Tag: 2010s

Life: Untitled (タイトル、拒絶, Kana Yamada, 2019)

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“Killing is easy. Revive me instead!” The heroine of Kana Yamada’s Life Untitled (タイトル、拒絶, Title: Kyozetsu) exclaims during a climactic argument, trying to find meaning in a life of ceaseless transaction. Adapting her own play, Yamada sets her tale of existential disappointment in an apartment used as an HQ for a group of call girls, each with their own problems but trying to live as best they can within the compromising environment of a patriarchal society which offers them little in the way of hope for a less depressing future. 

According to the agency’s top girl Riyu (Tomoko Nozaki) “everyone here is a failure of society”. Asking herself whether her painfully “ordinary” life was worth much of anything, Kano (Sairi Ito) resolved to become the hare rather than the tortoise, put on her recruit suit and submitted her CV to “Crazy Bunny”, a “delivery” company offering services only hinted at on the menu. Discovering that sex work was something she couldn’t handle, she managed to switch sides, becoming part of the management team taking “orders” and dispatching other women to various love hotels in the surrounding area, which means of course that she is privy to most of the interoffice drama even if she has little knowledge of these women’s external lives beyond that which they offer up freely as part of their work. 

The women who work at the agency, if you can call it that, are a varied bunch almost as if Yamashita, the thuggish boss running the operation on behalf of an older man (Denden), has made an effort to cater to all tastes. Three of the ladies gossip about ridiculous clients and their excuses for not wanting to use protection (including a fake medical certificate), while openly taking potshots at an older woman, Shiho (Reiko Kataoka), who has been selected as a substitute for the in demand Mahiru (Yuri Tsunematsu). Older women are cheaper they giggle, though the oldest of them, Atsuko (Aimi Satsukawa), is not so young herself and perhaps aware that she’s reaching a crisis point as she ages of out of the “most desirable” demographic. Kano thinks of Mahiru as the office’s hare in comparison to her patient tortoise, an embodiment of faceless desire wanted by all known by none. 

Mahiru too is well aware of her appeal and an expert in manipulating it. She loves money, she says, because she wants to use it to “buy someone’s life to burn the garbage inside me”, later vowing to “buy a person who can serve me for life”.  Carrying the burden of childhood trauma and sexualised from an early age, Mahiru is distrustful of relationships not based on transaction but perhaps craving something deeper while darkly yearning to burn the city of Tokyo to the ground. As it happens she is not the only one yearning to raze this society for the various ways in which it condemns women like her to a kind of underclass while men continue to live by a double standard that allows them to “buy” female bodies but resents the women who “sell” them. 

Another young woman, Kyoko (Kokoro Morita), finds this out to her cost in her difficult romance with the agency’s driver Ryota (Syunsuke Tanaka) with whom she slept for free while they were both drunk. She claims to understand him, that they are really both alike, soft people trying to look hard in order to survive in a cruel society. But he rejects her, asking who’d want to date a “hooker” like her, echoing Riyu’s words that she is “utterly worthless” by virtue of her life in sex work. Kyoko may be right and he likes her too, but he can’t let go of the idea that there is something “humiliating” about being romantically involved with a woman who has sex with men for money. 

Yamashita, meanwhile, is breaking all the rules of the trade by having sex with the girls he runs sometimes paying but perhaps sometimes not, wielding his position of power for sexual gratification before finally unmasking himself in describing the women as “garbage waiting to be thrown away”, disposable merchandise to be used and discarded once no longer useful to men like him. Kano might have been under no illusions as to Yamashita’s character, but the depths of his callousness surprise her. She’d developed a fondness for his underling, Hagio. (Hagio), who seemed sensitive and kind but turns out to have more than she’d expected in common with the girls while continuing to engage in the double standard, insisting that those who pay for sex are stupid, deluded for falling in love with those who only want money. 

Kano thought her “ordinary” life was “pathetic” and wanted to know if a “tortoise” like her could become the protagonist of her own story only to remain on the sidelines, a patient observer of these women’s lives while not quite as conflicted as you might expect her to be in her complicity with their exploitation. “A woman who ran away wouldn’t understand” Riyu fires back on being pushed for her refusal to entertain an unpleasant client, and perhaps it’s true, she wouldn’t because she works for the other side. She decides that perhaps it’s alright for her life not to have a “title”, meandering aimlessly without clear purpose but continuing all the same while the women take their particular kinds of revenge against a misogynistic and oppressive society ruled by male violence. Fully taking the play off the stage, Yamada depicts the lives of sex workers with a melancholy empathy quietly enraged at the society which forced them into lives they may not have asked for or wanted but discriminates against them simply for doing a job which is in essence like any other. “It’s not my fault” a high school girl instantly answers when questioned by a policeman, and you know, it really isn’t. 

