Tag: 2010s

The Odd Family: Zombie On Sale (기묘한 가족, Lee Min-jae, 2019)

Posted on by 2 Comments

The odd family poster 2It takes a special sort of mind to see a zombie and think “business opportunity”, but that’s exactly the kind of out of the box thinking you’ll find with the the Parks – a very strange family living way out in the countryside. Korean cinema is having a bit of a zombie moment, but they’ve rarely been as amusing as this. The debut feature from Lee Min-jae, The Odd Family: Zombie On Sale (기묘한 가족, Gimyohan Gajok) is a surreal satire of changing family values, the stereotypical strangeness of farm country, and the growing suspicion of underhanded practices in the pharmaceuticals trade.

As an opening voiceover informs us, there have long been rumours of diabetes drug manufacturer Human Bio kidnapping innocent members of the public to test their NoInsulin wonder drug. One day, a young man (Jung Ga-ram) manages to crawl out of a hole in the ground and shuffles zombie-like into the nearest village where he encounters the patriarch of the Park family (Park In-hwan), eventually biting him on the head. The Parks once owned the local petrol station, but with things as they are the business is all dried up and so now they mainly make their living by engineering road traffic “accidents” they can later charge exorbitant fees to fix seeing as they are literally the only place in town. When Mr. Park realises that after getting bitten on the head he’s regained his youthful virility, the family become less afraid of the fairly docile lad and decide to take him in partly with the idea of pimping him out to the other sad old men in town who long for nothing more than to regain their glory days.

Only middle son and recently returned failed salaryman Min-gul (Kim Nam-gil) wonders if there’s something not quite right about the new member of their family, showing the others a brief clip from Train to Busan to get his point across, but even he is temporarily won over by the money making opportunity. Tellingly, no one really stops to wonder if it’s OK to lock a young man up in the shed and make him do your bidding for no remuneration, but then where really is the harm if biting people on the arm makes them feel better about themselves? The harm is he’s a zombie which will eventually become quite a big problem.

Meanwhile, the strange Park family continues to fray at the seams. Youngest daughter Hae-gul (Lee Soo-kyung), an ethereal girl in dungarees with a fondness for pet rabbits she can’t seem to keep alive much longer than a month, takes to the zombie instantly. Naming him “Jong-bi” in a pun on his being a zombie and in keeping with the naming system for her rabbits, she installs him on a mattress right next to the hutch and proceeds to feed him cabbages for which he develops an intense fondness (along with ketchup which is Hae-gul’s personal favourite). Meanwhile oldest son Joon-gul (Jung Jae-young) does his best to keep out of the way while his heavily pregnant wife Nam-joo (Uhm Ji-won) keeps an iron grip on the family finances and the house in general. When everyone starts to wonder if dad is going to turn zombie, filial piety goes out the window but all Mr. Park wants is to jet off to Hawaii and leave the family to deal with the mess on their own.

With the patriarch out of the picture and a new little brother to play with (plus quite a lot of money to buy a new start), the Parks begin to repair themselves and make the “family” anew but the cracks are still there as Min-gul turns out to be more like his dad than he seemed in always looking for the best angle and opportunity to make some money no matter the risks or ethical concerns. Nevertheless, the zombie apocalypse does its best to remind them what’s really important as they find themselves having to work together to come up with a plan for survival. Riffing strongly off wholesome ‘50s Americana and kitschy pop-culture cues, The Odd Family is a charmingly surreal ode to family values in which one family’s money grubbing entrepreneurship almost leads to the end of the world only to paradoxically become its salvation as they prove that there’s nothing so potent as togetherness in combatting existential threat.

The Odd Family: Zombie On Sale was screened as part of the 2019 Udine Far East Film Festival.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Dying to Survive (我不是药神, Wen Muye, 2018)

Posted on by 1 Comment

dying to survive poster 1Big box office Chinese comedy continues to run rings round the censors in Wen Muye’s Dying to Survive (我不是药神, Wǒ Bú Shì Yào Shén). Not only does the film display on screen protest movements and tacitly imply that sometimes it’s OK to break the law when you think the law is wrong, but it also dares to criticise the state both for its slowness to introduce socialised healthcare provisions and for its failure to moderate increasing wealth inequality in the rapidly expanding modern economy.

In Shanghai in 2003, our hero Cheng Yong (Xu Zheng) is the proprietor of a shop selling “Indian God Oil”. A divorced father, he is involved in a volatile custody dispute with his ex-wife who has remarried and wants to take their son abroad. Meanwhile, he’s behind on his rent and the god oil business is not exactly booming. That is, until he receives an unusual business proposition. Lv (Wang Chuanjun), a young man suffering from chronic myelogenous leukemia, asks him to begin importing a knock off Indian cancer drug which is a clone copy of the big brand variety at a fraction of the cost. The Indian drug is banned in China, but, Lv argues, not because it’s unsafe – only because Big Pharma is determined to protect its profits at the cost of people’s lives. Yong is not convinced. He knows there are heavy penalties for trafficking “fake” medications, but he needs money for his father’s medical care and to fight for custody of his son and so he decides to give it a go, if for mercenary rather than humanitarian reasons.

