Tag: 2010s

Soul (失魂, Chung Mong-Hong, 2013)

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“Sometimes the things you see aren’t what they seem” the stoical father at the centre of Chung Mong-Hong’s supernatural psycho-drama Soul (失魂, Shī hún) later advises, for the moment creating a new, more convenient reality but also hinting at the mutability of memory and perception. Distinctly eerie and beautifully shot amidst the gothic atmosphere of the misty Taiwan mountain forests, Chung’s ethereal drama is at heart a tale of fathers and sons and the griefs and traumas which exist between them. 

When sushi chef Ah-Chuan (Joseph Chang) collapses at work, no one can figure out what’s wrong with him, finally suggesting perhaps it may be depression. His boss instructs three of his colleagues to take him back to his apparently estranged family to recuperate for reasons perhaps not altogether altruistic. In a near catatonic state, Ah-chuan is barely present offering no response to his name and staring vacantly in no particular direction. When he finally does begin talking, it’s to insist he’s no longer Ah-Chuan explaining that this body happened to be vacant and so he’s moved in while Ah-Chuan will apparently be off wandering for some time. Ah-Chuan, however, then abruptly stabs his sister Yun (Chen Shiang-chyi), who had travelled from Taipei to look after him, to death and is discovered covered in blood sitting calmly over her body offering only the justification that she was intending to harm him. 

Wang (Jimmy Wang), Ah-Chuan’s father barely reacts to finding his daughter’s corpse, merely rolling her under a bench and attempting to mop up the blood when a family friend, Wu (Chen Yu-hsun), who happens to be a policeman suddenly comes calling. Wang is either infinitely pragmatic instantly deciding there’s nothing he can do for his daughter so he’ll try his best to save his son, or else near sociopathic appearing to care nothing at all that Yun is dead. Nevertheless, realising that Ah-Chuan may be dangerous he takes him up to his remote cabin near the orchid garden and locks him inside while trying to figure out what or who this presence that has his son’s appearance might or might not be. As he later says, this brief time together is the most he’s spoken to his “son” if that’s who he is in years even if acknowledging that this Ah-Chuan is quite different from the old. Yet if it were not for the obvious fact that others see and interact with him we might wonder if Wang had simply conjured Ah-Chuan, projecting his own latent violence, guilt, and regret onto the figure of his son who is also in a way himself. 

Yet whatever Ah-Chuan now is he finds himself growing closer to the old man, feeling a filial responsibility towards him that he otherwise would not own. He contacts a “messenger” from “across the woods” to help his find Ah-Chuan’s wandering soul to tell him that his dad’s not doing so well, entering a space of dream and memory that reveals the trauma at the heart of their relationship that might in part help explain Wang’s apparent coldness. Just as the two Ah-Chuans begin to blur into each other, so perhaps to father and son, Wang prepared to go to great lengths to protect his only remaining child while, ironically, offering some harsh words to his son-in-law for not better protecting “the only daughter I have”. 

Chung hints at a kind fluidity of consciousness, each episode of “death” or “possession” accompanied by that of another creature, fish gasping and flapping around, a tired bug trying desperately to cling onto a leaf but failing, or a pair of snakes twisting themselves into a knot. Is Ah-Chuan merely experiencing a protracted dissociative episode under the delusion he is “possessed” while his essential selves “wander” the recesses of his consciousness or has someone else, a second soul, taken up residence in a body left vacant by a man who was in a way already “dead”. Wang in fact hints at this, telling the doctor that he had sometimes thought of Ah-Chuan as dead, or at least wondered if he might be seeing as they had long been estranged, suggesting that the Ah-Chuan of his heart and memory was already gone Wang believing himself to have killed something in him through his own violence when he was only a child. 

The two men mirror each other, growing closer yet also further apart as they make their way back towards the truth that might set them, metaphorically at least, free. Often viscerally violent not least in its jagged, abrupt cuts to black that feel almost like dropping out of consciousness or else waking fitfully with brief flickers of other realities, Chung’s eerie, ethereal drama ventures into the metaphysical but in its strangely surreal final scenes returns us to a more concrete “reality” in which the way home is found it seems only in dreams. 

Original trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Monk Comes Down the Mountain (道士下山, Chen Kaige, 2015)

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A wandering monk is forced to consider a series of dualities presented by his traditional upbringing and burgeoning modernity in Chen Kaige’s ‘30s wuxia Monk Comes Down the Mountain (道士下山, dàoshì xiàshān), inspired by the work of novelist Xu Haofeng. Essentially a picaresque, Chen sets orphan He Anxia (Wang Baoqiang) adrift in the secular world where he learns to see good and bad and perhaps the murky overlap between the two while simultaneously telling a rather subversive tale of frustrated same sex love and corrupt authorities. 