Life: Untitled is available to stream in the US until July 30 as part of this year’s Japan Cuts.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

What Can You Do About It? (だってしょうがないじゃない, Yoshifumi Tsubota, 2019)

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“Datte, shoganai janai?” The subject of Yoshifumi Tsubota’s empathetic documentary asks, stoically accepting disappointment with a resigned, well What Can You Do About It? (だってしょうがないじゃない). Recently diagnosed with ADHD, 41-year-old Tsubota documents his friendship with a relative diagnosed with a Pervasive Developmental Disorder, in his case autism with mild learning difficulties, as he tries to come to terms with the many changes in his life from the death of his mother some years previously to the impending prospect of having to leave his childhood home and enter a residential facility. 

Born in 1957, Makoto had lived alone with his mother for over 40 years before she passed away. Leaving education after middle school, he drifted around in various jobs before joining the SDF with which he served until returning home on his father’s death and is now in his early 60s. Yoshifumi’s aunt, Machiko, has become his legal guardian, helping him get the PDD diagnosis and sorting him out with a pension while managing his money and just generally watching over him. Other than Machiko, whom he refers to as a sister, Makoto is also visited by a series of helpers who assist him with day to day matters such as cleaning and grocery shopping he otherwise finds difficult. 

As his grocery helper points out, sometimes it can take a while for Makoto to fully understand why something is not working out the way he expected. In the case of shopping, he forgets about his budget and puts everything he wants into the basket only for the helper to remind him that he needs to put something back because he’s run out of money. He also gets himself into trouble with Machiko after asking Yoshifumi to go shopping with him and splurging on new trainers just because he liked them, lying that Yoshifumi had bought them for him and remorseful about potentially getting Yoshifumi into trouble. The biggest problem, however, is with a seemingly pernickety neighbour who has been making complaints about Makoto’s sometimes eccentric behaviour, especially his strange habit of going out late at night and throwing plastic carrier bags in the air just because he enjoys seeing them dance in the wind. He knows he needs to change, but finds it impossible to stop. 

Makoto’s compulsions worry Machiko who recalls a previous occasion on which he almost started a fire idly playing with matches. She is also alarmed on discovering a pornographic magazine he’d hidden in his figurine cabinet, paranoid that he might harm someone, unable to control himself or understand what might be considered inappropriate. Machiko’s rather prurient reaction appears to cause Makoto a great deal of anxiety despite Yoshifumi’s reassurance that most men have similar magazines and looking at them, so long as that’s all it is, is perfectly healthy whatever Machiko might say to the contrary. 

Meanwhile, he’s acutely worried about the prospect of being forced out of his family home and realising that if something happens to Machiko there will be no one left to look after him. After his mother’s death, Makoto had announced a sudden intention to marry a beautiful woman, but, as it turns out, only to get himself another mother. Two older women who come to chat with him as part of a community outreach programme try to talk him out of it, persuading him that wives and mothers are different, something which apparently took a little time for him to fully understand. When a cherry tree in the garden has to be cut down, he finds it very distressing as if he no longer recognises his home as his own with only two trees when there had always been three.

Yoshifumi too is looking for acceptance and understanding, explaining to Makoto and the visiting ladies that his wife is struggling to accept his ADHD diagnosis while telling us in voiceover that he’s been hiding his medication in his office and taking it in secret because she doesn’t approve. His quest to understand Makoto is also one to understand himself while trying to capture the way he sees the world. As Makoto says, however, Yoshifumi’s wife can never fully understand because she does not experience things the way they do. Nevertheless, the two men though a generation apart generate a genuine friendship, going to theme parks, baseball games, summer festivals, and eventually karaoke as they bond over their shared sense of difference. Lending a whimsical touch with frequent transitions into surrealist animation, Tsubota’s warm and empathetic approach explores not only his cousin’s usual life but also the problems of ageing and of disability in contemporary society along with a persistent stigma towards the acknowledgement of development disorders but finds solace in community support as friends and relatives rally round to help Makoto live his life to the fullest for as long as he can. 

What Can You Do About It? is available to stream in the US until July 30 as part of this year’s Japan Cuts.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Reiwa Uprising (れいわ一揆, Kazuo Hara, 2019)

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With a career spanning more than 40 years, veteran documentarian Kazuo Hara cannot exactly be described as prolific. His films can often take years to produce, his upcoming documentary on the Minamata disease apparently having been in development for the last decade and a half. Perhaps appropriately enough Reiwa Uprising (れいわ一揆, Reiwa Ikki) is then something of a revolution even within the director’s own career in that it saw him spring into action at a moment’s notice after being invited to document the imminent House of Councillors election by the documentary’s subject, Ayumi Yasutomi, making good on a joke made during an online interview. 

A transgender woman and professor at the University of Tokyo, Ayumi Yasutomi had received some previous press attention during an eccentric but unsuccessful campaign to become a local mayor. She was now one of 10 candidates selected to stand for brand new political party Reiwa Shinsengumi founded by former actor Taro Yamamoto. Yamamoto himself was already known for his unconventional political style, and Reiwa Shinsengumi was set up expressly to oppose the scandal-beset Abe administration with a series of broadly left-wing policies prioritising human rights and the environment in addition to pushing for an end to the consumption tax, nuclear power, and the controversial Henoko US military base in Okinawa. 