Yong’s transformation from schlubby snake oil peddler to (medical) drug dealer extraordinaire is a swift one and perhaps a satirical example of amoral capitalistic excess in his series of moral justifications which allow him to think he’s better than Big Pharma because the price he’s charging is lower even while knowing there are many people who still can’t afford it. Nevertheless, he quickly discovers he has competition. The even more dubious Professor Zhang (Wang Yanhui) claims to have a wonder drug that does the same thing, only it’s really paracetamol cut with flour. Zhang’s duplicity annoys Yong, not just from a competitive angle, but from a humanitarian one as he finds himself sympathising with the poor men and women who are unable to afford the extortionate fees imposed by the mainstream drug companies.

Afraid of the consequences, Yong gives up the drug trade and goes legit, becoming a successful textile merchant rich beyond his wildest dreams. Conveniently, it’s at this point his humanitarianism begins to reawaken as he’s brought back into contact with a sickly Lv who tells him that the smuggling ring has since dissolved. Zhang, irritated by Yong’s moralising, tells him that no real good will come of the “fake” drug trade because the “disease of poverty” can never be cured. Zhang does indeed have a point. These people are dying because they’re poor and have been deemed expendable. Yong’s change of heart may be all for the good, but it’s also fuelled largely by the fact he can now afford not to care very much about money which means he is free to care about other people’s welfare.

Then again, the police chief remonstrates with a conflicted underling that the law trumps sympathy. By this point, they have realised that the drug smuggling ring is close to a public service and people will die if they arrest the ringleaders, but their hands are also tied by the need to preserve order through enforcing the law. The law, however, is also corrupt as we see by the direct presence of Big Pharma sitting right in the incident room and asking the police to act on its behalf. Big Pharma would argue that it invested heavily in the research which led to the medical breakthrough and is entitled to reclaim its costs while those selling knockoffs are nothing more than pirates guilty of intellectual property theft, but the police has a duty to protect its people and a significant conflict when the “victim” is wilfully misusing its economic and political power to coerce it to do their dirty work.

This being a Mainland film, crime cannot pay but Yong manages to emerge from his straitened circumstances in heroic style as he stands both remorseful for having broken the law and angry that he even had to. A series of closing intertitles is quick to remind us that following the real life events which inspired Dying to Survive, the Chinese state began to reconsider its health polices, relaxed the law on “fake” drug trafficking, and took measures to make care more affordable to all. A subversive treat, Dying to Survive is the rare Chinese film which seems to suggest that civil disobedience is an effective weapon against an unfair society, making a hero of its lawbreaking humanitarian as he, ironically, learns to put the collective interest before the individual.

Dying to Survive was screened as part of the 2019 Udine Far East Film Festival.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Every Day a Good Day (日日是好日, Tatsushi Omori, 2018)

Posted on by 2 Comments

Everyday a good day posterTatsushi Omori burst onto the scene in 2005 with the extremely hard-hitting and infinitely controversial The Whispering of the Gods before going on to build a career on chronicling the unpalatable facets of human nature. He does have his lighter sides as the delightfully whimsical Seto and Utsumi proves, but even so he might be thought an odd fit for directing an adaptation of a series of autobiographical essays detailing one woman’s personal growth over a 20 year period spent perfecting the art of the Japanese tea ceremony. Every Day a Good Day (日日是好日, Nichinichi Kore Kojitsu) is, however, like much of his previous work, a story of youthful ennui and existential despair only one in which it turns out that the world is basically good once you agree to embrace it for what it is.

The film opens in 1993 with the heroine, Noriko (Haru Kuroki), a confused college student unsure of the forward direction of her life. Often ridiculed by her family for being clumsy and neurotic, Noriko compares herself unfavourably with her glamorous cousin Michiko (Mikako Tabe) who has come to the city from the country to study and appears to have her whole life already mapped out with a confidence Noriko could only dream of. A turning point arrives when she’s talked into accompanying Michiko to learn tea ceremony from a kindly old lady, Mrs. Takeda (Kirin Kiki), who lives nearby. Despite regarding tea ceremony as something fussy and old fashioned that only conservative housewives aspire to learn, Noriko begins to develop a fondness for its formalist rigour and continues dutifully attending classes for the next 24 years.

“Carry light things as if they were heavy, and heavy things as if they were light” Noriko is told as she clumsily tries to carry an urn from one room to another, though like much of Takeda-sensei’s advice it serves as a general lesson on life itself. Mystified by the entire process, Noriko and Michiko make the mistake of trying to ask practical questions about why something must be done in a particular way only for Takeda-sensei to admit she doesn’t know, it simply is and must be so. To look for that kind of literal meaning would be a waste of time.

