could, or should, survive if the old, rigid ideas can be remade into something lasting created out of love and acceptance rather than obligation?

As the film begins, Naoya (Kazuya Takahashi) wakes up to find his one night stand already fully dressed and heading out the door, awkwardly, without even stopping to say goodbye. Eventually he hooks up with the kindly Katsuhiro (Seiichi Tanabe) and the two quickly become fairly serious but then a damaged woman, Asako (Reiko Kataoka), enters their lives hoping to use Katsuhiro as a sperm donor, forcing the men to reassess a number of important desires and beliefs, putting strain on their still fledgling relationship. If that weren’t enough drama, a girl at Katsuhiro’s place of work has also developed a crush on him and is prepared to take her unreturned love to some extremely dark places.

The first level of mini stresses Naoya and Katsuhiro have to contend with is their conflicting (if complementary) personalities and attitudes to their sexuality. Naoya is an easy going type with a job at a pet grooming salon. He’s a fully out gay man and a frequenter of city’s gay scene. Katsuhiro, by contrast, is much more mild mannered and innately kind. He works at a scientific research station and is more or less closeted – that is, he doesn’t particularly go out of his way to hide his sexuality from his work mates and family but he doesn’t volunteer the information either. This attitude seems to bother Naoya at various points but being the easy going type he’s apt to let it go most of the time.

However, when Katsuhiro reveals Asako’s offer, Naoya is actively against it. His idea of gay life suggests that relationships are generally short, he prefers the relative freedom of his life as an essentially “single” man rather a husband shackled to a family. Katsuhiro on the other hand perhaps would have liked children, or to be a father figure to someone else’s. Though Naoya has previously expressed boredom and disillusionment with his life spent in clubs and gay bars, he’s still resistant to the idea of settling down, or at least to the belief that a single relationship really can stay the course.

All three of the central characters have, in a sense, been let down by the “traditional” family. Naoya’s father left when he was small, leaving him with a single mother which is something that wasn’t so common when he was a child resulting in a fair amount of social stigma from other people in the community. These days his brassy mother knows about his sexuality and seems OK with it (aside from getting the random idea that Naoya will be wanting a pair of breasts at some point). Katsuhiro’s father was an alcoholic who died when he was just a small boy, his relationship with his brother and his family seems good but he’s afraid to reveal his sexuality to them for fear of disapproval. His brother had an arranged marriage, which doesn’t seem to have worked out so well at least from the sister-in-law’s perspective. Asako has also had a troubled life looking for affection in all the wrong places, feeling that if she had not been neglected as a child perhaps she’d have been a steadier adult. Naoya was running away from the idea of family ties, but Katsuhiro and Asako are actively seeking to repair the ones which never grew into the kind of roots one needs to anchor onself in a society entirely built around familial bonds.

After receiving some surprising medical news, Asako perversely decides that her own salvation lies in becoming a mother. She’s had enough of casual relationships and decided to go a different route so when she spots the kind look Katshiro gives a small child at a restaurant, she decides he must be the one to father her baby. Asako knew that Naoya and Katsuhiro were a couple, but that works out pretty well for her plan so she approaches him and makes her left field offer right off the bat. It will take some figuring out but this literal third way is a neat solution to a series of problems and, being completely new, is safe from the pettiness and misery often found within the traditional family unit. Contrasted with the bitterness displayed by Katsuhiro’s sister-in-law, the unusual arrangement of these three would be parents and their unborn child(ren) is one filled with love, forgiveness and mutual support rather than cold obligation or a simple fulfilment of societal expectations.