As a new political party, however, there was no firm organisation in place and Yamamoto chose his various candidates for their individual platforms, giving them in the main a fairly free rein to run their own campaign as they saw fit prioritising their own policy ideals. Yasutomi’s central policies revolve around the protection of children with a focus on preventing abuse and reform of the educational system, but she is also keen to encourage a return to nature and as in her mayoral campaign is regularly accompanied by a rented horse temporarily stabled in the city. Like Yamamoto she stages a series of publicity stunts including a Thriller flashmob, describing the video’s zombies as adults who have died inside after being robbed of their childhoods and have subsequently become mere machines perpetuating the systems of oppression which have made them what they are, while continuing with the musical processions which had originally caught Hara’s eye during her mayoral campaign. 

Though Yasutomi remains his main focus, Hara expands the canvas to capture the nascent revolution that Reiwa Shinsengumi is attempting to foster. As a new political party, they are not so much focussed on winning power as gaining a foothold, hoping for the 2% vote share that would grant them status as an official political party. The other candidates stand on a variety of social issue policy platforms from disability to workplace exploitation and the anti-nuclear movement with a keen focus on social equality insisting that no-one should be judged according to their “productivity” or “usefulness” to society. A sign language interpreter appears onstage next to the candidates at the central rallies, and in an impressive hustings gimmick the floor literally rises to allow his two wheelchair-using candidates access to the stage on the same level as their able-bodied colleagues. It is perhaps an unexpected candidate who makes the most impact, however, in the impassioned speeches of part-time worker and single mother Teruko Watanabe who advocates fiercely for the rights and dignities of Japan’s impoverished working class as a woman who found herself at the mercy of an inherently exploitative employment system which offers little protection to those outside of the full-time salaried employee. Her concerns are echoed in those of another candidate who once ran a 7-Eleven and has a deeply held grudge against Japan’s famous combini culture having taken the unusual position of being a boss who regularly advocated on behalf of workers. 

While passively documenting their struggle, Hara nevertheless uncovers a possible schism at the heart of the movement in that, as unconventional as he otherwise is, Yamamoto is determined to work within the system if only to change it while Yasutomi would rather destroy it completely, repeatedly insisting that the entire country is “crazy” and has never fully managed to escape from its militarist past. She resents the ruling LDP, who have been in power for almost the entirety of the period since Japan’s new post-war constitution came into effect, for perpetuating a kind of “positionism” in which all they care about is a conservative desire to maintain their own status granting only the concession that they will in turn recognise the status of others. It’s this “positionism” she seeks to counter in what she sees as the best expression of liberalism through rejecting labels, something which has apparently brought her into conflict with the wider LGBTQ+ community. Reiwa Shinsengumi managed to win two Diet seats, awarded to the two disabled candidates in a first for Japan, though Yamamoto himself did not make it back to parliament and Shinzo Abe’s administration remained comfortably in power. Nevertheless, Hara captures a political moment in which real change seems possible for the perhaps the first time since the decline of the post-war leftwing student movement in the early 1970s. As Watanabe puts it, this is just the start the starting line. The revolution starts now. 

Reiwa Uprising is available to stream in the US until July 30 as part of this year’s Japan Cuts.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Special Actors (スペシャル アクターズ, Shinichiro Ueda, 2019)

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When your made on a shoestring indie debut becomes an accidental international phenomenon, no one could really blame you for succumbing to imposter syndrome. Shinichiro Ueda’s One Cut of the Dead, a meta comedy with high concept conceit, delighted fans around the world but rather than slide into summer tentpole territory Ueda remains true to his roots with follow up feature Special Actors (スペシャル アクターズ) once again developed through actors’ workshops and owing a significant debt to contemporary stage comedy.

Our dejected hero, Kazuto (Kazuto Osawa), is an anxious young man burdened with PTSD from childhood trauma that causes him to faint when he becomes overly stressed or is confronted by an overbearing, if not actually violent, male authority figure. He dreams of becoming a hero who can protect people like Rescue Man, the star of an American tokusatsu-style show he’s obsessively watched dubbed into Japanese since childhood, and is determined to become an actor only his habit of fainting mid-audition constantly frustrates his ambitions. Already behind on his rent and about to be fired from his part-time job as a security guard on the grounds that he didn’t disclose his “illness” when he applied, Kazuto is reunited with his estranged younger brother Hiroki (Hiroki Kono), also an actor, who offers to introduce him to his agency, “Special Actors”. In addition to the usual TV and advertising work, Special Actors speciality is renting out talent for “real” as in providing professional mourners, bulking out theatre audiences with laughing stooges, and engineering long queues outside previously empty restaurants. 

Kazuto isn’t quite convinced, not only because it seems like anxiety central, but because it’s more than a little bit shady. The lead “scenario” writer was once a conman, and you can’t get away from the fact this is all quite manipulative and essentially unethical. Forced to take the job because of his financial predicament, he finds himself involved in various plots to change problematic behaviour at the request of well-meaning relatives such as a mother desperate to rescue her daughter from frittering all her money away at host bars. But are the Special Actors really any different than a host at a host bar who is after all only playing a role, as the young woman must know even if she has for some reason been taken in by it? Perhaps they’d be better to find out what is fuelling her obsession rather than coming up with some hokum involving a fake shaman to convince her that her behaviour is dangerous on a cosmic level. 