When the temple at which he was abandoned as a baby falls into financial difficulty, He Anxia enters a kung fu fighting competition he believes will put him first in line for food only in cryptic monk fashion the “prize” turns out to be exile as the winner is obviously the most capable of looking after themselves alone in the world. He Anxia is however something of an innocent and despite the monk’s warning to stay true to himself soon falls into difficultly yet ends up discovering a new father figure in monk turned pharmacist Tsui while trying to steal his fish. For all of Tsui’s goodness, however, there is discord in his house as his pretty young wife Yuzhen (Lin Chi-ling) prefers his dandyish brother, Daorong (Vanness Wu), who has abandoned the filial piety of the past to chase modern consumerist pleasures in selling the shop he inherited for a fancy ring. When the situation escalates, Anxia finds himself taking drastic action only to wonder if he did the right thing. 

Head of a local temple Rusong (Wang Xueqi) encourages him to think beyond dualities, wondering if he did the right thing for the wrong reasons or the wrong for right. This temple is famous for helping women have male children through praying to goddess of mercy Guan Yin, yet under Rusong’s predecessor they adopted a much less spiritual solution to the problem in simply providing a place where other men could father their sons. Rusong again asks him if the men who took part were sinners or saints while laying bare the paradoxes of the monastic life in the contemporary society. A petitioner goes so far as to ask Anxia if he might be her saviour, pointing out that if she cannot provide a male heir even though the problem may lie with her husband she may be cast out of her family, thereby disgraced not to mention financially ruined. Having lived all his life in the temple surrounded by men, gender inequality is not something Anxia had been very aware of. He tells her that though he had no family he was able to find one only to lose it, little understanding why she might not be able to do the same. 

On the other hand, he appears to show surprising perspicacity in the touching moments in which he must say goodbye to his second father figure, reclusive kung fu master Xiyu (Aaron Kwok), in realising the depth of his feelings for army buddy Boss Zha (Chang Chen) who then becomes his final master. Ironically, the obviously homoerotic relationship between Xiyu and Boss Zha was perhaps less controversial in 2015 than it might be in the present day but its inclusion is nevertheless surprising if also poignant as Xiyu tells Boss Zha that he should resume his stage career, marry and have children, while he will live a quiet and lonely life perfecting his kung fu though he will always keep him in his heart. Fiercely loyal to his mentors, Anxia accepts this relationship totally and appears to fully understand its import to Boss Zha to whom he subsequently transfers his allegiance as they band together to face off against big bad Peng. 

Playing into the good fathers and bad motif, Peng’s problem is his sense of paternal rejection in being passed over by his biological father in favour of Xiyu whose skills are stronger. After having ousted his rival, Peng fears the same thing will happen to his own son who is not only lacking in aptitude for martial arts but also appears to have a drug problem. To win they resort to cheating in picking up a pistol signalling both their own lack of jianghu honour and the nature of the changing times in which the very nature of kung fu has perhaps become obsolete. Meanwhile, Anxin and Zha are targeted by the police commissioner, Chao, who happens to be a former triad and also points his gun at them if less successfully while in cahoots with the amoral Peng and son.

Only through each of these subsequent encounters does Anxia begin to realise why he was cast down from mountain, understanding that he had to witness the good and bad of the secular world in order to understand his Buddhist teachings and finally find his place. With sumptuous production values perfectly recreating the 1930s setting, Chen’s quietly subversive 20th century wuxia takes aim at the ills of the contemporary society in its tales of corrupt authorities and amoral greed, but eventually finds solace in simple human goodness and genuine relationships as Anxin continues on his long strange journey to find his way home. 

International trailer (English subtitles)

Cemetery of Splendour (รักที่ขอนแก่น, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2015)

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There’s a question that raises its head in the title of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cemetery of Splendour (รักที่ขอนแก่น), is this a splendiferous resting place or the graveyard of splendour itself? The melancholy atmosphere might imply the latter, but as it turns out the place that holds a series of sleeping soldiers is built atop an ancient palace in which, an old woman is told by two young goddesses, kings continue their petty conflicts thousands of years after leaving our world.

It’s an apt enough allegory for the destructive qualities of a legacy of warfare and conflict. The old woman, Jen (Jenjira Pongpas), later exposes a lengthy and painful series of scars running from hip to knee that explain why one of her legs is much shorter than the other and the reasons she walks with a cane are much greater than simple old age. The old kings quite literally sap the spirits of the young soldiers to the extent that it has provoked a kind of sleeping sickness among them in which they must fight ancient wars in their dreams while otherwise rendered powerless to resist or change the present society.

The old woman is given a tour of the other world by a younger woman, Keng (Jarinpattra Rueangram), who has allowed herself to be possessed by the spirit of Itt, a young solider for whom she has begun to care after learning that he had no family to visit. The sleeping Itt, through the body of Keng, guides her through the splendid castle of his dreams but she sees only the present reality, a forest filled with detritus and trite signs bearing greeting card-esque messages of inspiration. Perhaps it’s hard not to mourn this kind of splendour that seems so absent from the world Jen now inhabits which seems to be defined by empty consumerism and loneliness. The soldiers are being cared for in an old school house, a nurse explaining the hospitals had no room for them, which carries with it a sense of melancholy nostalgia not least for Jen who was once a pupil there occupying the spot where Itt (Banlop Lomnoi) now sleeps.