Of course, she doesn’t quite put it that way. As Noriko later realises, some things are easy to understand and need only be done once. Other things take longer and can only be understood through a weight of experience. Just as she was bored out her mind by La Strada at 10 but moved to tears at 20, the discrete pleasures of the tea ceremony are something only fully comprehended when the right moment arrives. What was once empty formalism becomes a framework for appreciating the world in all its complexity, embracing each of the seasons as they pass and learning to live exactly in the moment in the knowledge that a moment is both eternal and transient.

Noriko continues to feel herself out of place as she witnesses those around her progress in their careers, get married, or go abroad while she remains stuck, unable to find a direction in which to move. Even tea ceremony occasionally betrays her as new pupils arrive, depart, and sometimes wound her newfound sense of confidence by quickly eclipsing her. Nevertheless, the calm and serenity of ritualised motion become a place of refuge from the confusing outside world while also offering a warmth and friendship perhaps unexpected in such an otherwise ordered existence.

Over almost a quarter of a century, Noriko’s life goes through a series of changes from career worries to romantic heartbreak, learning to love again, and bereavement, while tea ceremony remains her only constant. She may not yet have discovered the path to happiness, but perhaps has begun to reach an understanding of it and believe that it might exist in some future moment – as Takeda-sensei says, there are flowers which bloom only in winter. In any case, what she’s learned is that sometimes it’s better not to overthink things and simply experience them to the best of your ability while you’re both still around. Every day really is a good day when you learn to slow down and truly appreciate it, living in the moment while the moment lasts in acknowledgement that it will never come again.

Every Day a Good Day was screened as part of the 2019 Udine Far East Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Jam (SABU, 2018)

Posted on by 1 Comment

PrintSABU began his directorial career with a reputation for shooting on the run. Time may have caught up with him, in that relaxed contemplation has begun to replace frenetic action in the more recent stages of his career, but it’s to his first feature, Dangan Runner, that he (after a fashion) returns in the similarly structured Jam. Random circumstance conspires once again to send three fugitive guys on a zany collision course, but this time the crash offers each of them something a little more positive (to a point, at least) than a grudging acceptance of life’s impossibilities.

The first of our three heroes, Hiroshi (Sho Aoyagi), is a cheesy enka singer with an army of middle-aged female fans whom he is perfectly aware of exploiting. Despite his “star status” with the ladies who crowd out his meet and greets, Hiroshi’s big concert is at the Civic Centre in Kitakyushu which is not exactly the Budokan, but it’ll do for the minute. Trouble brews when the wealthiest of his fans, Mrs. Sakata, suggests a change to the setlist only for a backbencher to leap to Hiroshi’s defence with slightly embarrassing fervour. Masako’s (Mariko Tsutsui) crazed fan aesthetic is later brought to its zenith when she gets Hiroshi to chug down some home made soup which is laced with some kind of knock out drug.

Meanwhile, all round good guy Takeru (Keita Machida) is driving around in a not quite classic car and looking for people to help because a Buddha appeared to him and told him if he did three good deeds a day his girlfriend would wake up from her coma, and ex-con Tetsuo (Nobuyuki Suzuki) is patiently pushing his grandma round town in a wheelchair and taking revenge on the gangsters who have betrayed him every time her back is turned.

“Pay back is scary as hell” one of the gangsters affirms as he laments potentially mixing up a thoroughly good guy like Takeru in their nasty yakuza business. As the other had earlier outlined, this is a world very much defined by karma – you do good and good comes back to you, but do something bad and you’re in for more of the same. The logic is sound, and yet it doesn’t quite work the way you’d expect it to. Takeru is nothing but good, too good as it turns out, but constantly suffers precisely because of his goodness. Not only is his girlfriend gunned down in front of him during an act of random street violence, but he eventually finds himself tricked into helping the exact same thugs commit further crime only to attempt heroics and see that massively backfire too. Even so, he keeps on trying to be good and perhaps it really will pay off in the end.

Meanwhile, Hiroshi seems to be leading something of a charmed life though perhaps through a prism of self-loathing. He knows he is a cheesy lounge singer and one step up from gigalo in the way he accommodates himself to these older ladies in whom his only interest is their money. This is perhaps why he finds himself desperately playing along when kidnapped by Masako in the hope he will write a song just for her (that’ll show the snooty Mrs. Sakata), but finally betraying her in the final moment as if attempting to reassert his artistic autonomy. Masako eventually makes a sacrifice of her own which sends Hiroshi running for the hills only to finally acknowledge a sense of responsibility for his willing misuse of her loneliness and disappointment in selling her an impossible dream of connection.