The moral ambiguity only deepens when the team take on their biggest challenge yet, taking down a shady cult at the request of an orphaned teenage girl whose sister seems primed to give away the family inn. Abruptly shifting into the realms of the espionage thriller reimagined as theatre, Ueda concocts an elaborate heist as the Special Actors infiltrate with the intention to expose. The central irony is of course that in practical terms there isn’t so much difference between them. They are both “lying”, manipulating vulnerable people and doing it for financial gain. “Acting is a big lie” the irate director had screamed in Kazuto’s face, “you have to mean it”. Is the shady cult merely “theatre” taken to an extreme, and if so who if anyone should be held responsible?

Ueda isn’t so much interested in these themes as the ironic potential of their latent comedy, stitching together a series of theatre skit set pieces working towards the epic finale in which the hero, Kazuto, learns to put on his cape and save the day by overcoming his internal “villain” in the shape of his abusive father. Like the cult, the Special Actors are also promising salvation or at least liberation from behaviours which others find problematic regardless of the target’s own wishes or desires even if in the case of some it may be for their own good, a more elaborate form of role play than that enacted in a therapy session. We are indeed all “acting” to one extent or another and you can never be sure that anyone is who they say they are because life itself is theatre. Shot with a perhaps thematically appropriate TV drama aesthetic, Kazuto’s zero to hero journey is pure wish fulfilment fantasy, but even if never reaching the perfectly constructed heights of One Cut of the Dead is undeniably entertaining. 

Special Actors is available to stream in the US until July 30 as part of this year’s Japan Cuts. Tune in for the live Q&A (available worldwide) after the movie on July 17 (also available afterwards on demand)!

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Shell and Joint (Isamu Hirabayashi, 2019)

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A capsule hotel is a contradictory space, a hub for compartmentalised pods which are nevertheless joined to form one greater whole. The people who frequent them are usually looking for confined private spaces as if cocooning themselves before emerging as something new, or at least renewed, yet the hotel at the centre of Isamu Hirabayashi’s Shell and Joint is slightly different, a noticeably upscale take on convenience with its stylishly modernist design and well appointed spaces from showering facilities to saunas. It is also, it seems, at the nexus of life and death as its bored receptionists, childhood friends, debate what it is to live and what it is to die. 

Sakamoto (Mariko Tsutsui), the female receptionist, has considered suicide many times but continues to survive. She attributes her death urge not to existential despair but to brain-altering bacteria and is certain that a vaccine will eventually be found for suicidal impulses. While her deskmate Nitobe (Keisuke Horibe) is struck by the miracle of existence, Sakamoto thinks his tendency to adopt a cosmic perspective is a just a way of dealing with his fear of death in rejecting its immediacy. Her suicide attempts are not a way of affirming her existence and she has no desire to become something just to prove she exists, nor does she see the point in needing to achieve. Just as in her bacterial theory, she rejects her own agency and represents a kind of continuous passivity that is, ironically, the quality Nitobe had admired in the accidentally acquired beauty of the pseudoscorpion. 

This essential divide is mirrored in the various conversations between women which recur throughout the film and mostly revolve around their exasperation with the often selfish immediacy of the male sex drive. The creepy “mad scientist” starts inappropriate conversations about sperm counts and his colleague’s impending marriage, offering to loan him some of his apparently prime stock to vicariously father a child with the man’s “cute” fiancée who, in a later conversation with another female researcher, expresses her ambivalence towards the marriage, like Sakamoto passively going with the flow, because men are like caterpillars permanently stuck in the malting phase. Her colleague agrees and offers her “men are idiots” theory which is immediately proved by the male scientists failing to move a box through a doorway. 

A middle-aged woman, meanwhile, recounts the process of breaking up with her five boyfriends who span the acceptable age range from vital, inexperienced teenager to passionate old age through the solipsistic, insecure self-obsessed middle-aged man but her greatest thrill lies in the negation of the physical, remarking that “ultimately eroticism is all mental” while suggesting the ephiphany has made her life worth living. On the other hand, a young man is terrorised in a sauna by a strange guy claiming that he is actually a cicada and simultaneously confiding in him about the strength of his erection along with the obsession it provokes to find a suitable hole in which to insert it. 

“What’s the deal with leaving offspring?” another of the women asks, seemingly over the idea of reproduction. The constant obsession with crustacea culminates in a butoh dance sequence in which lobsters spill their eggs down the stairs of an empty building (much to the consternation of an OL sitting below and, eventually, the security team) while other strange guests tell stories of women who underwent immaculate conception only to be drawn to the water where hundreds of tiny crab-like creatures made a temporary exit. The urge to reproduce, however, necessarily returns us to death and the idea of composition. The melancholy story of a Finnish woman drawn to the hotel because of its similarity to a beehive meditates on the sorrow of those left behind while a fly and a mite mourn their cockroach friend by wondering what happens to his dream now that he has died only to realise that because he told them about it, it now lives on with them. Nitobe wonders what the corruption of the body in death means for the soul and for human dignity, while the images Hirabayashi leaves us with are of a corpse slowly suppurating until only a scattered skeleton remains. Such is life, he seems to say. Life is itself surreal, something which Hirabayashi captures in his absurdist skits of the variously living as they pass through the strange hotel and then, presumably, make their exits towards who knows what in the great cycle of existence.