But then we can’t be sure isn’t Jen who dreaming and Itt wide awake. When we see her later her eyes are open and staring as the children play on mounds of earth dredged up by an ominous digger employed by some mysterious government project. Is she awake, now more aware of the sickness in her society, or fast asleep trapped within an unending nightmare? Perhaps it’s the same either way, but the border between this world and another, if it were ever there at all, has grown thin. After making an offering at a temple, Jen is greeted by two very beautiful yet mysterious women who talk in an odd, archaic fashion. They then explain that they wanted to thank her for her gifts, but unfortunately neither Itt nor any of the other soldiers will ever recover.

This news shatters Jen’s newfound sense of connection and hope for the future. Her loneliness is palpable, yet it seems that we can connect with each other only indirectly through dreams and messengers. On waking, Itt wants to contact his family but cannot find a charger for his phone nor remember their number. He wants to quit the army to sell Taiwanese moon cakes at gas stations and claims that his senses are heightened by his experiences, that he can smell the flowers in his dreams and even now pick out the distinct fragrances at an outdoor foodcourt yet he’s still caught between this world and another suddenly and without warning falling asleep and returned to the other world. 

Someone describes the lamps of an experimental treatment first used by the Americans to help heal nightmares born of war trauma as like lanterns used for a funeral and in some ways these men are both dead and alive, like the kings of old and the goddesses. The lanterns begin to fade hypnotically from one colour to the next, ordinary scenes of shopping mall escalators dissolving into the hospital as if we too were falling asleep or perhaps waking up. What are the diggers reaching for, unearthing the long buried past or building for us our own cemetery of splendour in which we’ll sleep, comfortably, but in loneliness and melancholy with no rest from our rest? Perhaps this is why Jen’s eyes are fixed in a permanent state of vacant openness neither awake nor asleep but something painfully in-between.

Cemetery of Splendour screens at New York’s Metrograph Feb. 24 as part of Part of Fire Over Water: Films of Transcendence

Trailer (English subtitles

The Shadow Play (风中有朵雨做的云, Lou Ye, 2018)

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The forever rebellious Lou Ye has had his share of troubles with the Chinese censors board. Suzhou River was banned on its release, while he received a five-year filmmaking sanction for screening his provocative Tiananmen Square drama Summer Palace in Cannes without clearing official permission first. Stuck in censorship limbo for two years, the aptly named The Shadow Play (风中有朵雨做的云, fēng zhōng yǒu yù zuò de yún), taking its title from characteristically well-placed retro pop song, sees Lou steeping into the increasingly popular genre of Sino-Noir once again critiquing the the corrosive corruption of the Modern China through the prism of crime. 

Many of Lou’s films pivot narrative around a single implosion from which everything radiates like cracks in a pane of shattered glass. The Shadow Play is no different only there are perhaps three distinct, interlinked points of fracture each connected in a complex web of corruption and frustrated desires. He opens therefore with a moment which occurs in the mid-point of the narrative, the accidental discovery of decomposing body by a young couple venturing into the wilds of nature for a little privacy. The action then moves to the “contemporary” present of 2012 in which a small village is engulfed by “rioting” as residents attempt to protest the demolition of their community by the Violet Gold Real Estate Company. CEO Tang (Zhang Songwen) turns up to do some ineffectual damage control, slipping into Cantonese as he reminds them he’s a local boy too and only wants to bring about “the transformation of our community” insisting that the “beautiful future” is possible only by tearing down the old. As he’s speaking, however, protestors manage to knock down the neon sign bearing his company’s name from the building behind him and later that night Tang himself is found dead, impaled its framework after apparently “falling” from the rooftop. 

Young and idealistic policeman Yang (Jing Boran) was assigned to the detail that night and thereafter to the investigation into Tang’s death, quickly growing suspicious over his ties to shady property tycoon Jiang (Qin Hao). As a brief montage sequence explains, Tang and Jiang who met at university in 1989 each prospered from the capitalist explosion of China’s ‘90s reforms but their complicated relationship is founded on resentment and dependency partly connected to their mutual love for campus sweetheart Lin Hui (Song Jia) who first dated Jiang but as he was apparently already attached later married Tang. Many suspect that Jiang has something to do with Tang’s death even as others point out that he needed him to preserve his access to government bureaucracy, but the investigation is further complicated by witness sightings of a third person thought to be Jiang’s Taiwanese former lover/business partner Ah-yun whose mysterious disappearance in 2006 Yang is convinced is connected to the traffic accident which left his veteran policeman father in a catatonic state. 