As for Tetsuo, pushing granny round the city by night, the yakuza lurk round every corner proving the past really is impossible to escape. As expected, the paths of the three men eventually intersect in strange and various ways though each is bound for a different destination and an individual epiphany. Another boy band odyssey from SABU, this time in collaboration with studio LDH and the members of EXILE, Jam takes a fairly ironic view of the idol business if thinly disguised in Hiroshi’s depressing business plan of self-debasement and fansploitation while simultaneously asking if you really do reap what you sow when it comes to cosmic karma in an increasingly surreal existence.

Jam was screened as part of the 2019 Udine Far East Film Festival.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Birthday (생일, Lee Jong-un, 2019)

Posted on by 1 Comment

Birthday posterOn 16th April 2014, a ferry carrying mostly teenagers on a school trip sank taking 304 passengers and crew down with it. The Sewol Ferry tragedy was to have profound ramifications, asking a series of questions as to corporate and political corruption in the society which had permitted such an accident to happen and then failed to mount an effective rescue. In the five years since, many films have probed the causes and implications of the tragedy, but Lee Jong-un’s Birthday (생일, Saengil) is not so much interested in the incident itself as in the nature of grief and all the more so when it takes place across a national canvas.

Lee picks up three years after the sinking as husband and father Jung-il (Sol Kyung-gu) returns to Korea after five years of working away in Vietnam. So disconnected is he from his family, that he was only vaguely aware that they had moved and has trouble finding the new apartment. When he gets there, his wife Soon-nam (Jeon Do-yeon) pretends to be out, sending Jung-il back to stay with his understanding sister who tries to fill him in on the various reasons he might not be welcome at his own door.

The loss of the couple’s oldest child, Su-ho (Yoon Chan-young), in the ferry tragedy is only gradually revealed though it’s clear that there is an absence in the family home. Soon-nam has kept Su-ho’s room exactly as he left it – school uniform hanging on the wardrobe door, unfinished school work on the desk, post-its seemingly everywhere. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Ye-sol (Kim Bo-min) is often left to her own devices while Soon-nam buries herself in work and shuts out everything that reminds her that her son is never coming home.

While some of the other parents have formed a tightly bonded community forged by shared grief and anger, Soon-nam wants no part of it. Invited to a gathering after bumping into other parents at the memorial site, she lasts barely a few minutes before accusing them of turning their suffering into an excuse for frivolity. It’s not as if she could ever forget what happened to her son, but when the ferry tragedy is on every street corner, on the radio, on the news, it becomes impossible to ignore. Soon-nam wants her grief to herself. Her son and her loss. She isn’t interested in sharing him with anyone else, be that an increasingly angry society or her little girl who is now terrified of water and worried about her mum.

Jung-il, burdened with guilt for having abandoned his family, tries to address his grief in a more positive sense by re-embracing his role as a father to Ye-sol who was so small when he left that she doesn’t really remember him. Though Lee is not particularly interested in the political ramifications of the tragedy, she does subtly point the finger at the effects of economic pressure on the ordinary family which have seen Jung-il exile himself abroad and Soon-nam working so hard just to keep her head above water that Ye-sol is caught in the middle. Jung-il wasn’t there when his family needed him, and there’s precious little he can do for them now other than try to be around.

The other members of the support group have been holding birthday parties for some of the kids who passed away, turning the solemnity of a memorial service into a celebration of life. Soon-nam is against the idea – she would rather save the day for herself in private commemoration, but Jung-il is broadly in favour. Probed, he has to admit he barely knew the young man his son was becoming and that this party might be the only way to reconnect with the boy he lost. A passport that will never be stamped, colleges that will never be applied to, weddings that will never take place – the finality of the loss is crippling, but in holding the birthday parties those left behind are able to find a kind of acceptance in shared remembrance and a confirmation that their loved ones were loved and will continue to be loved even in their absence. A sensitive yet uncompromising exploration of the sometimes forgotten personal dimension to a national tragedy, Birthday is a beautifully complex evocation of learning to live with loss and a strangely uplifting, cathartic experience.

Birthday was screened as the opening night gala of the 2019 Udine Far East Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

The Land of Peach Blossoms (世外桃源, Zhou Mingying, 2018)

Posted on by Leave a comment

Land of Peach Blossoms posterIn Tao Yuanming’s 5th century fable, The Land of Peach Blossoms (世外桃源, Shìwàitáoyuán) is a mythical utopia where people live in peace and harmony knowing nothing of the outside world. Zhang Derong, the founder of the Feast of Flowers restaurant, saw himself as creating something similar – a place beyond the outside world founded on collectivist principles where they make healthy people healthier through “emotional catering”. If it were not immediately obvious, the founder of Feast of Flowers is not entirely on the level but has promised great things to the young men who work in his restaurant and look up to him as if he were some kind of more ethical, caring Jack Ma.