Shell and Joint streamed as part of this year’s online Nippon Connection Film Festival. Viewers in the US will also be able to catch it streaming as part of this year’s Japan Cuts!

International trailer (dialogue free)

Extro (エキストロ, Naoki Murahashi, 2019)

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Extras are the unsung heroes of the movies. Getting up in the middle of the night, prepared to spend hours in makeup, and enduring not only the discomfort but also the boredom of standing around all day waiting for something to happen. Naoki Murahashi’s affectionate mockmentary Extro (エキストロ) is dedicated to those whose names do not appear in the credits and are, according to the characteristically warm onscreen interview from the late Nobuhiko Obayashi, the very force that brings life to the otherwise artificial world of the film set. 

The set in this case being “Warp Station Edo”, an artificial replica of a historically accurate samurai-era town used for the production of jidaigeki TV serials. Murahashi’s first subject is a retired dental technician, Haginoya (Kozo Haginoya), fulfilling a lifelong dream as a background performer, but as we quickly see the life of an extra is not an especially glamorous one. Having got up at the crack of dawn to be there at the time listed on his call sheet, he’s nearly sent away because he doesn’t want to shave his beard and back in old Edo facial hair was prohibited for civilised people. The only solution is to switch his role from townsman to farmer, which causes a costuming delay and gets the AD into trouble. Haginoya then goes on to cause yet more problems by bigging up his part before being taken ill, complaining that his intestines hurt right in the middle of a take. Unsurprisingly, he sits the rest of the day out. 

Meanwhile, the other extras are mostly forced to stand around in the cold waiting for the cameras to start rolling. The agency which provides the background actors laments that extra work is only suitable for flexible people with a lot of free time, i.e. pensioners like Haginoya, but that it also requires physical stamina which they often lack. It also transpires most of the agency’s employees are working on a volunteer basis and earning their money through a separate main job, which really begs the question why they bother especially when the agency itself becomes liable for the extras’ mistakes such as those repeatedly made by one “problem child” including making sneaky peace signs, smiling at the camera, and posting strange on-set photos to social media. 

Not quite content with satirising the production environment and its tendencies towards exploitative employment practices, Murahashi adds a second surreal plot strand introducing two bumbling policemen who are seconded to go undercover as extras after a suspected drug dealer is spotted on camera, somewhat incomprehensibly stepping out of hiding and into living rooms across the country. Predictably, the policemen aren’t very good at the acting business and quickly forget all about the case while becoming overly invested in their cover identities, even attending an acting workshop in an effort to blend in with the background stars. 

While the hero of the jidaigeki TV drama earnestly insists that the extras are what give the fake town “life” and it is in a sense he who is being allowed to perform in their world, not everyone is so forgiving. A pro-wrestler brought in to star in a low budget movie titled Dragon Samurai gets so fed up with the antics of the two policeman that he eventually quits, presumably costing another production company somewhere a lot more money, while a repeated gag sees most of the projects go unreleased because someone involved with the production had too much to drink and engaged in acts of public indecency. One such project is the amazingly titled “Prehistoric Space Monster Gamogedorah”, apparently inspired by a local legend about a giant evil duck.

From the self-obsessed stars who turn up when the money’s right to the embattled agency staff and the stressed out ADs, Murahashi doesn’t quite so much sing the praises of the extras as satirise the low level production industry, but does eventually cycle back to the unironic intro from Obayashi who affirms that the extras, or “extros” as he likes to call them short for “extraneous maestros”, are a part of what gives film its beauty and power. As if to prove that sometimes dreams really do come true, even Haginoya gets his moment in the spotlight mimicking his screen hero Steve McQueen as an Edo-era fireman but disrupting the filming once again by laughing maniacally in joy as he rings his bell while Gamogedorah looms ominously on the horizon.

Extro was streamed as part of this year’s online Nippon Connection Film Festival. Viewers in the US will also be able to catch it streaming as part of this year’s Japan Cuts!

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Sunod (Carlo Ledesma, 2019)

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A mother goes to great lengths to be with her daughter in twisty Philippine horror Sunod. In a tense tale of supernatural dread, Sunod’s heroine contends not only with mysterious curse and psychological disturbance but with social inequalities, conservative social codes, and a health crisis while trying to protect her young daughter but soon finds herself dragged into a web of black magic intrigue, her calm, rational and compassionate response to becoming the target of a demonic scam only used against her by her unscrupulous aggressors. 