The Shadow Play is in some respects unusual in its strong yet often implicit hints of police corruption perhaps mitigating its mild attack on the mechanisms of state through Yang’s idealistic, though flawed, goodness. Seduced by the lonely Lin Hui, he finds his name blackened but refuses to give in even when forced on the run after being framed for murder. Like Lin Hui’s daughter Ruo (Ma Sichun) however he is also representative of the post-90s generation who have grown up in the world created by men like Jiang and Tang. He is obviously uncomfortable in being introduced as his father’s son but also carries with him a desire for justice that lies adjacent to revenge. Ruo, meanwhile, though now an adult, longs for the restoration of her family despising her father Tang while obviously close to Jiang who has been supporting her financially by funding her education, using his wealth to game the system. “She’ll be happier than we are,” Jiang insists, ironically echoing Tang’s insistence that the village must be destroyed so they can give their children better futures. 

Tang meanwhile is a representative of China’s resentful petty bureaucrats forced into a middle-man existence unwilling to admit that he owes everything to Jiang, the man he knows to be sleeping with his wife. His toxic sense of male inferiority sees him take out his frustrations those with the least power, subjecting Lin Hui to years of domestic abuse before eventually having her locked up in a psychiatric institution claiming that she self-harms and is mentally unbalanced. The facade of the elegant, prosperous middle class family is well and truly imploded while it becomes difficult to tell if Tang is just a sleaze, exposing his misogyny in bringing up Ah-yun’s bar girl past, or his ill-advised pass at her is an attempt to get back at Jiang for his relationship with his wife while undercutting his rival’s manhood by sleeping with his woman. There is widespread impropriety in this incestuous world of corporate politics, but there’s also personal pettiness, hurt, and heartbreak that eventually blossoms into an ugly violence. 

In characteristic non-linear fashion Lou zips between the three points of fracture from the trio’s meeting in a 1989 through the disappearance of Ah-yun and the death of Tang, the layers of corruption deepening as the two men make themselves rich taking advantage of the unregulated capitalism of the modern China while slowly destroying themselves in their mutual unhappiness. It’s no surprise that the film found itself on the wrong side of the censors with its brutal footage of anti-redevelopment riots, hints of political corruption, and the depiction of the destruction of a body though we get the now customary title cards appearing at the end reminding us that the guilty parties have been caught and punished outlining exactly how long for everyone went to jail even if Lou subtly undercuts the sense of the State in action the card is intended to portray. Elliptical and somehow hard, ending like Summer Palace on the innocent image of the trio dancing back in 1989, The Shadow Play is cutting indictment of a morally bankrupt society and the corrosive effects of corruption but perhaps implying that the younger generation will in one way or another have its revenge for the ravages of their parents’ greed. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

The Beast (비스트, Lee Jung-ho, 2019)

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Internal police politics frustrate the hunt for a potential serial killer in Lee Jung-ho’s dark social thriller, The Beast (비스트) inspired by Oliver Marchal’s 36 Quai des Orfèvres. As a pathologist suggests, we all may have a hidden beast and it’s certainly true of the film’s conflicted protagonist, thuggish policeman Inspector Jung (Lee Sung-Min) who finds himself dragged ever deeper into a mire of corruption as a natural result of a series of bad decisions that started long ago, while his rival, Captain Han (Yoo Jae-Myung), presents the facade of efficient modern policing but inevitably turns out to be little better. 

As the film opens, Jung and his subordinate Yang are each wearing balaclavas while driving a heavily tattooed man out into the middle of nowhere though only for the purposes of frightening him so that he’ll back off their informant, local bar owner Madame Oh (Kim Ho-jung). Jung’s inner conflict is palpable as stares at his bloodied, shaking hands asking himself how it is it’s come to this while Yang later reminds him not to become too attached to his sources because once they’ve exceeded their usefulness they’ll simply be arrested. While all of this is going on, the police force is under immense pressure and receiving a lot of negative press over their handling of the case of a missing teenage girl, Mi-jin. Unfortunately, the girl later turns up dead with the murder enquiry split between two teams, those of Jung and Han each of whom are in the running to take over from the superintendent who before all of this happened was about to be promoted which is why he is desperate to solve the case as soon as possible. 

It might at first be tempting to read Jung and Han as representatives of different kinds of policing with their rivalry representing a battle for the soul of the police force only as it turns out each is merely corrupt in their own way. Jung is very much of the jaded veteran cop school, wanting to shift the case off his books as soon as possible by pushing the most likely suspect to confess. In this case that’s a shady pastor at a church Mi-jin used to frequent who was found in possession of her underwear and a series of photos of very young girls. Jung pushes the pastor to “confess” by selling him a story that a woman he was accused of assaulting in university took her own life as did her mother while her father later developed cancer as a result of all the stress and tragedy. Of course the pastor breaks down insisting that he killed her and it’s all his fault, only he’s talking about the other girl not that Jung cares too much about that. Han meanwhile quickly exonerates him by doing actual investigating, but only really so that he’ll still be in the running to solve the case and get the big promotion thereby besting his former partner turned rival. Jung had been the first to mention the possibility of an active serial killer only to be shut down because that would mean they’d lose the case to Major Crimes and therefore the personal opportunities for career advancement solving it would present. 