Once again Hashiguchi proves himself adept at creating a series of complex, flawed human beings who are nevertheless relatable and often endearing. Hashiguchi’s films tend to run long but he also ensures that even his supporting characters are well enough drawn to maintain interest in the many subplots from Naoya’s abrasive gay bar buddy to Katsuhiro’s unhinged stalker. An interesting sideways look at the state of the modern family, Hush! seems to advocate that just shutting up and going with the flow is not the answer but there are quieter solutions to be found if everyone is willing to listen to the silence.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Failan (파이란, Song Hae-sung, 2001)

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FailanSometimes God’s comic timing is impeccable. You might hear it said that love transcends death, becomes an eternal force all of its own, but the “love story”, if you can call it that, of the two characters at the centre of Song Hae-sung’s Failan (파이란, Pairan), who, by the way, never actually meet, occurs entirely in the wrong order. It’s one thing to fall in love in a whirlwind only to have that love cruelly snatched away by death what feels like only moments later, but to fall in love with a woman already dead? Fate can be a cruel master.

The titular Failan (Cecilia Cheung) is a migrant from mainland China who’s travelled to Korea in search of her last remaining relatives following the death of her family. Unfortunately, they moved abroad some time ago and no one knows how to contact them. Stuck in Korea, Failan is running out of options but a “kindly” woman suggests a phoney visa marriage so she can legally stay in the country and earn her keep at the same time.

So, she ends up married to the feckless petty gangster-cum-video-store-proprietor Kang-jae (Choi Min-sik). We meet him around a year later and it’s his story we follow for the first half of the film as he gets out of jail after being arrested for selling adult videos to horny teenagers. Kang-jae quickly gets into an argument with his gangster boss, Young-sik (Son Byung-ho), but as they’re also old friends they patch things up over a drink only for the evening to go way south when Young-sik spots a rival gang member and ends up beating him to a bloody pulp whilst in a trance-like rage.

Young-sik is young and ambitious so when the crime is discovered he pleads with Kang-jae to take the rap for him, promising that he’ll buy him that fishing boat he’s always wanted so he can go back to his home town when he gets out. Kang-jae goes home to think it over and gets a knock on the door, two policemen are standing outside only they haven’t come to arrest him – the wife he’d forgotten all about has died. Kang-jae has hit a fork in the road both literal and metaphorical and takes a road trip with his best friend to finally meet his bride in a cold and lonely place.

Failan is almost a plot device in the film that bears her name, but her story is a sad and a hard one. Orphaned and alone she finds scant kindness in her adopted country but the woman who runs the laundry where she ends up working does at least develop an almost maternal feeling for her. Failan feels great gratitude to Kang-jae for agreeing to marry her so she could stay in Korea and is convinced he must be a very good, very kind person. She thinks this largely because she never meets him.

Kang-jae is rubbish at being a gangster. Young-Sik may have a point when he says he doesn’t have the heart for it. Early on, some of the youngsters try and rope him into an extortion scheme where they’re trying to get an old granny to pay back some of her loan. Apparently the granny had once been kind to Kang-jae when he was young and hungry so he doesn’t really put a lot of effort into being menacing towards her which makes him lose face with the young toughs who think of him as a joke anyway. Reading Failan’s letter, it’s the first time that anyone has ever said anything nice about him. The first woman who ever thought he was worth anything at all and she’s already lost to him before he even knew her.

Kang-jae is not a good man, he’s an underling just muddling through without thinking. He leaps from one thing to another always thrashing around landing where falls. He has a vague ambition to get the money together to buy a fishing boat and go home, but he’s not seriously pursing it. Even the group of gangsters he’s involved with are so laughably low rent that they can’t hold on to their completely worthless territory and have to put pressure on old ladies just to get by. After reading Failan’s letter and hearing that someone believed he was better than this, Kang-jae finally wakes up and starts thinking about his life with the ultimate realisation that he doesn’t have to live like this. Unfortunately, he might have just picked the wrong day to start living the rest of his life.

In many ways Failan is a typical melodrama filled with the pain of unrealised love and Fate’s ironic sense of timing. Based on a novel by the modern Japanese master of the tearjerker Jiro Asada (Poppoya), Failan seems engineered to rend hearts with its tale of true love frustrated by time and circumstance where every ounce of hope and goodness is well and truly trodden into the ground by the time the credits roll. Nevertheless, Song keeps things on the right side of schmaltzy, never racking up the misery and heartbreak beyond the threshold of plausibility. Like all the best melodramas, Failan’s sentimentality is sincere and, ultimately, moving. Another sad story of salvation arriving too late, Failan’s tale of tragic, unrealised love is an all too familiar one but effectively told it can’t fail to tear the heart.