His most devoted pupil, Tang Guangbin used to work in a nuclear power plant and had a sea view from his company dorm but he likes it here better because he feels “free” in his heart and soul. Like Guangbin, Zeng Qi also feels that as long as they follow The President’s teachings they will make the Feast of Flowers bloom all around the world spreading health and happiness as they go. The Feast of Flowers is indeed a cheerful place filled with dancing and a faux ancient fantasy Chinese village atmosphere. There is also, however, a dark side which will become apparent to the young hopefuls the longer they stay in the garden.

The truth becomes apparent first to the practically minded Wang Peiyuan who turned down more lucrative jobs to work at the Feast of Flowers because he bought into Zhang’s ambitious business plan and assumed there would be more opportunities down the line. Not only is his pay cheque lower than promised because of all the “training” he has to pay for, but it’s so far below market rate that he’s worrying about paying his mortgage and being able to feed his wife and child. Meanwhile, Zhang waxes lyrical about work ethics and insists that “training” his workforce until 5am and then starting again at 8 is all part of his grand plan to turn them into top entrepreneurs.

Guangbin excuses himself to a friend on the phone in case he sounds as if he’s been “brainwashed” as he fiercely sells Zhang’s philosophy as not only a way to become rich and successful but to make the world a better, more caring place – the kind of place he perhaps assumes China was before the ‘80s reforms which opened it up to Capitalism. Of course, Guangbin is too young to remember what it was like back in the ‘70s, but hears people tell him about solidarity and job security and he’s understandably envious. He’s made a big investment in Feast of Flowers and so it takes a long time before he’s prepared to accept that he is being exploited by an unscrupulous charlatan. Once he and some of the other guys figure out there won’t be any expansion of Feast of Flowers, prime jobs, or bonuses, they want to quit but they can’t because they’re in hock for all this “training” and will lose their unpaid salary because, ironically, they don’t have effective work place protections. 

Zhang runs the place as if it were a work cadre and himself the Chairman. He commands absolute loyalty and requires employees to self criticise, running regular hunts to find the most “self centred” of the workers with many keen to jump at the bait and even to accuse others on cue. Those who disagree and want to leave are dismissed as having “too many personal thoughts and opinions” when they should be concentrating on understanding The President’s philosophy. Guangbin once felt free inside the Feast of Flowers, but later came to feel that outside was “a world of freedom” and inside “a prison full of darkness” from which there is “no escape”.

As if to ram his point home, Zhang makes the workers listen to Red Detachment of Women and has a bizarre obsession with “retaking” the Diaoyu Islands (also known Senkaku islands) from the Japanese, even staging a surreal play in which the Feast of Flowers soldiers personally defeat the Japanese army and capture Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe while Moon Over Ruined Castle plays mournfully in the background. Disillusioned by modern China’s lurch towards soulless consumerism and yearning for a simpler time in which people supported each other in common endeavour (but secretly still wanting to get ahead), the youngsters at Feast of Flowers bought into Zhang’s duplicitous nonsense and allowed themselves to be brainwashed into serving his ideals rather than their own. The parallels are obvious, but Guangbin may sadly be right in believing that there is no escape from the soul crushing exploitation of the modern economy which promises so much and yet delivers so little.

The Land of Peach Blossoms screens as part of the 2019 Chinese Visual Festival at King’s College London on 5th May, 7.15pm.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Stammering Ballad (黃河尕謠, Zhang Nan, 2018)

Posted on by Leave a comment

Stammering ballad poster“We all live our lives in silence” according to the subject of Zhang Nan’s Stammering Ballad (黃河尕謠, Huáng Hé Gǎ Yáo). A love song to a disappearing rural landscape, Zhang’s beautifully composed documentary follows an aspiring folksinger whose dreams of fame have taken him away from the land he loves so much as he tries to ensure the survival of traditional village culture by singing in the cities.

A college dropout, Zhang Gasong embraced his love of folk music while too embarrassed to return home. Honing his craft as he goes, he’s been travelling around the country for the last seven years going wherever someone wants to hear him play – though occasionally they might have to front him the train money to help him get there. Gasong is, it has to be said, an eccentric young man. A former bandmate laments Gasong’s “poor social skills” which led to the band’s breakup, while also remaining exasperated that Gasong just up and left, disappearing for years on end without a word, with little regard for their friendship. Still, he seems to have forgiven him enough to agree to play for Gasong’s big shot on China’s Got Talent.

China’s Got Talent might seem like a left field move for a traditional folk musician, but Gasong has his eyes on the prize. He wants to be the kind of star where everything gets done for him and all he has to do is play, but for the moment he’s busy touring small music venues and festivals singing for his supper and hoping the youth of China who have, like himself, abandoned their village homes for the convenience of city life, will eventually re-embrace the song of the earth.