Both men eventually end up at the showdown by each of their respective routes implying there’s little practical difference between them. Han jeers that he can’t tell anymore if Jung is a bad guy or a cop but all he can answer is that it might be a matter of perspective, while he is also aware of Han’s backdoor deals and willingness to compromise himself in order to win advancement. In the midst of all this jockeying for power, it gets forgotten that a young woman lost her life in the most heinous of ways while whoever really did it may still be out there looking for the next girl to torture and kill. Everyone may indeed have a beast inside them, Jung already acquainted with his in his morally compromised soul while Han battles his internal ambition but the real beast may be the contemporary city and the infinitely corrupt hierarchies of the modern Korea along with the toxic masculinity that forces these men to betray their ideals simply not to be accounted a failure trapped at the bottom of the pyramid by their own problematic righteousness. When they’ve served their usefulness, the system chews them up and spits them out but until then it’s only hanging on as long as they can in the utter futility of a morally bankrupt existence. 

International trailer (English subtitles)

Heaven’s Story (ヘヴンズ ストーリー, Takahisa Zeze, 2010)

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“When your family’s murdered, aren’t you entitled to happiness?” remarks a bereaved husband trying to move on from tragedy to a similarly bereaved little girl who is determined not to. “I don’t think so”, she coldly replies, dragging him back into a dark world of hate and vengeance. At that time perhaps best known for his career in pink film, Takahisa Zeze’s 4.5-hour epic Heaven’s Story (ヘヴンズ ストーリー) weaves a tale of interconnected hurts born of violence and its legacy, parental betrayals, and irreconcilable loss. The only victory is survival, but it’s a prize none of us will win. The best we can hope for is continuity, and perhaps leaving something more behind us than fear or rage. 

Our heroine, Sato (Moeki Tsuruoka), is orphaned when her parents and older sister are brutally murdered by a disgruntled employee exacting some kind of petty revenge on her father. The killer is later found dead in a hotel room, presumed to have taken his own life. The tragedy is however just one of many. Passing by a TV screen, Sato catches a report detailing the death of her family members and their murderer which is immediately followed by a press conference with a very angry young man whose wife and infant daughter were killed in random attack by a passing drifter who has been given an indeterminate sentence on account of the fact that he was underage and suffered greatly during his childhood. Tomoki (Tomoharu Hasegawa), the bereaved husband and father, vows revenge angrily insisting he won’t ask for the death penalty because he wants the killer, Mitsuo Aikawa (Shugo Oshinari), released as soon as possible so he can kill him with his own hands. Only eight years old, Sato identifies with his rage. The man she wants to kill is already dead and she’s been robbed of the chance of closure through vengeance so vicariously latches on to Tomoki’s quest for retribution, making him something of a personal hero. 

Tomoki’s words were offered in the raw pain of his loss. His reaction is understandable, but as he later says, people started to lose sympathy for him once he called for the killer’s death. As time moves on, he perhaps starts heal, marrying again and having another little girl, starting a new life in a new place which of course does not overwrite his past loss but is a new start. That’s something Sato can’t allow or understand. She feels irrationally betrayed by Tomoki’s decision to leave his loss in the past and move on to a new life. Rocking up at his tranquil island home, she accuses him of forgetting the dead, guilting him into thinking he’s betrayed the memories of his wife and child by not knowing that Mitsuo has been released from prison let alone not having taken his revenge. 

Mitsuo, however, has also attempted to move on. It can’t be denied that he committed a heinous, unforgivable crime, but he is also, in a sense, a victim himself. His mother took her own life when he was 13 because his father was abusive and he carries that abuse with him, which of course does not excuse his crime but might help to explain it. Kyoko (’70s folk singer Hako Yamasaki), a lonely doll maker, is taken by his enigmatic statement that he wants to be remembered by the unborn and begins writing to him in prison, eventually agreeing to adopt him as her son though she is already suffering with the early stages Alzheimer’s. Later in a tense conversation with Tomoki, Mitsuo describes Kyoko as a woman of great warmth and if it were not for her he might perhaps have killed again. Her positive maternal presence gives Mitsuo the sense of anchoring through parental love that he had never had, restoring him towards a more normal kind of existence as he diligently cares for her while her condition continues to deteriorate. 

Time swindles them all. Kyoko desperately tries to remember something she’s forgotten, while Sato is locked into a pleasant childhood memory of walking with her parents to see a newly completed housing estate which seems to be the very embodiment of a post-war utopia, a large green space surrounded by neatly arranged, identical blocks with well appointed family homes piled one on top of the other. The conclusion takes us somewhere similar, only inverted, in the empty shell of a disused danchi, once a home to a bustling mining community now abandoned by the modern era. In the monologue which opens the film, Sato recounts a folktale about a monster who lived in the hills and attacked people, but did so only accidentally in his loneliness and longing to be a part of the world around him, but the people were afraid and so they rejected him and his monstrousness intensified. Tomoki destroys his second family in an internecine need to avenge the first driven by Sato’s demonic need for vicarious retribution, while Mitsuo’s attempt to move into the light is frustrated by an inability to escape his past. All the fear, and hate, and suffering, breeds only more of the same. “Heaven’s Story” may be in many ways the story of violence, but violence is not its resolution. Sato makes a kind of peace with the past, but will also carry that legacy of pain back into the complicated urban world as far from the heavenly vistas of tranquility which exist now only in her memory as it’s possible to be. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Nocturne (녹턴, Jeong Gwan-jo, 2019)