Never married single-mother Olivia (Carmina Villaroel) is wearing herself to the bone with worry over her teenage daughter Annelle (Krystal Brimner), a long-term hospital patient with a dangerous congenital heart defect that apparently requires expensive medical treatments Oliver can ill afford. Reluctant to be away from her daughter, she knows she needs to find another job but draws a blank in the currently difficult employment environment. At her wits’ end, she steps into a recruitment fair intended for students in search of part-time work but manages to impress the recruiter with her top English skills and spiky attitude. Her new job sees her working nights at a call centre where she struggles to adjust to the intense office atmosphere while bonding with “professional trainee” Mimi (Kate Alejandrino) and sympathetic boss Lance (JC Santos). 

Even on her first day, however, Olivia begins to notice something strange about the building where her new job is located which apparently once housed a hospital and is kitted out in gothic style complete with statues of angels and sweeping staircases. During a power cut one day after work, Olivia is approached by a strange little girl, Nerisa (Rhed Bustamante), and unwisely takes her by the hand, guiding her out of the building. Ominous events intensify, she begins hearing things and getting strange calls while Annelle’s heart condition appears to have been miraculously healed only she’s also had a complete transplant of personality. 

Of course, much of this could be down to Olivia’s fraying nerves. We’re told she’s not slept well in months and is already on various kinds of medication while obviously under extreme stress working overtime to try and pay for her daughter’s medical care. Trapped at the bottom of the economic ladder, she also faces a degree of social stigma as an unmarried mother, as she reveals nervously confessing to Mimi that she’s raised her daughter alone and so might not be the best person to ask for dating advice. Mimi, meanwhile, is an ultra modern freeter, flitting between a series of temporary jobs uncertain whether to get married for convenience’s sake or make a go of independence by committing to a career. After listening to Olivia’s story, she decides to give things a go at the call centre and the two women generate an easy friendship despite the difference in age and experience. 

Olivia meanwhile finds herself in a difficult position, propositioned by the previously “nice” Lance who hands her a fat check to help cover Annelle’s medical bills but then tries to get his money’s worth by trying it on in the employees’ rest room. She manages to fend him off, but is conflicted in her decision to keep the money out of a sense of desperation. Plagued by strange nightmares in which she sees herself bury her daughter alive, she begins to lose her sense of reality, half convinced that Annelle has been possessed by the spirit of Nerisa who, she has discovered, may have some connection with the building’s dark history as a World War II hospital. 

“When you have a child, there’s always a constant feeling of fear because her life is in your hands” Olivia tries to explain to Mimi, illuminating a more general kind of maternal anxiety than her acute worry over her daughter’s health. A compassionate soul, she tries to help Nerisa settle her unfinished business by helping her find her mum in the hope that she can then “move on” leaving her and Annelle in peace, but finds herself entangled by dark maternity and under threat from a motherly entity that quite literally cannot let go. Driven half out of her mind by an unforgiving, patriarchal society, Olivia tries to do the best for her daughter but struggles to escape her sense of futility in being unable to protect her either from her illness or the society in which they live. Rich and gothic in atmosphere with its creepy disused hospital setting replete with empty corridors and malfunctioning lifts, Sunod’s quietly mounting sense of dread leaves its heroine at the mercy of forces beyond her control, bound by inescapable anxiety. 

Sunod streamed as part of this year’s Udine Far East Film Festival.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

i -Documentary of the Journalist- (i－新聞記者ドキュメント－, Tatsuya Mori, 2019)

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“I’m not obliged to answer you” Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga irritably tells a journalist part way through a press briefing. It begs the question, if you’re not willing to be interrogated then what are the briefings really for? Something which unflappable reporter Isoko Mochizuki, subject of Tatsuya Mori’s documentary i -Documentary of the Journalist- (i－新聞記者ドキュメント－, i -Shimbun Kisha Document-) makes a point of asking but of course receives no reply. Reporting for Tokyo Shimbun, Mochizuki has earned a reputation for being “troublesome”, refusing to let politicians off the hook without getting a proper answer. This is of course what a reporter is supposed to do, she’s only doing her job in holding those in power to account in the name of the people, but Japanese politicians are used to deference from journalists who pull in their punches in fear of losing access. She is also the author of the book which inspired last year’s box office smash political thriller The Journalist in which a dogged reporter finds herself an unlikely ally of a conflicted bureaucrat who is minded to blow the whistle on a governmental land scandal. 

As we see, Mochizuki’s everyday life is nowhere near as glamorous or sensational. In fact, Mori struggles to keep up with her as she finds herself constantly on the move dragging a small suitcase and large tote bag all around town while displaying an ironic tendency to get lost trying to exit official buildings. Meanwhile, none of the people she attempts to visit for comment on the relocation of an SDF facility in Okinawa is in when she calls and, again, she has trouble gaining access to the building in order to leave them a note. 

Access, as we soon realise, is the pressing issue. Mochizuki is a well known reporter for a major paper so it would not be politically expedient to have her removed from the room, but even so the powers that be do their best to obstruct her ability to gain answers, firstly by having an usher loudly instruct her to get to the question while she patiently tries to make her point. It amounts to a kind of game. Mochizuki knows Suga will issue a non-reply, insist that the government is acting in accordance with regulations while refusing further comment, and so is using the question to raise awareness of the issue which necessarily takes time in providing context. They then introduce an unofficial policy restricting Mochizuki, but no other reporter, to two questions only to prevent her pressing her point, before escalating matters by crudely issuing an open directive to journalists to avoid basing their comments on “fake” information, attempting to invalidate her line of questioning by implying it is partisan and offered in bad faith. 