That aside, Gasong has a conflicted attachment to the pastoral past. He always hated farming and ironically claims to loathe the familiar smell of wheat germ and freshly tilled soil, not to mention the physical toll of of the work. Nevertheless he maintains an attachment to the landscape and views it almost as an inheritance of which he has been robbed by the modern China. The place where he grew up is now largely in ruins after having been relocated to avoid a drought, and though he bitterly misses the familiar black donkey that once lived in the village he has to remember that it’s long been sold. A traveller now himself, Gasong is losing connection with his land and with his family, but desperately clinging to his ancestral legacy through the medium of song.

In the end, China’s Got Talent didn’t really get Gasong, but perhaps that’s for the best. Cameramen expecting disappointment found only relief when they came to interview the band afterwards. Though it’s a shame that the performance will never be aired, and the beautiful rural folksong will not be heard by the millions of Chinese viewers almost certainly tuning in for more energetic fare, Gasong remains undaunted. Wandering off once again he loses touch with his band members and resumes his nomadic travels as an itinerant musician. The grand irony is that these songs, so intrinsically linked with place, are themselves travelling and echoing in new locations looking for new pastures in which to take root as the modern China flattens mountains to build factories and moves families on from their lands while sending its young into the cities all alone.

Gasong, who has stammered since childhood, has found his voice through music though often struggles to make that voice heard in boisterous modern society. Like many of his generation he too has realised he cannot stay in his pastoral paradise, but has also discovered that the city doesn’t suit him. Most at home in the wide open spaces of his native Gansu, Gasong roams the land singing the song of the soil as he goes in the hope that it will one day echo and send the sound of home all around the world.

Stammering Ballad screens as part of the 2019 Chinese Visual Festival at King’s College London on 5th May, 1pm.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

First Night Nerves (8個女人1台戲, Stanley Kwan, 2018)

Posted on by 1 Comment

First night nerves posterStanley Kwan returns to the director’s chair after a lengthy hiatus with a cheeky piece of self-referential meta comedy revolving around two “stage sisters” and their parallel quests to seize the spotlight in the increasingly competitive and celeb obsessed Hong Kong entertainment industry. As implied by its Chinese title “Eight Women, One Stage”, First Night Nerves (8個女人1台戲) is an almost exclusively female affair in which straight men barely feature, but for as much as it heartily embraces the cattiness of backstage life it is also keen to affirm the many ways in which women support and nurture each other even if it is clear that the arts are not always as liberal as one might expect them to be.

Kwan begins in high camp as the diva actresses square off during a tense press conference for an upcoming play which marks the long awaited comeback of veteran actress Xiuling (Sammi Cheng Sau-man) who abruptly retired some years previously, notably playing opposite the slightly younger starlet, Yuwen (Gigi Leung Wing-kei), many accuse of stealing her spotlight (and thereby forcing her off the stage). The behind the scenes gossip makes Two Sisters the hottest ticket in Hong Kong, which is all very good news for Xiuling’s sister-in-law Cong (Angie Chiu) – a wealthy Shanghainese heiress and theatrical impresario producing the play, some say, as a personal favour following the death of her brother in a recent plane crash which has become a minor scandal seeing as he died alongside his American mistress.

A canny business woman, Cong is not above pitting her two stars against each other as a means of getting bums on seats but she also needs to make sure the show goes on which is difficult when Yuwen, still insecure in her star billing, is intent on proving she’s not playing the second lead by constantly upstaging her co-star. Yuwen, it has to be said, is the less sympathetic of the pair – cast early as a divaish upstart who finagled her way into showbiz with sex appeal, while Xiuling remains the dignified, wounded star laid low by life. The truth is, of course, more complex as the two women circle around each other before reaching a kind of equilibrium born of mutual understanding and a healthier professional rivalry.

Before that, however, the two stars occupy two very different camps each with their own retinues. The assistants – Mainlander Nini (Qi Xi), a relative of Cong, and former pool hall girl Yilian (Catherine Chau), support their respective mistresses in different ways but are each responsible for and reflective of their emotional difficulties. Yilian, in a heartfelt conversation with the otherwise perspicacious Nini, explains that she puts up with Yuwen’s sometimes divaish antics and is happy to act as an all purpose maid because Yuwen has also been loyal to her – supporting both herself and her son even after she became famous, making plain that Yuwen is, deep down, a sincere and caring person. Xiuling, meanwhile, is cast as somewhat cold and distant, keeping Nini at arms length and the relationship professional despite Nini’s, as it turns out, entirely accurate characterisation of her strangely intense friendship with adoring lesbian heiress “Master” Fu Sha (Bai Baihe).

Despite the supposed liberality of the arts, Xiuling is not the only one to experience mild discomfort with homosexuality even if her coming around to a surprise announcement from her son eventually gives hope to the lovelorn Sha whose confused grandmother has offered a vast bounty in the hope of hooking a prime son-in-law in a ripped straight from the headlines subplot. Transgender playwright An (Kam Kwok-Leung) encounters frequent transphobic slurs passed off as an extension of divaish lovey banter and is never fully accepted as a woman by her colleagues, subtly hinting at the extent to which LGBTQ issues still struggle for mainstream acceptance.