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“Every day is a battlefield” the mother of Eun Seongho, one of the protagonists of Jeong Gwanjo’s documentary Nocturne (녹턴) exclaims while trying to keep her son in line during a difficult journey on the underground. Seongho is autistic and has learning difficulties. He is very dependent on his mother, Minseo, who raised him and his brother Geongi alone after their (never seen) father left the family. But while Minseo does her best to push Seongho towards a stable career as a classical musician, Geongi seems to flounder extremely resentful of his mother and brother in feeling both burdened and excluded. 

Geongi later claims that he does not feel part of the family and as a child assumed that his mother disliked him as all of her time was taken up with trying to care for Seongho. Now as an adult he struggles to settle, once training as a concert pianist himself but later dropping out of university to start a business which he says failed because of a scam. “There are no nice people in this world,” he sighs while openly wondering what sort of man he’d be if only he’d had the same love and attention poured on him as Seongho had heavily implying he’d have made much more of his life.

Seongho’s language skills are limited and he is easily distracted, unable to sit still and often jumping around like a child or else making high pitched noises to release some of his frustration. Of course, all of this is particularly difficult in the rarefied world of classical music which depends on a sense of formality and decorum. Minseo painstakingly rehearses with him, reminding Seong-ho to lift the tails of his suit as he sits at the piano and place his hand on the edge of the keyboard as he bows. His music teacher berates him for not practicing and then lying about it, telling Minseo he’s at the end of his tether as he feels he does not know how to get through Seongho while himself frustrated by his slow progress and knowing that only increases the pressure on Seongho who will then become avoidant and unwilling to play at all. 

Minseo seems to be hoping that Seongho will be able to support himself financially through his music and is acutely aware that caring for him will become more difficult as she ages while she obviously cannot be there for him forever. The manager of residential centre she takes him to grimly adds that many parents of children like Seongho hope that they will be able to bury their children with their own hands while Minseo wonders if she’d be able to go peacefully outliving him  by just a few moments.

All of which is the reason that she places so much pressure on Geongi to take care of his brother so that Seongho will be looked after once she’s gone. But that only deepens Geongi’s resentment feeling as if he only exists as a caretaker for Seongho and his own life is unimportant, wilfully sacrificed by his mother whom he cannot forgive for the sense of rejection he feels. He claims not to resent Seongho himself, but doesn’t see why he should sacrifice his life for him and firmly refuses the responsibility. Meanwhile, be becomes a heavy drinker working several low paying jobs to get by while practicing piano in his spare time. 

Yet after agreeing to accompany him to St. Petersburg where ends up playing the piano for him after a snafu with the sheet music, Geongi comes to a new understanding of his brother explaining that as they played together it finally felt as if they were really conversing and Seongho for the first time felt like a big brother to him. Echoing the universal language of music, the film never shies away from the difficulties faced by those responding to Seongho’s complex needs or his own in his inabilities to make himself understood or when his behaviour confuses others such as his need to touch things on the subway, but does ultimately discover a kind of rebalancing as Geongi finds new ways to connect with his brother along with a new acceptance of himself.

Nocturne screened as part of this year’s London Korean Film Festival.

Original trailer (UK subtitles)

Hello! Junichi (ハロー!純一,  Katsuhito Ishii, Kanoko Kawaguchi, Atsushi Yoshioka, 2014)

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A collection of confused nine-year-olds decides the best way to solve all their problems is to start a band in charming kids ensemble movie, Hello! Junichi (ハロー!純一). Co-directed by Katsuhito Ishii, Kanoko Kawaguchi, and Atsushi Yoshioka, the film is more linear and less surreal than most of Ishii’s other work but has a refreshing take on the childhood adventure movie as the kids each deal with their various problems many of which still plague the adults around them. 

After all as kindhearted rocker Takao (Ryu Morioka) admits, the children aren’t really all that different from us. Shy and a little on the timid side, Junichi (Amon Kabe) is a peripheral member of his friendship group and perpetual fall guy who lists his only talent as the ability to carry everybody’s bags. His main problem is that he borrowed a rabbit-shaped eraser from his crush, Maeda, about a month ago and is too shy to return it. Now all he can think about is whether he should pluck up the courage or pretend to have forgotten. Things get more complicated when a new student teacher, the beautiful Miss Anna (Hikari Mitsushima), joins his school and confiscates the eraser as part of a cruel power game before agreeing to give it back if he helps her find out who scratched an offensive word into the side of her flashy car. 