The problem is partly that, as Mori is keen to suggest, the system is rigged because of press complicity with government. We learn that the Abe administration, which has long been beset by scandal, has been keeping a stranglehold on the official press club since it took office in 2012. Mori himself tries to get access to briefings to film Mochizuki but is told that it is almost impossible for freelance journalists to gain approval, while a visit to the Foreign Correspondents’ Club reveals that it is no easier for international journalists who may gain access but are not generally given the opportunity to ask questions nor can they speak directly to members of government whom, it is said, are not terribly interested in Japan’s overseas reputation. Papers afraid of losing their spot in the room avoid directly criticising the government, while the rightwing press is content to do the government’s bidding such as in its vilification of the Kagoikes, the couple at the centre of the Moritomo Gakuen scandal in which Prime Minister Abe’s wife was herself implicated, or its attempt to smear a whistleblower on a possibly corrupt sale of land for a veterinary school to an old friend of Abe’s. 

For those reasons while other journalists and politicians may be sympathetic to Mochizuki’s cause in private she receives little support in the room. An increased profile and persistent harassment campaign also brings out the cranks including a death threat from a man who uses a word many would regard as a racial slur to brand her a North Korean spy. The people, however, approve organising a demo in support outside the Diet building insisting on press freedom and government accountability. The title may take things too far in its emphatic “I”, the reporter is not the story, but advocates for an end to the conformist culture of deference to power in which journalists willing to ask difficult questions will no longer be a “troublesome” aberration but the welcomed norm. 

i -Documentary of the Journalist- streamed as part of this year’s Udine Far East Film Festival. Viewers in America will also have the opportunity to catch the film when it streams as part of this year’s Japan Cuts.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Chasing Dream (我的拳王男友, Johnnie To, 2019)

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“You gotta give everything to get everything” according to an intense rocker in Johnnie To’s musical boxing romance, Chasing Dream (我的拳王男友). What turns out to be most important however is not physical endurance but emotional authenticity, if you want to be taken seriously then you have to take yourself seriously first and that means learning to find the courage to embrace your authentic self. A tale of two crazy kids chasing the Chinese Dream, To’s colourful fantasy world is not without its bite as he leans in hard to what it costs to succeed and not in what is often a merciless society.

Our hero Tiger (Jacky Heung Cho), “The Gluttonous Boxer”, is a young man who broke with his boxing master to step into the MMA ring but is also an enforcer for a shady local loansharking gang run by his manager. Aware he is approaching the end of his career – a doctor later tells him he’s in danger of going blind, rupturing his liver, and getting Parkinson’s – Tiger’s life changes one day when he recognises one of the ring girls, Cuckoo (Wang Keru), as the granddaughter of an old woman who used to sell noodles back when he studied boxing in his rural hometown. Unfortunately, Tiger’s boss has also recognised her because she is in deep debt with the mob. Some of the guys want to cut their losses and sell her on to the sex trade but Tiger, seemingly indifferent, claims he can find her a way to work off her debt and thereby kickstarts his rescue not only of her but of himself from the increasingly empty life of an ageing prize fighter. 

What he discovers is that Cuckoo is harbouring intense resentment over being seduced and betrayed by one of China’s biggest pop stars who made himself a name as the “king of originality” after stealing all of her songs and leaving her in the lurch. Qu Fengfeng (Ma Xiaohui) is now a judge on China’s biggest TV singing competition Perfect Diva and Cuckoo has a plan to confront him by getting on the show, the only snag being that she is extremely unpolished as a performer. Tiger, meanwhile, wants to get out of the ring and has a plan to start his own hotpot empire essentially by copying all the best bits of the major chains and bringing them together. He vows to help Cuckoo train by having her mimic the performance styles of major stars, but what she quickly discovers is that there is no substitute for emotional authenticity. A fellow constant decides to switch her routine at the last minute after catching sight of Cuckoo rehearsing, but is unceremoniously voted off by judges who’d rather she “performed a tacky fan dance” (as she was originally planning to do) than simply copycatting famous artists. Challenged that her songs are too similar to Qu Fengfeng’s Cuckoo snaps back that it’s his style that’s close to hers, earning the admiration of astute female judge Zhao Ying (Wu Yitong) who can perhaps detect the artist inside her beginning to free itself from her sense of insecurity. 

Achieving your dreams can however come at a heavy cost. Pearl “the kick ass rocker” (Kelly Yu Wenwen) has an intense, aggressive performance style but in a running gag turns up at each consecutive audition with a new incapacity, eventually using a wheelchair and wearing a back brace only able to move her arms. “Totally worth it in the name of music!” she cheerfully explains, literally destroying herself to get to the top. Tiger does something much the same exploited as he is by his unscrupulous gangster manager, shouting out “it doesn’t hurt” as he trains by having people jump on his belly, but the battering he takes is not so much for himself as for others, stepping back into the ring in defence first of Cuckoo and then of his dejected master, Ma Qing (Shao Bing), whose attempt to defend the dignity of the noble art of boxing against the modern upstart MMA goes horribly wrong. But Tiger cannot fight others’ battles for them, and the only way he can win is by being himself while honouring their legacy. 