Underneath the high camp and beautifully pitched melodrama, Kwan makes space for subtle barbs towards the creeping influence of the Mainland in Hong Kong cinema as Yuwen irritatedly admits she’s considering learning Mandarin while outraged that producers on a previous film had the audacity to dub her dialogue and insisting everyone stay in Hong Kong to watch the Cantonese version. Behind all the bitchiness and backstabbing, there is real affection for the Hong Kong entertainment industry if tempered by a mild anxiety for its future as exemplified by the strangely warm closing scene in which the two divas sit shoulder to shoulder appreciating the beauty of Victoria Harbour while acknowledging their own small role in ensuring it survives.

First Night Nerves screens as the opening gala of the 2019 Chinese Visual Festival at BFI Southbank on 2nd May where director Stanley Kwan will be present for a Q&A.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Tracey (翠絲, Jun Li, 2018)

Posted on by 3 Comments

Tracey PosterHong Kong has often sought to present itself through its cinema as an ultramodern, cosmopolitan city, claiming a kind of cultural freedom from Mainland oppression. In truth, however, there are areas in which it may disappoint itself. Jun Li’s debut feature, Tracey (翠絲), is in many ways an empathetic attempt to redress the balance in making plain the destabilising effect emotional repression can exert across an entire society, causing nothing other than the mutual unhappiness which provokes one person to oppress another in service of nothing more than conventionality.

A married, 50-something father of two grown up children, Tai-hung’s (Philip Keung) conventional, ordered life is disrupted when he receives a phone call telling him that a treasured childhood friend, Ching, has been killed while working in Syria as a war photographer. Unbeknownst to anyone, and not quite admitted even to himself, Ching had been the love of Tai-hung’s life and his death finally forces him into a reconsideration of the feelings which are now, perhaps, a lost opportunity. The sense of loss is doubly brought home when he collects Ching’s partner, Bond (River Huang), from the airport and discovers that he had been legally married to another man in the UK though the pair’s marriage certificate is not valid in Hong Kong which presents a problem in trying to repatriate Ching’s ashes.

Bond, himself from Singapore where homosexuality is at least technically still illegal, knew of Ching’s love for Tai-hung and Tai-hung’s unrealised attraction to Ching but struggles with Tai-hung’s decision to not to embrace his sexuality, preferring to marry and have children in pursuit of a conventional life. Despite having grown up in an arguably even more oppressive society, Bond is 20 years younger and has perhaps benefitted from an increasingly liberal world in which greater awareness has afforded him the vocabulary to process Tai-hung’s complex identity with a delicacy that was not available to Tai-hung in his youth, nor to his quasi-mentor Brother Darling (Ben Yuen) – a performer of Chinese Opera who specialised in female roles and confided to Tai-hung that he identified as a woman but is unlikely to have ever come across the term “transgender” let alone claim it as an identity.

Nevertheless, Bond’s arrival begins to push Tai-hung’s long repressed longing to the surface even if his first attempt to explain to Bond that he too identifies as a woman is met with mild derision as Bond misunderstands him in assuming his claiming of a female identity is an attempt to reject his homosexuality. What Tai-hung tries to explain to him is that he does not see himself as a gay man but a straight woman and therefore felt that pursuing his love for Ching, a man who loved men, would never have been a possibility. Fearing his gender identity would never be accepted by anyone, Tai-hung kept his true self hidden even from his closest friends and unwittingly placed a wedge between himself and the man he loved.

Bond pushes him still further with the perhaps unfair charge that his entire life has been essentially selfish and founded on the continued deception of his wife and children. Despite its seeming conventionality, Tai-hung’s family life is not altogether happy. His wife, Anne (Kara Hui), is a fiercely conservative sort who prizes nothing so highly as respectability as she proves by rifling through the maid’s room in search of evidence of sexual indiscretion which she later uses as grounds to suggest firing her. As the couple’s son Vincent (Ng Siu-hin) points out, there is also an unpleasant racial component to her puritanical morality which objects to her Indonesian maid having a right to a private life, fearing that she will bring “disease” into the house by sleeping with another “foreigner”. This is perhaps why she objects to her pregnant daughter’s (Jennifer Yu) desire to divorce her highflying lawyer husband when she discovers that his serial philandering has resulted in a sexually transmitted disease which he has passed to her and which has thankfully been detected early enough to avoid harming the baby.