You can currently stream Failan via Amazon Video in the US courtesy of Asian Crush, but the Korean R3 DVD and Region A blu-ray both contain English subtitles!

Unsubbed trailer:

Weekend Blues (ウィーク エンド ブルース, Kenji Uchida, 2001)

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weekend bluesKenji Uchida travelled to America’s San Fransisco State University to study filmmaking before returning to Japan and making this, his debut film, Weekend Blues (ウィーク エンド ブルース) which later went on to claim two awards at the prestigious Pia Film Festival for independent films earning him the scholarship which enabled his next film, A Stranger of Mine. However, Uchida’s film, though resolutely his own, individual creation, plays much more like the Japanese indie movies of the time and particularly those of the similarly considered, if drier, Nobuhiro Yamashita than it does to late 20th century American indie or the mumble core movement.

As in his later work, Uchida builds around a finely constructed farce only this time the central conceit is a bout of amnesia suffered by the central character, Kensuke, who is a depressed salaryman still reeling from his ex-fiancé’s sudden exit from his life. He takes solace in his one solid relationship – that with his committed slacker friend, the similarly named Kenji. However, on visiting Kenji’s apartment one Friday night he discovers Kenji has gone and got himself a girlfriend. Kensuke gets extremely drunk and also tries some of the weird drugs that Kenji has got from somewhere or other before accompanying Kenji’s new squeeze, Ayumi, on her way home.

That’s the last thing Kensuke remembers before waking up in a faraway town. On returning to Kenji’s flat he’s shocked to learn it’s actually Sunday already and he has absolutely no idea what’s been going on for the past 48 hours.

Jumping to the natural conclusion that the drugs are to blame, the two Kens descend on the dealer who seems to be some kind of man scientist researching a formula to give the “wimpy” men of today some of their caveman swagger back. Ironically named “samurai” the drugs themselves are more of a Mcguffin but provide a key into this world of nervous, unambitious, soon to be middle-aged men who’ve each had their girlfriends poached from under their noses by the more socially successful. A parade of jilted lovers passes by until we reach the more psychotic set who’ve decided to embrace some decidedly dodgy methods in order to ensure they won’t be humiliated and run out on ever again.

Uchida also adds another level to the amnesia based shenanigans with a sideline in internet dating where everybody is lying to everyone and presenting version of themselves that’s very much idealised. Kenji has told his prospective girlfriend that he’s a successful high earner despite the fact he doesn’t actually have a job at all, but at least his interest in the new woman has persuaded him to try and get back into the employment market so his full scale frauds can be demoted to gentle half-truths before things (hopefully) start to get more serious. In turn, his new lady love, Ayumi, may not be all she seems either.

Kensuke’s larger philosophy lies in a need to be needed. Now that his fiancée has left him, discovers he was no longer necessary to her anymore, Kenji feels himself a man without purpose and the prospect of simply continuing like this for another fifty years is beginning to frighten him. Again there’s a wider question here about interconnectedness (which is also the heart of any farce) in the supposedly “connected” world in which you can pick up a true love fantasy by lying about yourself on the internet – even if the mutual misrepresentations end up spinning their own pretty web of deceit in their own sweet time

Uchida’s first film is a necessarily low budget, indie effort but makes no apologies for itself or claims of being anything more than it is. That said, the performances are universally strong and the direction often interesting even given the obvious budgetary constraints. A very modern kind of farce which also looks back the salaryman comedies of the ‘60s, Weekend Blues is a good indication of Uchida’s future direction whilst also succeeding as an enjoyably off the wall comedy in its own right.