Finally finding how to bare their souls for all to see and “have someone share the fatigue of loneliness”, the pair learn to recalibrate their dreams while falling in love discovering that mutual support is their guiding light as they give each other the strength to be all they can be. Ostensibly somewhere in Mainland China, To’s make believe, retro future city has a colourful comic book intensity that adds a mythic quality to the saga of Tiger and Cuckoo that is perfectly in tune with his dreamy romanticism in which sudden flights of fancy including a full-blown Bollywood-style dance sequence seem entirely natural. A surprisingly moving, wilfully absurd musical love story between wildly grinning pugilist and a young woman learning to sing from the the heart, Chasing Dream is a delightful sugar pop confection in which two crazy kids find love in the ring and with it the power to believe in themselves and a better future.

Chasing Dream streamed as part of this year’s Udine Far East Film Festival.

Original trailer (Cantonese, no subtitles)

Vertigo (버티고, Jeon Gye-soo, 2019)

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To many, the word “vertigo” is synonymous with a fear of heights, but in essence it refers more to a sense of unbalance, a giddiness born of having lost sight of the ground, temporarily unable to orient yourself within an environment which no longer seems to make sense. The heroine of Jeon Gye-soo’s artfully composed Vertigo (버티고) fears she is suffering with the medical variety caused by an ongoing problem with her inner ear which leaves her with recurrent tinnitus and a permanent sense of wooziness. She is also, however, suffering with a kind of existential dizziness, trapped in a constant state of anxiety in feeling entirely untethered to the world. 

30-something Seo-young (Chun Woo-hee), is a contract worker at an ad company with an office on the upper floors of a high-rise building. Unbeknownst to her colleagues, she’s been having an affair with her handsome, once divorced boss, Jin-soo (Yoo Teo), but he seems to be holding something back from her, insisting on keeping their relationship secret and reluctant to introduce her to his grown-up son. Meanwhile, she’s subject to most of the minor micro-aggressions plaguing women in the work place which run from being expected to come in early to do menial tasks like refilling the photocopier and tidying the shelves, to casual sexual harassment. Somewhat out of it, Seo-young has managed to avoid most of that and thinks she’s moved past the stage of having to play the office lady game by keeping the men entertained at the not-technically-compulsory-but-you-still-have-to-go afterwork get-togethers. Her friend Yedam (Park Ye-young), however, has her getting worried, at once complaining about their sleazy team leader asking for massages and reminding her that they need to turn on the charm at least until their contracts are renewed. 

Being a “contract worker” and not a salaried employee is certainly a major cause of Seo-young’s anxiety, leaving her feeling unanchored in her professional life in the knowledge that she could soon be unceremoniously cut loose for reasons largely unconnected to her performance. As a woman in her 30s it will be increasingly difficult to find a new job while a still patriarchal society will most likely write her off for daring to reject marriage in favour of work but failing to make a success of it. Her male bosses and colleagues, regular employees all, use her precarious status against her, expecting that she “play nice” to get a recommendation for further employment and threatening to tank her career if she doesn’t toe the line. She muses on going “far away” with Jin-soo, perhaps to Argentina, a land of passion where people dance the tango and drink wine late into the evening, but on some level knows it’s a just a comforting fantasy. 

Regularly visiting an ear doctor, Seo-young tries to overcome her sense of unease through medical means, unwittingly returning to the source of her trauma buried in a painful childhood which regularly resurrects itself in her toxic relationship with her mother who only rings to belittle her success while complaining about her string of relationships with terrible men and unsatisfying life with Seo-young’s step-father. Seo-young can’t find firm ground because she is essentially unanchored, left dangling by a failure of the traditional family and seemingly with no “real” friends. She begins experiencing panic attacks at work, retreating to unoccupied rooms to calm herself by looking out at the horizon. 

Meanwhile, her growing despair has been spotted by window cleaner and bookshop clown Gwan-woo (Jeong Jae-kwang) who is carrying a sadness of his own. He pities and protects her, supporting from the other side of the glass in a way which is not, strictly speaking, OK but is filled with such innocence and unspoken connection that it largely overcomes the otherwise unpalatable quality of his stalkerish devotion. Gwan-woo is, in a sense, a man who’s unafraid to fall, secure in his ties to the world and literally anchored by his position in society. Seo-young yearns to overcome her sense of anxiety, find firm footing and a sense of support, at once reassured by the presence of Gwan-woo and perhaps disturbed by it. She is, however, feeling her way back to solid ground, gaining the desire to climb safe in the knowledge that someone will be there to catch her even when she feels like falling. 

Vertigo streamed as part of this year’s Udine Far East Film Festival. It was also due to screen as part of the 10th Season of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

International trailer (English subtitles)