Miss Anna is either the best teacher in the world or the absolute worst. She arrives dressed for a night out and puts on a cutie pie act for her dejected middle-aged boss Achikita (Yoshiyuki Morishita) which she immediately drops as soon as he leaves the room inappropriately giving the children far too much information about her personal life but they do at least get some maths out of it. She also smokes by an oil can round the back of the building and talks like an aggressive high school girl when her boss’ back is turned, but eventually comes round to her responsibility as a teacher after bonding with the kids. 

In comparison to some, Junichi’s problems aren’t really all that big except that his parents have to work late so he often has to prepare dinner for himself and his philosophising grandpa (Tatsuya Gashuin). Kuramoto (Yohei Hotta) meanwhile is beginning to act out at school because he’s got problems at home caused by his father’s gambling addiction which forces his mother (Chizuru Ikewaki) to run herself ragged just to stay afloat. With Miss Anna’s help, the kids decide to put on a concert for Mrs Kuramoto’s birthday which might on one level be charmingly naive but does in the end seem to cheer her up while allowing them to bond over their shared issues many of which are romantic in nature. 

During the opening sequence in the park, child actor Machida (Shoma Suginomori) had given the other boys some grown up love advice he picked up on set which amounted to getting girls to like you by giving them cliched compliments such as remarking on the beauty of their smile. It’s not terribly good advice and a little a bit patronising not mention insincere, but amusingly enough is the same approach eventually taken by Takao when he and Miss Anna awkwardly try to address their mutual attraction. In the end, she has to concede that she doesn’t know what to say either and they end up having a rather childish conversation about favourite foods which is all to say it doesn’t get any easier and the adults don’t necessarily know much more than the kids. 

Then again, there are some distinctly bad examples in Achikita’s thankfully ineffective attempt at workplace harassment and stalking of Miss Anna even if he eventually gives the most important life lesson in dressing down a trio of teenage bullies by telling them they have to learn love and appreciation or they’ll be weak men incapable of protecting anyone. Protecting people is something Junichi’s been worried about too, especially after failing to act when he spotted female classmate Tanaka (Rio Sasaki) duct taped to a pole by the bullies though she thankfully managed to save herself while uttering some particularly choice language for a nine-year-old. Still as his grandfather tells him he’s an unpolished stone. He has a weak side and a strong side and is still in the process of settling though the real business of growing up may be knowing which to be when. Charmingly quirky and infinitely warmhearted, Ishii, Kawaguchi, and Yoshioka masterfully capture an authentic sense of childhood anxiety while suggesting that none us is really so different after all. 

Hello! Junichi is out now the UK on blu-ray as part of Third Window Films’ Katsuhito Ishii Collection.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Dream Home (維多利亞壹號, Pang Ho-cheung, 2010)

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“In a crazy city, if one is to survive, he’s got to be more crazy.” according to the opening titles of Pang Ho-cheung’s surprisingly poignant slasher satire Dream Home (維多利亞壹號). In the 10 years since the handover, the average wage has increased by a measly 1% while house prices have risen by 15% in 2007 alone. Sheung’s (Josie Ho) one overriding mission in life is to buy a flat for her family to live in, but it’s clear that her struggles to become a homeowner aren’t the only pressure points in her life in an increasingly capitalistic society. 

As we later discover, Sheung is set on one particular flat because the building it’s in stands on the spot where she once lived as a child before her family was pushed out by rampant gentrification. In essence, she’s just trying to take back what’s hers and restore her family’s sense of dignity and security. A flashback to her childhood reveals her father’s own insecurity in having been unable to secure a larger living space in which she and her brother could have their own rooms while her grandfather, a sailor, longed for a sea view and the sense of an expanding horizon otherwise denied to the family in a cramped Hong Kong council flat. In a touch of irony, Sheung’s father himself worked in construction building apartment blocks he couldn’t afford to live in and in the end it killed it him through exposure to asbestos and other dangerous fibres. 

Sheung works at a bank but is conflicted about her job cold calling account holders to try to get them to buy into dodgy loans neatly echoing the film’s closing moments which hint at a coming economic crash precipitated by the subprime mortgage crisis which will threaten Sheung’s homeowning dream. Her friends think she’s crazy to buy a flat at all, but she’s completely fixated on repairing her broken childhood by taking back her family home and ending her displacement. Meanwhile, she’s in a dissatisfying dead end relationship with a married man which largely takes place in love hotels he sticks her with the bill for and turns up late to only to immediately fall asleep. When Sheung asks him for a loan to help pay for her father’s medical care after the insurance she got for him is voided because he never told her he’d been diagnosed with a lung complaint before she took it out, he tells her to use her deposit fund instead and give up on homeownership because only fools like her would buy in such a volatile market. 

Disappointment in both her personal and professional lives continues to place a strain on Sheung’s fragile mental state that eventually tips her over the edge. Hoping to bring the apartment’s price down, she goes on a murder spree in the building killing it seems partly out of resentment and otherwise pure practicality. There is irony here too, in that she kills her victims with the weapons of their privilege. A cheating husband who comes home unexpectedly after lying to his wife that he’s gone golfing but was actually with his mistress is whacked on the head with a golf club while an obnoxious stoner kid is stabbed in the neck with his bong. Sheung murders a Filipina helper, but also the snooty middle-class woman who employed her by using the vacuum pack machine the helper had been using on her behalf. One might ask if she really needed to kill the helper or the pair of Mainland sex workers in the next apartment, but when it comes to devaluing property prices “massacre” sounds much better than “killing” and so it’s the more the merrier. 