Despite Anne’s pleas with her daughter that you don’t reject someone for turning out to be different than you assumed them to be, she is obviously not ready to accept Tai-hung’s authentic self despite having been aware that there was always something slightly amiss within their marriage which prevented it from being a true and total union. It is perhaps this sense of nagging incompleteness and unhappiness which has pushed Anne’s need for respectable conventionality into overdrive, as if a superficially successful adherence to the rules could be a substitute for emotional fulfilment. Her own suffering then seeks to push her daughter into the same space as a self-sacrificing housewife who has exchanged personal happiness for the cold comfort of social respectability. 

Thanks to reuniting with a now elderly Brother Darling and finding himself accepted by the younger Bond, Tai-hung begins to find the courage to embrace his true self and discovers that many of his friends and relatives are more supportive than he might have assumed even if some of them may need time to get over the initial shock. As his mother tells him, the important thing in life is learning to find one’s peace of mind – something which could only be helped by abandoning the outdated Confucian ideas which continue to define the social order in favour of something warmer, freer, and fairer built on mutual acceptance and compassion.

Tracey screens as the closing night gala of the eighth season of Chicago’s Asian Pop-Up Cinema on April 24, 7pm, at AMC River East 21. It will also be screened in London as the closing night of this year’s Chinese Visual Festival on 9th May, 6pm, at BFI Southbank where members of the cast and crew will be attendance for a Q&A.

 Original trailer (English subtitles)

Memories of My Body (Kucumbu Tubuh Indahku, Garin Nugroho, 2018)

Posted on by Leave a comment

Memories of My Body posterYou view life through a tiny hole, as the narrator of Garin Nugroho’s Memories of My Body (Kucumbu Tubuh Indahku) so often observes. Loosely based on the life of Lengger Lanang dancer and choreographer Lianto, Nugroho’s 19th film examines the physicality of history as bodies become maps of trauma and dislocation while its itinerant hero is pushed from pillar to post through a series of abandonments and upheavals that leave him at the mercy of a society permanently on the brink of eruption.

We begin with the older Juno who narrates his story to us as if it were a piece of ritual theatre. The camera pans left and we meet Juno (Raditya Evandra) as a child – or more precisely, the child of the older Juno’s memory. Abandoned by his father, the boy begins hanging around a troupe of Lengger dancers for whom sensuality is all. Though Juno was originally attracted to the show for this very reason, peeping at the ladies through another “tiny hole” in the wall, he eventually becomes disillusioned with the dancers when he sees the group’s leader viciously beat an underling for having sex with his assistant at her instigation.

Sex, violence, and dancing continue to define the young Juno’s life even after he is taken in by an aunt when it becomes clear his father will never return. Following a brief obsession with chickens, Juno is then sent on to live with an uncle who trains him as a tailor where he develops a friendship with an ultra macho, soon-to-be-married boxer (Randy Pangalila) who too longs to be free of his bodily constraints but has become indebted to gangsters. Before long he finds himself in motion again before coming full circle as a costuming assistant with a troupe of travelling dancers where he becomes a favourite of the “Warok” (Whani Darmawan) but also the object of unattainable affection for the local military representative (Teuku Rifnu Wikana) of a corrupt regime whose insoluble jealousy seems set to burn the world around him.

As Juno’s uncle later tells him, bodies can go anywhere but they take their traumas with them. Even so, you have to love your body or all is lost. His uncle goes on to add that this family is particularly burdened, explaining the reason for his brother’s coldness to his son which turns out to lie in a rational distrust of family born of seeing his own massacred in a river, a sight he couldn’t seem to forget and eventually decided to erase by leaving his home and family far behind for the anonymous vistas of an unfamiliar island. Juno’s own traumas, as he seems to remember them, imprint themselves on his physicality and give weight to his dance as he tells his own story, filled with abandonments, rejections, transformations and rebirths in the intensely repressive atmosphere of a nation trapped in perpetual revolutions.

Juno’s own, slow path towards delight in his own body takes place against a series of external reformations obliquely referenced in a red terror threat to have the dancers denounced as communists, while primacy of religion remains paramount – the local military officer running for office, or more particularly his eminently practical but perhaps also compromised wife, is panicked by a photo in which he unwisely took Juno’s hand in public. Merely grasping a hand becomes suspect in an atmosphere of intense suspicion and any hint of impropriety potentially enough to destabilise an already volatile situation.

Illicit romantic jealously spurs on a greater tragedy, and Juno is soon on the road again. As Juno says, you see life only through a tiny hole – in this case through the rhythmic history of an itinerant dancer whose stage is perpetually ripped away from him as external freedoms shrink and all that remains is the unification of the contradictory elements of one’s own soul and the authenticity of touch and movement. Poetically told and boasting a wonderful selection of classic Indonesian pop music, Memories of My Body is a beautiful exploration of “muscle memory” as lived history and the tangible effects of a life lived in turbulent times.

Memories of My Body screens as part of the eighth season of Chicago’s Asian Pop-Up Cinema on April 23, at Joffrey Ballet Tower Studio A, 10 East Randolph Street, 7pm.

Original trailer (English subtitles)