 

Beijing Bicycle (十七岁的单车, Wang Xiaoshuai, 2001)

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BeijingBicycleThere are nine million bicycles in Beijing (going by the obviously very accurate source of a chart topping song) but there are 11.5 million inhabitants so that’s at least two million people who do not own a bike. Still, if you’re in the unlucky position of having your bike stolen by one of the aforementioned two million, your chances of finding it again are slim. Luckily for the protagonist of Wang Xiaoshuai’s Beijing Bicycle (十七岁的单车, Shí Qī Suì de Dānchē), he manages to track his down through sheer perseverance though even once he gets hold of it again his troubles are far from over.

A young guy from the country, Guei has lucked out with a good job at a bicycle courier company. Each of the new employees is given a new, high-tech bicycle which they will eventually own after working off the cost through a 20/80 salary split and once the bike is theirs they’ll be on an even better 50/50 pay rate. This is a dream job for Guei and he’s pretty good at it – he’s nearly paid for the bike in under a month. However, after being messed about by a hotel reception desk which keeps him hanging around longer than usual, he emerges to find his bike no longer waiting for him.

The vehicle turns up in the hands of another boy of a similar age but very different background. Jian is a lower middle-class boy at a posh school where most of his classmates are considerably better off than he is and it seems to get to him. Jian’s father has been promising to buy him a bicycle for years but something always comes up and now it’s that his little sister got into a better school so they need the money for her fees. Resentfully, Jian gets himself a bike to hang out with his posh friends through other means and generally continues to be a little shit about it.

Quite obviously inspired by De Sica’s neo-realist classic Bicycle Theives, Beijing Bicycle doesn’t quite have that movie’s harsh sentimentalism but goes about as far as Wang could take a similar message and still get around China’s frighteningly tight censorship regulations. Guei does everything right – well, almost everything, he gets so upset about losing his bike that he forgets to deliver his final package which is what gets him fired from the delivery firm (they didn’t really mind about the bicycle anyway). He offers to find the bike and bring it back and is promised a second chance if he can actually beat the odds and track it down but his boss doesn’t seriously expect to see him again. Guei needs the bike to live, he can’t work without it and this was about the best job he’s likely to get in the bustling metropolis of Beijing without qualifications or family connections.

On the other hand, it becomes increasingly difficult to sympathise with Jian and his petty squabbles with his very reasonable father and attempts to blend in with the equally awful group of thuggish rich boys from school. Of course, it’s all about a girl really – somehow he thinks she’d care about him having a bicycle (she wouldn’t) and luckily said girl is too sensible to hang out with someone who’d beat up some poor kid and take away his only way of supporting himself just because he could. Yes, he’s a young man and he’s angry so he’s doing stupid teenage boy stuff but he’s ruining lives in the process and desperately needs someone to explain to him about the world not being fair.

Guei eventually steals back his bike, only for Jian’s mates to beat him up and take it again. Guei doesn’t give up though and eventually the two end up sharing the bike even though Jian only uses it for swanning around and trying to impress a girl who isn’t interested in him. Needless to say it all ends quite badly. Jian gets Guei into even more trouble that he didn’t ask for and both boys end up losing out both ways. As in De Sica’s film, society turns us all into bicycle thieves whether we wanted to be or not. The boys are both chasing an unattainable dream but they’re doing it from very different places and though both are arguably at a disadvantage boys like Guei will always lose out to cowardly thugs with muscle like Jian.

Nicely filmed in a modern indie, neo-realist inspired style Beijing Bicycle does suffer a little with its lengthy running time especially as the tussle over the bicycle itself turns into a repetitious saga in which you just want someone to give Guei back his bicycle and have done with it. Nevertheless, having said that it actually does quite a lot with an economical script though Zhou Xun’s virtual walk on of a cameo as the glamorous neighbour feels a little underdeveloped even if it pays off in the second half of the film. A sadly realistic tale of a very unlucky boy who just wants to get on and works hard to get there only to come up against cowards and thugs with money Beijing Bicycle does what it can do to highlight the unfairness inherent in the post-communist world.

Beijing Bicycle was previously released by Tartan in the UK and is currently available to stream via Amazon. In the US it’s currently available on DVD through Sony Pictures Classic.

Watched via Mubi.