In the end, it’s this city that’s driven her out of her mind with its status-obsessed consumerism and constant sense of impossibility. After her killing spree, she doesn’t even seem very conflicted about selling dodgy loans to vulnerable people not so different from herself while she was so desperately trying to get approval on a mortgage there was no way she could afford despite working a series of other part-time jobs including one selling designer handbags to the kind of wealthy women she resents. Her dream apartment has a view quite literally to kill for, though there’s a sense that Sheung’s dream will always be futile with the same motivations that brought her here leading to the mortgage crisis and economic shock that could eventually take it from her. Bloody, gory, and at times sickeningly violent Pang’s satirical horror show paints contemporary capitalism as the real villain and even in its dark humour reserves its sympathies for the wounded Sheung pushed to breaking point by a pressure cooker society. 

Dream Home available to stream in the UK until 30th June as part of this year’s Odyssey: A Chinese Cinema Season.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Full Strike (全力扣殺, Derek Kwok & Henri Wong, 2015)

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A former badminton champ begins to rediscover herself after being permanently banned for bullying behaviour when charged with coaching a bunch of former bank robbers in Derek Kwok & Henri Wong’s zany sports comedy Full Strike (全力扣殺). Dedicated to “all the beautiful losers”, the film is less about literal winning as it is about learning to turn one’s life around in moments of profound despair and draw strength from even non-literal victories in simply refusing to be looked down or belittled.

It’s ironic in a sense that Dan (Ekin Cheng Yee-Kin), Kun (Wilfred Lau Ho-Lung), and Chiu (Edmond Leung Hon-Man) became bank robbers because they didn’t want to be bullied having grown up as friendless orphans. Former badminton champ Kau Sau (Josie Ho Chiu-Yee), meanwhile, was such as tyrannical diva that she gained the nickname “The Beast” before being banned because of her unsportsmanlike behaviour and treatment of her long-suffering assistant. But cast out of the sports world, she’s become a dejected layabout not quite working in her brother’s restaurant and otherwise hiding out from the world. Her life changes when she’s publicly mocked after running into her former assistant who has since gone to take her position as a reigning champion. Running out into the night, she spots a shuttle-cock-shaped meteor and is chased to a badminton club by what she assumes is an “alien” but might have just been a frightened homeless man.

In any case, she takes it as a sign she should pick up a racket once again which as Dan later points out she probably wanted to do anyway and was just waiting for an excuse. He can’t explain why he chose the unlikely path of becoming a badminton player to help him turn over a new leaf after leaving prison but reflects that perhaps you don’t really need a reason only the desire to change. Dan, Kun, and Chiu all developed disabilities as a result of their life of crime but slowly discover that they can actually help them on the court in a literal process of making the most of their life experiences no matter how negative they might have assumed them to be while Kau Sau similarly regains her self esteem while acknowledging the destructive patterns of her previous behaviour careful never to bully her new teammates as they all square off against her bullying cousin “nipple sucking Cheung” (Ronald Cheng Chung-Kei) who tries to use his newfound wealth to cover up a lack of skill by hiring Kau Sau’s old teammate. 

Cheung is also trying to overcome low self-esteem and is later forced to realise that becoming a champion won’t really change that much about how he sees himself, though apparently still relying on an ever capable middle-aged woman to fight (literally) his battles for him. Meanwhile, the gang are coopted by a media mogul hoping to make an inspirational documentary about them but also manipulating their lives and hyper fixating on their criminal pasts to the point of staging a fake arrest as they enter the stadium for a competition. Doubting the chances of success in setting up new lives for themselves as badminton players, Chiu is drawn back towards a life of crime while feeling somewhat distanced from the team as a tentative romance between Kau Sau and Dan seems to fall otherwise flat.

A throwback to classic mou lei tau nonsense comedy, the zany gags come thick and fast but are at times over reliant on low humour while the central premise of staking everything on an “unexciting” game like badminton perhaps wears a little thin by the time it gets to the high stakes finale with the heroes fighting twin battles squaring off against their traumatic pasts rather than the literal opponents in front of them. Winning becomes a kind of irrelevance when the contest was within the self. Each rediscovering the spark of life, the players rediscover the will to live while bonding as a team and sticking to their training in pursuit of their goal. Kwok and Wong lay it on a little thick with the martial arts parody in the uphill battle to master badminton but otherwise lend a poignant sense of warmth and genuine goodwill in sympathy with the underdogs’ quest if not quite to win then to own their loserdom on their on terms in reclaiming their self-respect and dignity. 

Full Strike is available to stream in the UK until 30th June as part of this year’s Odyssey: A Chinese Cinema Season.

Original trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)